this post was submitted on 11 Dec 2023
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I guess having to explain this is a good enough reason to avoid this allegedly gender-neutral word in gender-neutral contexts
Only for people that did not made through elementary school.
Do you include in this group everyone with English as a foreign language like me?
English is my second language too, but my mother tongue has neutral genders the same. I don't know how it works in your primary language, but if it is not the same, I guess you have to learn more about how it works before trying to tell the native speakers to abandon context.
I’m happy that we can now at least forget about inferring the education levels of people.
What I do see though is the usage of the language by native speakers. I pretty much never see a woman addressing a group of women by the "gender-neutral" "guys". I often see males addressing a group of males by "guys". Even this mismatch tells me enough about how neutral this term is among the people I see.
I also see males addressing a mixed group by "guys". When called out, they say "oh, but I didn’t mean it like that, many other people do that, the word is now neutral". Which might be even true despite the evidence mentioned above, but it still carries an awful lot of resemblance to other excuses about non-neutral language and behavior. I guess you can see why some people see this as an excuse.
I come from a country which in the last century had probably the best women’s rights in the whole world. And it still struggles with appropriate usage of neutral-gendered and "female"-gendered forms of words, and the excuses are all the same.