Alright, so....

First of all:

Thank you Teresa, Yaakov, Cesar, and everyone else who helped put this response together; it's sincerely appreciated that you were committed to responding to the Letter even though quite a bit of time has passed since it was posted. I'm aware that the company has been going through a lot of changes, especially in regard to how it deals with the community, and it's great seeing that work is being put into fixing outstanding problems related to the community.

Next...

I was part of the discussions that were held between members of the community and staff members about the Letter, and gave feedback on this before it was posted.

With that in mind, here are some thoughts I have on this response and the reception surrounding it.

• The sincerity of this response

I've seen some responses that are skeptical of whether or not this response is a sincere effort in repairing community relations and righting wrongs or if it's just an optics scheme - posting because it looks good and not because they actually care.

I believe that they're sincerely interested in righting wrongs. I and a couple other community members had a chat with Teresa, Yaakov, and another employee back in April about a response to the Letter, what specifically the problems encountered were that led to the Letter, and how to address those. (This included a lack of moderation in moderator spaces, which overlaps with other issues, such as the religion-based attacks that were floating around the TL for quite a while.) In the time since that video chat, employees have taken diversity training, there have been commitments made for enforcing the CoC equally, and e.g. tools for TL moderation are coming.

Those discussions eventually led to the commitments being made in this response, and helped formulate the response itself.

I was, to be frank, disappointed at the refusal to go back and review old cases (including at least one blatantly bigoted statement by a still-active moderator). Aside from that, however, I can at least confirm that the employees I spoke to are sincerely interested in helping the community and not making things worse.

• "We can't even discuss the pronoun rule!"

I've seen some complaints about this line:

To clarify, this includes discussion questioning or debating the legitimacy of someone’s race, gender, sexual orientation or religion. Further, the debate or discussion of whether or not you want to or should use a person’s pronouns is both offensive and alienating.

...specifically, saying that this means that the "pronoun rule" can't even be discussed.

My response to that would be... well, sort of? Saying "I don't want to use your pronouns" or debating whether you should use someone's stated pronouns is offensive and a violation of the Code of Conduct. If you wanted to argue about whether or not you should use someone's stated pronouns, then yes, doing so is now explicitly against the CoC.

This does not mean that good-faith questions or requests for clarification are a violation of the CoC. Of course, everything is context-dependent, and these policies aren't being enforced by robots. Like everything else, this comes down to individual situations, judgement calls by moderators, and taking context into account; this doesn't mean that anyone confused or learning about "they/them" for the first time is going to find themselves suspended. A little faith in our mods, please?

The Tolerance paradox is at play here as well.
If you tolerate intolerance, the intolerance will take over the tolerance. (Here's a nice comic.)

In other words... if we tolerate the intolerance - those who think that people's stated pronouns are up for debate - we are making a statement that it is okay to be intolerant. That means that those who actually want to be tolerant will leave, or be silenced, and you will wind up with only the intolerant being heard.

Allowing intolerance is equivalent to endorsing it. In both cases, the intolerance will become the dominant force.

• Amount of time it took for this response to be posted

Yes, it took a long time for this response to get posted. An entire year, in fact, pretty much on the nose.

This boils down to two separate issues: Stack's problems with the community, and trying to get the response right.

The problem Stack has with the community has been going on for the past year+, and most people here on Meta will be familiar with it; I'll just say that it was only several months after the Letter was posted that community really came back onto the company's radar.

But it was back in March already that Teresa had reached out to discuss the Letter and how to solve the problems that it spoke about. Since then, there's been back-and-forth in a chat channel, discussing how best to solve issues and reviewing copies of a response to make sure it sufficiently addressed the Letter's concern, over the period of months. It took so long because, as Teresa hinted in the response, Stack wanted to figure out what actual commitments to make and detail instead of just sending out a bland response with no real meaning. It took a long time because once responding was back on the map, doing it correctly was the goal.

• "Why doesn't this response talk about other things? Why the focus on the LGBTQ+ community?"

It's true that there are other outstanding issues, some similar to the concerns laid out in the Lavender Letter. (For instance, religion-based attacks were mentioned, which I called out in my stepping-down-as-mod post as well.)

However, the Lavender Letter was written specifically about the challenges that queer users - and especially moderators - encountered, going back further than just Sep '19. This response is meant to specifically address those issues, not everything all at once. Let's not conflate all the issues. and instead take them one by one.

I will reiterate that I was disappointed in the decision not to review complaints raised about blatant bigotry that were never acted upon; especially when the perpetrators of that blatant bigotry are still diamond moderators on the network. I do not trust that the people capable of blatant bigotry are able to effectively carry out moderating and removing bigotry if it should come up. I do not trust that they are capable of cultivating a safe environment for all, and I believe that Stack is making a mistake in not reviewing those cases.

And since this has come up and inevitably will come up again:
Stack's ham-fisted handling of this in September 2019 led to significant damage to the queer community, opening up LGBTQ+ users to attacks by people claiming to be defending Monica Cellio.
There was non-public context at play in Monica's dismissal.
The way in which she was treated was disgraceful.
There are still people prejudiced against LGBTQ+ users because of a perception that LGBTQ+ users caused Monica to be removed as a moderator. This will not be fully addressed unless Stack is able to resolve the situation with Monica to a satisfactory state.
I encourage Teresa to reach out to Monica and have a discussion.
This is not the place to discuss this further, because Stack cannot (or will not, it comes to the same thing) discuss this in public at all.

Finally, I agree strongly with what @kviiri wrote in TTRPG General Chat:

If it's a year old thing, it'd be so easy to just drop the issue and hope it blows over. Answering to something that would be easy to ignore arguably demonstrates more genuine commitment than answering to something more urgent.

It's highly appreciated that Stack is addressing outstanding community concerns, including the ones that are relatively old, such as this.