@anyia @xgranade

> my circle of friends has always seen "guys" as all-inclusive

That's just the lifetime of patriarchal oppression talking.

@alice @anyia @xgranade

Frankly I have been wondering about that, since some time. English is "only" my second language. I originally thought "guys" would be gendered, but then I saw it used as ungendered all over the place and came to doubt my initial understanding. And saying/writing "guys and girls" seemed somehow even worse.

Now, I am grateful to Alice for resolving this question for me, AND I am very grateful to @xgranade for bringing up the alternative of "folks". I had been looking for one, but inspiration did not come.

@BernieDoesIt @alice @anyia @xgranade

Not sure i can follow you there as far as causation is concerned, but then I am conversing mostly with non-native speakers and ex-patriates (and the latter are very rarely from the US).

@BernieDoesIt @alice @anyia @xgranade

Yeeees. But this is now not about economic aspects. If it's about anything, we're talking about participation in society, about visibility. The end goal would be that the default is neutral and if e.g. gender doesn't play a role in a story, at the end you as a reader might not know if the protagonist is "male", "female", "no-binary" and so on. It just doesn't matter, so why should the author bring it up.

I genuinely like Ann Leckie's SF novels, where the default pronoun is she and the protagonista every know and them mentions that her own language actually doesn't have gendered pronouns (so the she, supposedly is a translation artifact, a choice when translating to English).

Economic prospects, IMHO, in a sane society are sub-ordinate to participation. Only capitalistic, money-oriented societies think this needs to be regulated by money (e.g. participation should be proprotional to allocation of money, so we need economic equality -- I'd agree we need economic equality, but that is IMHO orthogonal to participation/visibility/normality).

@glitzersachen Even the most fastidious inclusive language users in my hometown use the word "guy" to refer to a girl for exactly the same reason most English speakers use "goose" to refer to a large waterfowl even if it they know it's a gander.

I've lived in a different place where using "guy" to refer to a girl will get you looked at like you have three heads and the plural usually is only used for groups of boys.

@glitzersachen The US altolect is somewhere in the middle, disallowing "guy" to refer to a girl and being a bit squeamish about using "guys" to refer to a group of girls.

If the dialect I grew up with was the altolect, would we be having this conversation? Maybe, but I doubt it. English has a lot of words that are marked for gender only when used contrastively, and no one really complains about any of the other ones.

@glitzersachen The only reason this is an issue is because the altolect is kind of wishy-washy, and the altolect is the altolect because the most privileged people tend to speak it. That means the discussion has classist and regionalist underpinnings even if people don't realize or want to acknowledge it.

None of this is an endorsement of calling anyone anything they don't want to be called, of course.

@BernieDoesIt

> the discussion has classist and regionalist underpinnings even if people don't realize or want to acknowledge it.

I think we are done with this discussion now. This kind of accusator meta-argument on whether it's legit / morally OK to have a discussion on this topic is a communicative deal breaker.