From https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/12/18/nerds_hate_speech/:

Labeling super-smart people with terms like nerd, geek, or boffin is hate speech, and should be punishable as such, argues lecturer and Harley-Street psychotherapist Dr Sonja Falck.

...

She then embarked on a “contextual analysis of literature” and decided that calling someone a boffin was equivalent to the worst racial slurs.

A couple of points occur to me. One is, one should be careful of the logical pitfalls of arguing “A is no better than B”. Because the flip side of that is that you are also saying “B is no worse than A”. In the process of trying to demonize A, and in the absence of any additional evidence for your position, you could be seen to be trivializing B.

The other point is that targeted groups seem to be granted a licence to own terms which are used as slurs against them. These terms become accepted as commonplace inside the group, that nobody outside is allowed to use.