When non-native English speakers are taught English, they are taught that "Hey guys" is gender neutral. So you'll meet lots of non-native English speakers who will be completely shocked at that it's not.

I have so much fun joking with some of my women friends that they're sexist because they're using "guys" instead of "folks".

To me, it's one of those things where someone is always going to be awkward and say "that doesn't include me". They may jokingly say something but some take it as a personal insult and just assume the other person is being sexist. While I always use "folks" just to avoid the hassle, personally I wouldn't be too bothered if the people who take "Hey guys" as a sexist insult don't talk to me.

The fact that it was white people bullying people from all over the planet only made it worse.

I've noticed that white people as a group regularly get abuse in anti-woke HN threads. Seems bizarre to me.

I guess it is some kind of "gotcha", intended to undermine "woke" people but it seems a bit self-defeating.

"White people are so racist they're even racist when they're trying to be non-racist" seems more woke than anti-woke to me, but that doesn't seem to be the intention.

It's specifically the phenomenon of rich 1-percenters trying to cancel each other that's grating.

Is there injustice in the world? Clearly. Are these people insufferable? Also very much yes.

In the tech context specifically, we are very international in a way that doesn't map to US culture wars, which makes the white woke people look even more out of touch with reality.

And of course, complaints about white people are one of the things that wouldn't be punished under these code of conducts despite the "no racism" clause, because they're usually not evenly enforced.

My pet theory is that most 'woke' people are people that feel ashamed at not being at the bottom of the hierarchy, and so try to compensate their 'privileges' by being overly sensitive to any kind of injustice, to the point of seeing moral or symbolic violence where there is none.

And since the negative discourse (e.g. saying "Women face so many issue in the workplace" as a man) is way more socially palatable than a positive one (saying "Women have it OK now in the workplace" as a man), people who try to be sensible about thing not directly concerning them tend to overdo it by amplifying the "everything is bad" angle.

Which is why at the height of the BLM movements, lots of well-meaning (but IMO severely misguided) people felt that 'master' or 'blacklist' were carriers of oppression, while not thinking twice about words such as 'white noise' or 'white-label' (Implying that a lack of creativity or panache is associated with whiteness, The horror!), The former was among white 'wokes' sensibility-by-proxy, while the same crowd had the experience and tool to know this argument is bonker, and that anyone having issue with the expression 'white noise' has mental issue.

I came to this conclusion after a gay/muslim friend of mine, who likes to do humoristic quizzes on Instagram did one for the Ramadan. He asked "Apart from Ramadan, what are the other 4 pillars of Islam", and accepted the Ru Paul reference "Creativity, Uniqueness, Nerves and Talent" as the answer. The only people taking issue with that were non-muslim white french dudes who felt it was islamophobic, which greatly annoyed my friend, who felt it feed into the stereotypes of "angry muslim".

> When non-native English speakers are taught English, they are taught that "Hey guys" is gender neutral.

I'm a native English speaker in the US, in my late 50s, and I was taught that "guys" used in that way was gender neutral in grade school.

I'll buy this when I hear a straight man talk about the guys he's dated. A thing that I have still never once observed.

There are lots of languages where the gender-neutral term and one of the gendered terms are the same. Consider the Spanish "ellos", meaning either "the masculine group" or "the masculine and feminine group". The word "ellas" denotes a feminine-only group.

It seems very reasonable that "guys" could function similarly in English. Moreover, I might not say "the guys I've dated" as a straight man, but if all the women I've ever dated were talking together in a room, I wouldn't bat an eye asking "what are you guys all doing?".

Similarly, I wouldn't say "all the folks I've dated", but I might say "good evening, folks" -- the word is a misfit solely because of the idioms and context, not because the word is inherently communicating something else.

A nuance of that usage of "guys" to refer to a group consisting of both men and women is that the group of people being referred to is typically immediately present in some way.

Like in those earlier examples, the people are probably all within the same house/yard at the same time when they're called to dinner, or they're all using the same online discussion forum at about the same time.

When discussing multiple individuals with significant time and/or distance separating them (like the people somebody has dated over the span of years), a more specific term like "men", "women", "men and women", or "people" would likely be used instead.

"Guys" tends to be neuter in the second person and masculine in the third person.

In any case, I think your example works better with a bisexual speaker. A straight guy would probably use more specific gendered language rather than a neuter construction. A bisexual person using "guys" to refer to the men and women (s)he has dated would be an example of a third person neuter usage—which I also think would be quite rare.

Here's a shocking concept: language has context.

The person you’re responding to is providing an example of context-sensitivity.

The person he's responding to is choosing to be obtuse in order to police other peoples' language based on rules derived by their political ideology, and does not care about context

I wish you guys could understand that

"Context for me but not for thee" is not a principled argument.

The rest of the comment is speculative: you don't know anything about their politics, or have any reason to believe they're being obtuse.

I don't think this example counters the gender neutrality of "guys". Have you ever observed a straight man talk about the people he's dated?

Yes.

It's an interesting bit of context. I also grew up with guys as a generic plural, but it's not really generic, rather it's a mixed group plural. It would feel just as natural to say "the people I date", as "the women I date", but never "the guys I date.

Even that's a weak rule though. For example if a girls soccer team performed really well you might hear someone say "those guys really gave it their all today" (though I'd say this usage is mostly dead, I don't think I've heard it this way in a long time), but never "THE guys really gave it their all today".

I'm sure some linguists have studied this and have a term for this kind of thing.

If everyone I dated were in a room, then I, a heterosexual male, very much might address that room as guys. As in, "hey guys, what are you doing here?"

I absolutely would not say "hey ladies"

It would feel too formal to say "hey everyone"

"Hey people" would be awkward

"Hey you all" eh

It might be better to leave it at "hey"

It might be best to just say "bye"

Why would they use it to refer to a group of exclusively women? 'guys' refers to a group of men or a group of men and women, not to a group of women. Is that so hard to understand?

I haven’t used “guys” in that specific way, but I’ve definitely called my various female partners “dude” before. Language is fluid etc.

Oh my god you are being so dramatic. Someone says something you disagree with about whether a term is gender-neutral and you're suddenly talking about "speech totalitarians" and authoritarians and gulags. Get a grip.

I work in Japan - naturally I've Japanese colleagues, and a significant number from other Asian countries too. The "you guys"/"hey guys"/"that guy" thing is practically universal.

The idea of a native (probably white) English speaker lecturing them on it being sexist or non-inclusive is repugnant to the extreme. At that point they've lost the argument, and can frankly get fucked.

> The idea of a native (probably white) English speaker lecturing them on it being sexist or non-inclusive is repugnant to the extreme

It really is amazing how those people don't see it that way and instead think they are really helping anyone. English was forced on a lot of the world. Now it's sort of happening again, in a different way and with infinitely less violence, but the justification remains the same: to civilize the savages.

Another data point: I’m from Ireland and grew up in the 80s. For as long as I remember, the plural form “guys” always referred to groups of any gender. I’d be just as likely to use it to greet a female-only group of colleagues as a mixed or male-only group of colleagues.