I'm glad for you it doesn't feel exclusive. Your experience is totally valid and also you are correct, there are structural issues at play that also need addressing.
Other folks, myself included, do feel excluded by "guys" as a gender neutral term. I'm not offended, but I do appreciate when people offer something else.
But to your later point, I don't think it's either/or. We can do both.
I think pursuing things like the eradication of an expression that is genuinely considered gender neutral by large swaths of people is the sort of thing that loses you goodwill for the big stuff.
I’m sorry that you find it exclusionary. What I find exclusionary is people telling me that it’s justifiable to think less of me for using that term, or comparing continuing to use the term to their grandmother who still uses the N word.
For what it’s worth I have stopped using “you guys” at work except for in “safe spaces” because I don’t want to deal with this sort of judgement. But I find the “it costs you nothing!” defense of word policing to be completely unconvincing.
You and others keep putting words in my mouth. Where did I sell the eradication of language?
The scenario here is, "I feel excluded by 'guys', would you all feel ok using something else?"
You are a grown up, you can just say "No".
The consequences will be me having a slightly lower opinion of you as a person.
There's no eradication. I'm not asking you to stop using the word guys.
> The consequences will be me having a slightly lower opinion of you as a person.
That's an incredibly naive take. In many places, especially professional ones progressive/liberal/woke places, the consequences are much more than you having a slightly lower opinion of someone.
> I think pursuing things like the eradication of an expression that is genuinely considered gender neutral by large swaths of people is the sort of thing that loses you goodwill for the big stuff.
On the flip side, someone unwilling to do even the “small stuff” pretty much already lost the goodwill that they would be willing to do the “big stuff.”
Put another way, if you ask someone to take a small step for you, and they refuse, would you feel like they are more or less likely to take a big step?
Not at all, it’s just that those (i.e. sensible) people just think that this small step is in a direction that’s entirely orthogonal. Unless of course the goal is virtue signaling rather than solving actual problems.
I would be concerned that if I ask them to take a bunch of small steps they will marvel at my chutzpah for asking them to take a big one.
If a person won’t even return your text messages, you don’t ask them to help you move.
I think if you want people to give you the grace to form your own opinions of others, you need to be comfortable with us forming an opinion of you. I'm allowed to have people I think about as allies, I'm allowed to think of others as assholes. To suggest otherwise is a much stronger control over someone than to say, "I would find it less uncomfortable if you spoke differently."
You are, in essence, saying, "I want you to think differently."
I made no claim that it costs nothing. Changing language use is non trivial. Which is why I never demand it. I make a preference known, you can act on it or not.
I made the claim that: a) it does not offend me and b) I prefer others not use it and c) if I've expressed my preference and you choose not to honor that preference, it will diminish my opinions towards you.
This is how preferences work. We communicate them. Others find the request reasonable or not and act accordingly. If my preference was no music playing in desk areas, and you played music in the desk area, I'd think less of you as a result. If you gave me a nickname and I asked you not to use it, and you still used it, I'd think less of you.
Maybe you shouldn’t sort people into allies and assholes based on whether they are willing to change decades of language use to accommodate something that doesn’t even offend you (or as you say anyone else).
I try my best not to offend anyone at work, but policing my language to match the preferences of everyone around me would be exhausting. I grew up speaking a non-prestige dialect. I have a lifetime of experience policing my words. It can be exhausting. It’s easy to underestimate the mental cost if you speak a prestige dialect.
I spent a few decades being made fun of for saying y’all. I now find it a bit weird people who would have made fun of me for using it 20 years ago now use it themselves. I’m not offended by it, but my preference would be that non-southerners don’t use it.
However, I realize that it would be a bit much to ask that of everyone I interact with. And if I did it would be insane to label people who didn’t comply assholes.
I prefer that people that people don’t use learnings instead of lessons. I prefer not to be referred to as a USian. But I don’t expect people to follow my preferences.
I don't expect either. Why is it unreasonable to say, "I'd prefer something other than USian"?
> Why is it unreasonable to say, "I'd prefer something other than USian"?
Not the person you're replying to, but my take on it: because in the grand scheme of things it's small potatoes, and putting even a minor burden onto someone else to change their language seems unreasonable and unnecessary.
> I think if you want people to give you the grace to form your own opinions of others, you need to be comfortable with us forming an opinion of you.
This is both trivially true (I recognize that everyone has the right to form their own opinions of everything) and still counter to things I assume you believe (such as: people shouldn’t make assumptions about others based on their gender or skin color).
I do want you to think differently. I want you to think that people who continue to use a phrase widely considered to be gender neutral are not in fact your enemies. Some of them probably are your allies.
For what it’s worth, if I knew you in real life and you made that preference known to me, I would try to respect it, but that respect would depend on the closeness of our relationship. It’s hard to remember every preference of someone you meet once every two months, but I don’t like to be an asshole and try to respect the preferences of people I interact with.
The problem though is that somewhere along the line, continuing to use “you guys” became a sort of reverse shibboleth among a certain set of people who try to use things like whether someone uses “you guys” or whether they have their pronouns set on their profile to determine whether they are allies or, presumably, enemies. And yeah, I do object to that sort of mindset.
First, I definitely don't judge people for a preference I haven't expressed. If something genuinely hurts me, I need to advocate for myself. And I'd only do that if it was really something that genuinely hurt.
From there, if I only see you once every few months I don't expect you to remember flawlessly. The only time I judge someone is if they say no.
As for pronouns, they are a useful signal, but not the entire signal. Like, their presence indicates "this person might be safer", their absence indicates nothing.
You are missing the point. You're allowed to think highly or lowly of whomever, for whatever reason. That's your business (freedom of thought). It's more problematic when you express, overtly or not, such low opinion, as you will cause resentment. And there is the risk that the mere request is seen as a "correction". In our society, it's not generally polite for adults to correct other adults' speech.
I would also take issue with reasonableness of the request. You concede it does not offend you, and that it's merely a preference. I also have a myriad of preferences about speech: the intonation, accent, the grammatical constructions, the words, etc. To ask of other people, whom I don't even know intimately, to match my preferences is something else altogether. It's to impose my preferences over that person's dialect or ideolect, which is also rightly frowned upon.
Why would I express that opinion though? There's zero benefit to me to indicating you've slightly damaged your reputation. We both move on.
And it's never couched as a correction. It's always an expression of the impact on me, "Hey all, I know this is a bit of a hang up, but the use of 'guys' feels exclusionary to me, any chance folks would try alternatives? Folks, peeps, y'all, etc?"
In a work context this still creates tension and constraints. Work is not a context where we are free to express ourselves, so even such an "expression" creates a situation where I either piss off someone else or self-police. Given that you might have a particular role in the organization, might be trusted by people in a certain role or might simply represent a potential case where HR gets involved, self-policing becomes the safest, obvious choice. This means I don't really have a free choice to make, because the impact of such choice can go beyond our respective opinions on each other.
My personal experience in a UK/US company as a non-native English speaker includes this specific case. I still remember this very example (I.e., the use of "guys") being used as an example of noninclusive language from day-2 in the company (it was in some policy), 5 years later. It requires a nontrivial amount of energy and attention for me to self-police in a language that is already not my own, and I personally stress about it (including the few times I had slip-ups where I automatically said "hi guys" to a mixed group and corrected myself in a clumsy way). There are countless ways I could express my preference (speak slower, less accent when speaking, don't use idiomatic expressions or metaphors that are very language specific, maybe learn to pronounce my name how I pronounce it rather than english-ize it). I personally never expressed any of these because I wouldn't want to cause stress to anybody for something so minor, and I believe people will feel less free to talk with me.
This is just my opinion, but being someone who cares about not making others uncomfortable, I think we should all be realistic about what it really means to express such preferences at work, because it's not just a personal matter.
> Other folks, myself included, do feel excluded by "guys" as a gender neutral term.
You are reading into the words a message that was never intended, and that is on you, not the speaker.
I don't think that's true at all. I think language carries history, and that we all come from different upbringings and life experiences that give language context.
There are words we use because they are familiar that are nevertheless hard to hear for some groups.
When that happens, one absolutely can share the impact of the words AND acknowledge no malicious intent. When I was a kid, "gay" meant bad. Tell you what, didn't feel good to hear it. "Hey, I'm gay" was met with, "Oh I didn't mean it like that". Like, sure, but also can we find another word for bad?
Idk, some queer people are ironically using it in that way, which kinda blurs the line. The word gay itself started out as an insult, but later became the preferred term people identify with, as opposed to the clinical "homosexual" which I'd identify as more uncomfortable today.
I feel this is pedantry. It's been used in good faith as a neutral term to address all, basically no different to using words others don't like such as moist.
If this level of pedantry can be considered acceptable, how on earth do these folks justify/cope with terminology used in "empowerment" initiatives who often use very non-inclusive wording more so than "guys".
Pedantry would be pointing out the extensive history of "you guys" as being non-gendered and that even dictionaries say that is what it means. Anyone misinterpreting a word or phrase by using their own made up non-standard definition of it is, at best, assuming the absolute worst about someone's intention without any cause. If people feel excluded by the phrase it's an entirely self-inflicted wound.
And yet despite centuries of use of singular they/them pronouns, people respond the same way when they encounter them. Presumably you are comfortable with singular they, given its long and frequent use?
I'm mostly ambivalent about it excepting those situations where it makes things confusing. For example, I really enjoyed A Psalm for the Wild-Built which featured a non-binary protagonist referred to using they/them pronouns, but there were some sentences which became ambiguous as a result. That's something the editor could have caught and had corrected though and I wouldn't have had anything to complain about.
I don't know about others, but yes I'm entirely fine with people using singular they on me. My native language doesn't have an animate gender-neutral pronoun and I like how English gives me the option to actually be more gender-inclusive without an unnatural "he/she" construct.
If another cis man was suddenly uncomfortable with "they", I'd attribute that to some fragile sense of masculinity or a weird anti-woke crusade, as was the case with most such cases in my life, and find it personally annoying.
I don't want to deliberately make other people uncomfortable with my language, but it does feel exhausting to second-guess yourself, having to double-check if any innocuous phrase might be misinterpreted as an underhanded aggression, preempting a correction we know will be awkward for both sides.
I think we'd do better to consider context more than the specific language...
I've watched a woman walk into a space to meet her group -- all of whom were women -- and address the group with "Hey you guys!"
I've also worked with a woman who was extremely displeased to be greeted with "you guys". I found her absolutely insufferable.
The reason it feels bad to people who use "you guys" in a gender neutral way is what it says about the offended person. The offended person has a pet peeve, and if you don't accommodate it, it will be a problem. That's pretty much the definition of an insufferable person.
A person who is well-regulated wouldn't make a stink over something so trivial. Which then tells you that the person is going to make a similar stink over other trivial things. Ad infinitum.
No one is offended by the use. Some folks feel excluded by it. Those are wildly different experiences.