We don't have to walk on egg shells when speaking. Men and women can still interact like it was before I started reading about such insanity.
Another important ingredient in that is saying, "I don't know" a lot. Then when you tell them something, they know you're not bullshitting them. So again, there is no reason for someone to think something is anything other than what you say it is.
"Just be cool" is not a strategy.
Right now we're seeing a lot of the "illiberal left" marching through institution after institution, as another commenter said, it will reach you eventually.
God help you if you ever made the mistake of greeting a room full of people with "hey you guys" in her presence.
The ridiculousness of the complaints escalated until any Slack messages not strictly business related were relegated to direct messages with only trusted people. There were no more work outings, because people didn't feel comfortable. People avoided engaging her at work as much as possible for fear of an HR report.
It made work absolutely miserable.
Once you see one person behave like that, a very easy trap to fall into is to think that everyone who is concerned about even vaguely similar things is trying to do the same thing, even if their concern is fair/reasonable.
The dominant view on social issues swings like a pendulum. When one extreme falls out of disfavor, there is a shift toward the other extreme.
I hope that one day we can settle on something sane. I'm not going to hold my breath, though.
It might be more comfortable for those folks that have gotten burned if there was a more endemic feeling of having any recourse. It being the case that there isn't, asking for people to feel empathy for another group of people that has actively persecuted them is a big ask. To my mind an unreasonably big ask.