Loaded terms in free software

How do you think you change attitudes? By saying "oh, this is just the way language works, we can't do anything about it"? No, you change attitudes by saying "I do not think this is acceptable, because . . . " and continuing to say that even when people keep pushing back.

Power structures have built-in mechanisms for self-perpetuating - you have to fight them to achieve change. For power structures on the scale of, say, systematic racism in the post-colonial world, or gender disparities basically everywhere, you have to fight really hard at every step of the way to get anywhere.

One of those self-perpetuating mechanisms is the language we use to express our ideas, and how it's allowed or encouraged to develop over time - changing the words we use changes the way that we think about things, as you've noted yourself in other posts. Language changes are in many ways just a small part of what need to happen, but /any/ large systemic change is made up of lots of small changes that add up - maybe in the end you don't need all of them to get where you want, but it's only with hindsight that you can have any idea of that: at the time, in the thick of it all, you fight whatever battles are in front of you and hope that it will all end well.

And this is a fight that's actually being /won/. People have drastically reduced their usage of "mankind", in case you hadn't noticed - "humanity" or "humankind" are more generally acceptable. Even inelegant and klunky terms like "councilperson" or "congressperson" and similar are gaining acceptance over "councilman" or whatever - change /is/ happening. The argument that "man" isn't an acceptable generic term is changing what people consider acceptable language, which is shifting people's attitudes about gender roles in society, which is contributing to the broader fight against gender disparity. Changing the language is part of changing attitudes, and they're both part of a much larger set of changes which will ultimately reshape society (and which has already reshaped society massively).