Hi Juha,
I agree with John and let me explain why.
This conversation is concentrated to native English speakers.
For example, Uralic languages (with the most native speakers are Hungarian, Finnish, and Estonian) lack of grammatical gender. Logically there is one pronoun for both he and she; for example, hän in Finnish. As a result, logic of language expressing gender is strange for Finnish speakers. This causes Finnish people often mix, for instance, she/he and actor/actress when they try to speak English. For them hän is always correct and neutral!
I'm a self taught English speaker and my native language is a gender neutral one, like yours. But I disagree with you and John and am actually concerned by his trolling efforts to waste hours and hours of our collective time that could be spent on doing better things.
While I tend to ignore emails coming from John (as I've long lost assuming good faith), I figured I'd reply to yours as it may have come from a different place. We're all coming from different backgrounds (and cultures) but here we're talking and writing in English and collectively, have chosen this language as our main communication channel. It only makes sense to respect the etiquette of the language if we want to maintain the rule of "be excellent to each other" and have a healthier and more inclusive community, which in my personal opinion is something we might not have always been the best at, but hey we're having this conversation so there are improvements.
As a native Finnish speaker my language codes my brain not to see difference and the whole idea is untranslatable to my native language. As a result, I often mix between she/he/hers/his/actor/actress etc. Indeed, I have said something like "About my grandmonther, he is..." in English which translates completely right to my language!
I too make this mistake a lot. And that is okay. If you catch yourself making that mistake, you can always correct yourself. It takes about 2 seconds. And if you don't, that's okay too. As long as it's an honest mistake and you don't deliberately continue to call somebody with the wrong pronouns. My rule of thumb is that I default to they/them in my language to avoid people's feelings.
Most of the Tor user are not speaking English as their first language.
This is true, and for many years, I've been an advocate to move away from focusing too much on the English speaking user-base. This is a fine argument to have under another topic and when it's related to our products and definitely not under this topic. It's not our place to decide who wants to be called what and how.
Live and let live.
Peace,