I’ll provide my experience as part of the community then (not just about CoC issues).
I am profoundly physically disabled; pretty much all I can do now is talk and use 3 fingers, and eventually I will become completely paralyzed. Also, my family is Jewish (I’m atheist though) and some died in the holocaust.
I’ve never, ever felt that I was treated differently by the Python community in bug trackers, in pull requests, in person or video calls, in IRC, etc. I’ve encountered folks who seemed to be having a bad day, and even those who are notoriously abrasive. That’s just life and never did it feel personal. I have always felt included by virtue of our shared love of the language and the value it brings to the world.
Over the past few years, however, the atmosphere doesn’t feel quite as welcoming as it used to be and I find myself getting less and less involved, making acquaintances/friends, etc.
For starters, there has been a cultural shift within the tech scene and increasingly in Western society at large where people prefer to have minor interpersonal disputes arbitrated by third parties, in our case the SC. This change is actually an area of active research in psychology and sociology. One of the seminal papers is Campbell, B., & Manning, J. (2014). Microaggression and Moral Cultures. Comparative Sociology, 13(6), 692–726 (access on sci-hub here).
A key insight is:
a morality that privileges equality and condemns oppression is most likely to arise precisely in
settings that already have relatively high degrees of equality
That sounds like what the Python community has been for years: very egalitarian and inclusive.
A consequence of this shift is spurious accusations of CoC violations. Consider this one against Łukasz Langa: please address these concerns · Issue #1536 · psf/black · GitHub
While the person seemed well intentioned, it’s obviously ridiculous. The truly unfortunate part though, is that with the current culture of most members in Python leadership positions, it’s plausible that feature would have been implemented had the issue been left open or if a tweet about it gained popularity.
Another problem is self-censorship. Not only do I restrict what I say in friendly real-life scenarios (jokes, political talk, etc.), but I also find it stressful to decline or critique contributions for technical reasons even when being as polite as possible. If there is difficulty even imagining this scenario, consider then that a monoculture may have already been formed here.
Second, I find the emphasis on diversity to be a bit insulting. I don’t want my defining characteristic in people’s minds to be something I cannot control, basically becoming just a statistic.
The underlying assumption is that phenotypic expression somehow leads to certain thought patterns, or another version, an identity grouping is so homogenous that any member may adequately represent the group.
That is false. On basically every measurable metric (interests, IQ, etc.) the difference within groups is greater than that of between. Not only is that notion empirically untrue, but when applied to skin pigmentation, that is quite literally the definition of racism.
We all should be thought of as individuals, each with our own unique experience and ideas.