I did some quick research and found this [0]. It seems he rewrote some documentation changing "he/she/etc" to "they/them/etc". Doesn't seem like a terrible thing to do really. I had never particularly thought about the issue. The pull request was denied by another guy for some reason. I can't imagine caring if the "he"s get changed to "they"s.
Then everyone came out and started criticizing the other guy and it all blew up. I can see not necessarily spending time changing the documentation (it's certainly an easy task to set aside for later or not even think about in the first place) but to deny the pull request seems to be in bad taste in my opinion. It's not as if people who might normally use "he"s would see the the "they"s and have some sort of problem with it so if people want "they"s give the people "they"s if someone does it for you.
If anything was in bad taste, it was the pull request itself. You don't just go to a project you have never contributed to and tell them they're using pronouns wrong. And who talks like this to people:
> I'm sorry to hear that. I don't really see why you wouldn't merge it if it's so trivial though. Surely making the library less hostile is worth a few seconds of our time to press the "merge" button?
Do you see what's going on there? It assumes as a premise that his pull request makes the library "less hostile" when everybody knows that's not a universally agreed upon premise. Now if you want to argue with that comment, you have to unwind it to argue with the premise, which is going to lead to an exhausting conversation. So instead, people don't usually do that. This behavior serves to exclude and alienate people that don't agree with his premises.
Alex Gaynor does this all the time and has been doing so at least since back when he posted on the Something Awful forums. Maybe he just wants everybody with views different than the ones he's adopted as part of his identity to just go away. In online communities where this sort of conversational tactic can't achieve that (Twitter, Hacker News), he leaves and publicly announces that those communities are beneath him.
(This opinion is not borne of confirmation bias: Thanks to him using different usernames in different contexts, I've managed to independently come to hate him for this sort of thing three different times before realizing it was the same person all along.)
The pull request was rejected as part of nodejs's standard policy of rejecting small changes to the documentation or code comments. When isaacs merged it in manually, bnoordhuis reverted the commit because it broke the rules: all changes landing in master had to be signed-off by one of the head maintainers, and his wasn't.
Then everyone came out and started criticizing the other guy and it all blew up. I can see not necessarily spending time changing the documentation (it's certainly an easy task to set aside for later or not even think about in the first place) but to deny the pull request seems to be in bad taste in my opinion. It's not as if people who might normally use "he"s would see the the "they"s and have some sort of problem with it so if people want "they"s give the people "they"s if someone does it for you.
[0] - http://www.dailydot.com/news/github-gendered-pronoun-debate/