Using the pronoun people ask you to use has become a proxy for all sorts of other tolerant/benevolent attitudes towards that person and the way they want to live their life, and to an even greater extent, refusing to do that is a proxy for thinking they should be ignored, or possibly reviled, or possibly killed.
There’s an interesting mechanic here, a hyperstitious cascade. In certain educational environments, people are taught to use approved language with protected-class members. In that environment, anyone who uses forbidden language is, therefore, some kind of troublemaker. That then makes it somewhat less illegitimate for the most sensitive of those protected-class members to say they feel threatened when someone uses forbidden language. Which then makes it all the more important to teach people to use approved language, and have harsher enforcement on it. If this goes far enough, then we get to where one can make the case that unpunished usage of forbidden language constitutes a hostile environment, which would therefore drive out the protected classes and hence violate civil rights law.
There’s an interesting mechanic here, a hyperstitious cascade. In certain educational environments, people are taught to use approved language with protected-class members. In that environment, anyone who uses forbidden language is, therefore, some kind of troublemaker. That then makes it somewhat less illegitimate for the most sensitive of those protected-class members to say they feel threatened when someone uses forbidden language. Which then makes it all the more important to teach people to use approved language, and have harsher enforcement on it. If this goes far enough, then we get to where one can make the case that unpunished usage of forbidden language constitutes a hostile environment, which would therefore drive out the protected classes and hence violate civil rights law.