I'm under the impression that you misunderstand the CoC update procedure. It has not been updated. SE is hellbent on updating it in the future, and they explicitly stated that they are not willing to budge an inch on its gender-/pronoun-related contents. This is not accidental, there is not one single dissident behind it but the entire company.
It will be the duty of the moderators to enforce the new CoC. The discussion in question arose in a mod-only forum (and later on an email conversation) and concerned what behaviors these rules sanction or disallow. It should be self-evident that moderators need to ask these questions and clarify these things in order to enforce them, and that none of this discussion is in itself to cause public outrage (because the public was not to know of any of this in the first place).
Public outrage was _only_ sparked when Monica was unceremoniously fired without any explanation to her or the public. Predictably, the context being described by those privy to it has resulted in lots of pronoun- and gender-related discussions all over the place, but this is neither the primary problem for SE (significant parts of the moderation force leaving is, as well as this being the ~6th community PR nightmare in 1-2 years) nor was it in any way avoidable or unpredictable based on the plans of SE.
It will be the duty of the moderators to enforce the new CoC. The discussion in question arose in a mod-only forum (and later on an email conversation) and concerned what behaviors these rules sanction or disallow. It should be self-evident that moderators need to ask these questions and clarify these things in order to enforce them, and that none of this discussion is in itself to cause public outrage (because the public was not to know of any of this in the first place).
Public outrage was _only_ sparked when Monica was unceremoniously fired without any explanation to her or the public. Predictably, the context being described by those privy to it has resulted in lots of pronoun- and gender-related discussions all over the place, but this is neither the primary problem for SE (significant parts of the moderation force leaving is, as well as this being the ~6th community PR nightmare in 1-2 years) nor was it in any way avoidable or unpredictable based on the plans of SE.