I hate to play tu quoque

I'm glad you pointed this out, because I never would have figured it out on my own. It's subtle!

you gave a long list of very confining restrictions you wanted on commenters, enforced by bannings

I dispute "long", "very confining", and "bannings". There were a handful of things on my list, and they could all be summed up as "sexism", which is only one thing. Many commenters have no trouble abiding by the restrictions. I also don't remember ever proposing actual bans, just social mechanisms of discouragement and some downvoting.

Despite their best efforts, no one could discern the pattern behind what made something beyond-the-pale offensive, so you were effectively asking for unchecked, arbitrary authority to remove comments you don't like.

I dispute "their best efforts", "no one", "asking for unchecked, arbitrary authority", and "don't like". I am not convinced that everyone tried their very best. I am convinced that many people understood me very well. I did not request any personal authority, much less the unchecked arbitrary kind. My requests had to do with comments that had a particular feature, which does not overlap completely with things I do not like.

You even went so far as to ask to deputize your own hand-picked cadre of posters "with their heads on right" to assist in classifying speech as unacceptable!

That was in response to discomfort with being implicitly given, because of my gender, the "authority" you accused me of requesting. I did not go on to actually deputize anyone.

I will gladly make my criticisms more polite in the future

Yaaaaaaaay!

I'm not going to apologize for having lower karma than if I abused the voting system the way some of you seem to.

Wait, you're saying that some people conduct an abuse of the voting system that increases their own karma? As opposed to increasing or decreasing others'? What accusation are you making, exactly? Against whom? What's your evidence for it? Or are you saying that if you abused the voting system, you could get others to upvote you more and downvote you less?

And in the meantime, perhaps you could make it a habit of checking if the criticisms you make of others could apply to yourself.

I don't think, in ordinary language, it's possible to make a habit of the same thing twice, so unfortunately, I can't do that, anymore.

I'm not asking that you be perfect or unassailable in this respect. I'm not even asking that you try to adhere to your own standards.

I'm so glad you said so. Subtle.

Edit: I didn't downvote the parent of this comment because I'm not petty like that.

Okay. You have my blanket approval to refrain from downvoting anything you are disinclined to downvote.