I agree with you, but I would ask you to consider the "grey boundary" between the various cases.

For instance, Frank Parker's comment about a reader being offended by his use of "bitch" to refer to a female dog. Well, that's very strictly the reader's problem, because "bitch" is still the correct term for female animals of certain species. Unless and until the documented definition of that term is updated, it's perfectly reasonable to use as Frank has done.

At the other end of the spectrum are various highly derogatory terms that are specifically and only intended to cause psychological harm to other humans. I won't provide a sample cuz I don't want to get banned. (Unfortunate, but that's how things are these days.)

These highly derogatory terms are more than just words. If they become normalized in a society, then the concepts underlying them will also become normalized. Normalized concepts enter the zeitgeist of a society and become nearly impossible to remove, yet those concepts, now embedded in people's minds, will tend to provoke various actions - typically actions that are discriminatory, hateful, and harmful in physical as well as psychological ways.

In the middle, there's the grey area. And it's in the grey area that context matters. A great example of this is in higher education. If I were teaching a course on the evolution of human rights and how we're finally coming round to recognizing that, say, gay folks are no better or worse than straight folks, then it's absolutely necessarily to use terms that many gay people will find horribly insulting. Why? Because that's real history. And there's no better way to understand what gay people have had to endure than to get as close to it as possible.

I guess what I'm saying is that both the transmitter and receiver of an utterance must attend with sufficient care and diligence to what they are transmitting and how they process its reception.

And with that in mind, blocking must remain an option, and people should be encouraged to use it - under the right circumstances.

Yes, the use of blocking has its own problems - like creating echo chambers that reinforce ideas irrationally. But until we come up with something better, it's what we're stuck with.

Sorry for the long response, but things like this really get me wound up.