I reject the notion that anyone hearing or reading a word from this list could possibly experience anything properly categorized as "harm".
This is what's known in the sports world as "flopping" - feigning an injury to elicit a penalty on the other team.
Except academia has taken it even further. You don't even need to pretend that you're the one injured. You can make up an imaginary person and pretend they are injured, i.e. "maybe somone will hear the word tarball and think of tarbaby and then they'll feel bad" despite the fact that this has never once happened in recorded history.
This way you can search for infractions and more expeditiously accuse and eject your rivals (people whose work is better than yours).
You're basically positing that words have no possible effect and anyone actually hurt by words is just pretending.
Sure, we're not expecting every single word on these lists to have any random person go cry in the corner, but those are pretty long lists and I could totally see specific people getting hit at the right angle and be affected enough to warrant consideration.
I am in favor of inclusion, but if someone is being affected by the word 'user' in IT context, or 'white space' talking about text, the problem is not the language.
> I am in favor of inclusion
How have we arrived at a point where we have to make such defensive statements when no offense was ever intended? Isn't it upon those wanting to change the language to defend their arguments and bring forward thorough evidence that the intended changes will justify the costs (along with an analysis of what the real costs are)? And do we believe that we can create a language that can still work for meaningful communication while simultaneously ensuring that no one can possibly ever be offended?
> Isn't it upon those wanting to change...
No. It isn't anymore. Because the loud minority now has the means to globally and publicly destroy you if you say something they dislike. You might lose your job or even your personal safety because of a statement that can be interpreted in some way that someone doesn't like.
Be realistic, not a single person will suffer consequences for continuing to say "white space".
Perhaps not whitespace, but I think people insisting on using blacklist or master-slave terminology in computing will actually see direct consequences. Plenty of big tech companies have made their engineers scrub such words from their internal codebase, even going so far as to rename the master branch of Git to main.
I am pretty sure that an employee insisting not to abide by this mandate would be reprimanded and even fired if they don't stop.