> There is the very obvious middle ground of "I won't make an effort for it but accept if others do"

And how does that work, exactly? If you get a PR to modify all the docs/code to be gender neutral you accept it? And what if in the same PR someone else vehemently opposes to the change? Or what if 2 days after the PR was merged you get a revert PR by someone else?

The thing is that you cannot just ignore "politics", politics are an integral part of our lives. Completely ignoring politics means accepting the status quo, so it's by definition a conservative position.