It's questionable how many of these things would have happened if the language wasn't made memorable.
Of course it irritates people who would prefer not to think about these things - because it's supposed to.
There's actually far more us/them divisive language on the right. Even if you hate progressive tropes and don't always agree with the politics they're at least making an effort to be inclusive.
Right wing language is always irredeemably divisive - usually aggressively so. Frequently with outright contempt, and sometimes with normalisation of violence.
And it makes no attempt to be anything else.
For debugging it’s not so much to change nothing, but to investigate and figure out what to change rather than change things without an understanding of the intended impact of the change.
Also, it’s not that I don’t think about these things. It’s that I think and determine the best course of action is no action. That gets conflated with not thinking about these things because on the outside it’s hard to differentiate those that thought and care and think to do nothing vs those that are oblivious vs those that choose not to think about this.
In this example, I think the best course is to not include disabled in the list. I want to include disabled people, but I think changing language in this way is not valuable.
When people see something bad-discrimination against disabled- they want to improve the situation but don’t know what to do. So they do something, anything without considering if the action is effective or if the best course is to do nothing.
So making a list of words to use or not use is doing something. There’s no way to measure if it makes things better or worse, but at least it’s something.
If they don’t make a list, and do nothing then that might be confused with not recognizing the problem.
So I think it’s well meaning people who want to help and do something stupid rather than not doing something.
I wonder if just releasing a statement of values is more appropriate for noting that an organization is against all these injustices but not advocating for lots of dumb little changes.
That and I think these lists naturally suffer from collaboritis. Where someone makes a document and circulates it for edits. All the obvious stuff is already on there so people want to help and think up any edge case and add it to the document. It’s hard to argue for parsimony for fear of being called out as a bigot. And it’s hard to suggest removing an item for the same reason.