Tom was in good faith, he didn't know the word used had negative connotations and he thought it was as close as the original Japanese meaning as possible. After the translation was released,
he was even accepting suggestions from trans users. He was very open to modify the translation.
After HG_101's tweet, he got harassed and labelled as trans-phobic and as a member of the alt-right. He got depressed and left Twitter for months. Had people actually talked to him instead of jumping to conclusions, he would have likely changed the word (as he said he was going to do).
Everyone in the fan-translation scene I read / talked to seems to agree that Tom is very professional (the later Near asked him to work on Bahamut Lagoon) and one of the nicest person on the planet. I think we should leave the Goemon incident behind and accept the whole situation was unfortunate. The choice of the word was problematic, but so was the behavior of the community.
I can sorta vouch for this: from what I know of Tom he's a good guy and pretty much worked by himself on the TL bit, and him feeling bad and wanting to fix that was a good sign, even if, as someone who knows a basic bit of Japanese myself, that word should never, ever be translated as a slur (or even directly at all because let's face it, it's still a bad word even in direct translation terms), ever, despite what weebs who beg and plead on their knees that it's somehow "accurate" (it's not, and that's why kurt rightfully pointed to it as troublesome) will try and tell you.
The problem is the person he worked with who hacked the text into the game and released the patch (DDS), declared himself as full anti-SJW and threw a shit fit over people mad at the slur being in the TL for months, with him making the whole controversy far, far worse and pretty much dragging tom through the mud by bitching at every person upset and mass blocking a majority of leftists and other TL folk in the industry en masse, starting that even before the goemon 3 patch came out, (so DDS was this way for a long while) and then constantly tagging HG101 every few weeks to complain about how Kurt pointed out that a slur was a slur. Then he got a lot of the far-right riled up, including a certain XSeed hating translator to somehow come out of hiding to harass Kurt, leading to Kurt getting bombarded for months, to the point that
even now shitheads are mad at him over calling out the slur. I don't give a shit what you say, if you are friendly with far-right shitheads as well as
the translator who harassed XSeed employees for a damn decade, and don't mind seeing them wail on someone who calls out your release's transphobic line, then you are associated with the far-right.
Tom mostly kept to himself during this and if I were him i'd quite bluntly have cut off DDS after all that (Tom fixing the line later at least proves there's a slur-free version you can play now, thankfully), and it looks like he might have seeing how the last DDS collab Tom did was the Game Freak SNES RPG from last year, but yeah, while I'm not buying that he didn't know what that word meant (even my limited hiragana knowledge, reading a phrase with that word in it is enough for me to go "yeah i'm rewriting that" if I translate it), the fact he at least came out and started to try and fix it and get trans feedback gives me
some hope he's not anything like the hacker who responded to the controversy by doubling down and fueling the far-right flames. I know several in the industry who respect Tom a lot but strongly avoid DDS for the way he acts, and since Near was good besties with Tom too, I'm not on the "avoid if ____ is involved" train with Tom. DDS though, I'll hard pass on anything he's involved in, especially since anyone associating with a certain TLer who harassed my friends in the Falcom community is a huge avoid at all costs.
TLDR: Tom tried to quietly fix it his own way but DDS blew a lid over it and started stupid fights and associates with abhorrent people making it worse for everyone
