I care deeply about social justice, and I'm totally on Monica's side here. Even more so because as far as anyone can tell, she wasn't even violating a CoC yet, and would probably have followed it if it was sufficiently clarified. But at the most basic level, I feel gender-neutral language should always be okay.

In fact, I think it would be healthy if language in general developed in a more gender-neutral direction. We don't use special pronouns to divide people based on other characteristics, so why gender?