A clarification that might go a long way: What in the CoC is required and what is preferred?

This is a good and important question, but I think it's worth emphasising that until the debacle of Monica's firing is resolved, a large number of users simply won't trust that whatever is said will be enforced fairly and consistently.

It appears that what is "required" and "preferred" will change depending on the mood of the SE staff member making the decision.

These decisions will be made in secret, and then SE staff will close ranks and defend their own, even if what was done was as obviously wrong as completely ignoring and bypassing a long-standing moderator firing process.

There will be no way a user can defend themselves, or even find out exactly what they are accused of, because the most important thing will be SE staff members trying to shield each other from criticism, disagreement or accountability.

They need to demonstrate to us that this isn't the case.

I'd love to believe that the new CoCs were intended in good faith, as an honest effort to help the LGBT+ community that SE staff appear to be currently using as human shields and scapegoats for their own wildly unpopular botched actions (seriously, SE have unleashed a huge wave of hostility, and responded with a couple of half-hearted non-apologies, then strolling away into the distance humming to themselves).

All the evidence points to the contrary, however, and SE staff seem to be doing nothing to rebuild the years of trust they've burned.

I don't think we need further clarification on what is required and what is merely prefered. The language of the CoCFAQ is clear in that respect:

Q9: Do I have to use stated pronouns? A: Yes.

Q10: ... you must respect that and use them...

Q11: Explicitly avoiding [stated pronouns] is a violation of the Code of Conduct.

You can't be much clearer in saying that you require these things, while other things, like stating what your pronouns are, are clearly declared as being optional:

Q7: Are we going to force everyone to identify their pronouns? A: No. This is a voluntary decision.

Going from that, I think they thought enough about the wording of the FAQ items to make it clear which ones are requirements and which ones aren't.

IMO, what we do need is actual proof that compelled speech is necessary in order to be more welcoming and inclusive.

SE is presenting itself as a company that acts on data. They keep telling us how they've tested things and statistically analyzed their effects, for example here:

We appreciate all their hard work, and we’ve seen a reduction in the odds of a new comment being detected as abusive go from 2.6% of new comments down to 1.3%

But on the question of whether stack overflow has a bigotism problem, the proof is the following (paraphrased until I find Jon's original blog post): "When users are telling you they're feeling hurt, that's it. You're done".

That's pure sentimentalism.

Now there are enough vocal people on Meta saying there is a problem, and who am I to say that just because I haven't encountered it much in my time here, it's not important? So I can see you want to act on such user feedback. In fact I think its what the community wants, as a general rule: That SE reacts to feedback.

But there is not even an attempt to explain, let alone prove, how Q9, Q10 and Q11 are a) necessary and b) sufficient to remove bigotism from this site

If you compell people to defer to others in how they speak, then I think you should present your reasons (not just opinions or feelings of why it's good) to do this, and back them up so they can stand up under scrutiny.