Comment by autoexec
17 hours ago
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...