Of course, PC only works if you are doing it on your own, not if you impose it on the people you are trying to convince.
But it's a bit weird to equate empathy for a condition beyond one's control with empathy for people who don't choose to use empathetic language.
I've been in a few classes or workshops where the instructors have taught people how to correct insensitive speech. It's something that can be done well.
http://www.dianegoodman.com/documents/RespondingToBiasedOrOf...
Personal anecdote: I was playing a game in college with some other students. One was periodically bragging about some particular sexual exploit in a roundabout way. I think he was looking for validation, but when he didn't get it, he tried again. I said something along the lines of, "That comment isn't acceptable and if you keep saying things like that I'm not going to play with you." It was definitely confrontational, it drew a line in the sand, and I didn't hear him say inappropriate comments for the months that we played together.
Half the struggle here is just deciding that someone else's behavior isn't acceptable and that you want to do something about it.
Personally I translate it to 'good manners'.
I suppose there is some chance that they are being slightly more sophisticated and making the argument that the expectations are strictly performative. But I doubt it.
The use of political correct terms makes people mad because it contains within it an implication that they are being rude, and often the person coming up with these euphemisms has not the faintest idea whether the existing term was offensive or not!
That's probably true, given that "happy holidays" predates "political correctness" by more than a few decades.
But as an atheist of Jewish descent, what do I say to my co-workers, who are from Turkey, India, Korea and China? Of those who I know to follow a religion, none are Christian. It would feel outright silly to say "Merry Christmas".
(For comparison, try saying "Happy Hanukkah" to your non-Jewish friends as a non-Jewish person when the season comes, and see if it makes much sense to you).
My question is more whether you care if someone you don't know says it to you on the street or when you buy a coffee or whatever.
On the other hand, different people are rubbed the wrong way by many different things. I do try to avoid going out of my way to avoid offending people, by, say, assuming they're Christians. And on the other, other hand, I'm fine with offending people who want to go out of their way to be offended.
I know that the term "barrierefrei" is PC, and I know that quite a lot of people will hate it for that reason alone. I use it nevertheless, because I think that PC terminology is actually a good thing (to be used, not to be enforced), and that "barrierefrei" is an especially well-chosen term.
The most "anti-PC" people in the US have their own jargon and codewords and "safe spaces" with all the same restrictions, just turned on their heads. For instance, there are very few places you could go where people would tell you to your face that black lives don't matter, but a much larger set of places where it wouldn't be "PC" to wear a Black Lives Matter shirt.
There's also something called 'decompression therapy' that supposedly helped youths with psychopathy become less psychopathic.
The theory as I understand it goes like this: Everyone has a 'sphere of empathy', they empathize with those inside it but not outside. To a psychopath that boundary is their own skin, to a vegetarian it includes all animals, to a pescatarian all land animals... you get the idea. What makes people's sphere of empathy expand is feeling safe and empathized with, it allows them to risk the vulnerability of empathizing with someone who might betray them. But it's like voluntarily relaxing a muscle - the process is slow, and while the right pressure can help the problem point relax, too much pressure will make it tense up more.
e.g. ESPN pulling veteran announcer Robert Lee off a University of Virginia football game because his name is too close to Robert E. Lee, the Confederate general is an example of political correctness in action, and that has nothing to do with treating people fairly (certainly the announcer wasn't treated fairly in this through no fault of his own), but to prevent the risk that someone might get offended;
Censoring Huckleberry Finn (for having the n-word in it, despite being a great anti-racist novel of the time) done at some institutions was another example of political correctness - again, there's nothing in the act about treating people fairly, it's simply a fight against "taboo" words or thought, and that is pretty Stalinist in some aspects.
Pretty sure that the announcer himself asked to be moved to another game.
Political correctness tends to shut down discussions, empathy extends them.
PC is prescriptive, empathy is descriptive.