Let me express the power of a CoC to you, because it's the power of "certainty".

Awhile ago I came out non-binary. Fast forward to a local tech conference 2 months later. I was actually confronted by a human who started to harrangue me about how non-binary lifestyles are a fiction, and I was seeking attention and demeaning the community. I wasn't wearing any markings or even trying to advertise my presence; someone read my social media and paid the entrance fee with the express goal of putting themselves squarely in my face to say those things.

In this case, the CoC of the conference gave me a clear resources and certainty. I reported the incident, witnesses confirmed it, and this individual's access to the event was revoked. Their harassment was clearly and firmly unwelcome in the community, and I did not have to build any sort of case that this person shouldn't be allowed to follow me around gradually getting more threatening.

The rules were clear, and I did not have to work very hard to get other people to enforce the rules. It was neither the place for those accusations nor the place for me to have to proffer agitated and frustrated defenses for the lazily constructed accusations against me.

So people saying the CoC has no power here or that at tech conferences these problems don't exist: here is someone who looks like a white man and has had all the passing privilege of a white man, STILL being harassed. You say it never happens online or that I should toughen up? I say that if all these CoCs do is reinforce community and a basic commitment to keep our spaces relevant to programming then that's fine. People who want to harass others are the ones who need to toughen themselves up and shut the hell up in spaces that have no bearing on their pet social projects.

But the idea that people's outside activities somehow cannot be taken into account in a CoC is somewhat absurd. It's sort of like saying you'd support taking pull requests from someone who has threatened to attack you (this has happened to a friend of mine, it was followed up by physical violence at RubyConf some time ago). It's not reasonable