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Viliam_Bur comments on Don't Get Offended - LessWrong
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A corollary:
If someone asks you to do or say things a little differently, in order to not scare, upset, or worry them ... don't get offended.
A lot of people turn into "slogan-chanting zombies" when someone informs them that they've scared, upset, or worried someone, when they had no intention to do so. They react with protestations of innocence; with accusations that the unhappy person is "oversensitive", or that their plea is a cynical ploy for a political cult; with baseless cries of censorship; or with biting, dismissive mockery.
This is unfortunate ... and it's bad rationality, too.
If someone goes to the trouble of informing you that the way you're acting or speaking leaves them feeling unsafe, unhappy, or uncomfortable around you ... they are giving you information. If you are interested in not having those effects on others, getting offended and defensive when someone informs you of them is a very bad idea.
It's a fact of the world that some ways of expressing yourself will come across as threatening, triggering, or creepifying to others. This is not because those people want to feel threatened, triggered, or creepified, or even necessarily that they have unusual predilections to those epistemic and emotional reactions. It also doesn't mean that you meant to do those things, or even that they believe you meant to do them. After all, if I thought you wanted to upset me, I sure wouldn't bother telling you that you had done so; I'd just stay away from you.
We're living in a world full of humans, not impersonal data-processors, and getting along with those humans is a vital skill. It is useful to your goals to obtain accurate information about their emotional and epistemic states ("How do they feel? What do they believe?"), especially their feelings and beliefs toward you. "Bad news is good news" — if your words or actions are having negative effects on others, don't push people away for informing you of that fact ... or else they might stop telling you, or stop talking to you at all.
(Also, for any incipient-FAI readers in the audience: Having emotional states and caring about others' emotional states, is something that humans value. Even though they are inconvenient sometimes. Please do not rewrite us to not be offended at anything at all, nor to not care if we offend others.)
If you find yourself responding with cached thoughts or catch-phrases such as "Everything will offend someone", or "Some people just want to be offended", or "If we let ourselves care about offending those people, next thing they'll be taking away our freedom of speech" ... yeah, that's the defensiveness I'm talking about. Stifle it; it's weakening you.
Intentionally being offensive (e.g. in protest) is sometimes worthwhile; and sometimes you simply can't do certain vital tasks (e.g. teaching biology) without offending someone (e.g. creationists). But finding out that you have been accidentally offensive is nothing worth defending or rationalizing — it's something to say "oops, sorry!" and update about.
You should be happy that they are helping you create a better argument for this type of readers.
Of course there is a difference between "saying things differently" and "not saying things". Sometimes the offensive thing is not how you present the information, but the information itself. For example, you can speak about atheism without using ad-hominem arguments about Pope, or without mentioning child abuse in churches. Those parts are not the core of your argument, and are actively harmful if your goal is to make an "Atheism 101" presentation for religious people. On the other hand, if someone is offended by the mere fact that someone could not believe in their God, there are limits about what you can do about it. You could make the argument longer and slower to reduce the impact of the shock; use an analogy about Christians not believing in Hindu deities; perhaps quote some important religious guy saying something tolerant about nonbelievers... but at the end, you are going to say that nonbelievers exist, without immediately adding that they should be killed or converted. And someone could be offended by that, too.
Also, sometimes there are limited-resources consideration. Sometimes your argument is inoffensive for 90% of your audience, and the harm done by offending the remaining 10% may be smaller that either the cost of improving your argument for them or the cost of not presenting the argument. -- On the other hand, we should be suspicious of ourselves when we have this impression, because we are likely to overestimate the positive impact of presenting the imperfect argument, and underestimate the offence caused.