Sensationalist headline-writer: “These researchers are neutrally investigating language change? Let’s throw ‘fear’ in there to get up the prescriptivists’ hackles!”

This is fair. Usually when I hear “prescriptive” I have a knee-jerk reaction to it as something bad because it’s usually used to refer to people using made-up rules to enforce systems of oppression rather than fight against them like inclusive language does, but I hadn’t thought about it as “prescriptivism for good.”

Using inclusive language isn’t linguistic prescriptivism. Prescriptivism is saying “this word is incorrect English/doesn’t mean what you are using it for.” Inclusive language is saying “if you use this word, you’re being a jerk.”