I'm all for reasonably accommodating reasonable preferences. A nickname preference for example is common and fairly easy to accommodate. The more bizarre and unreasonable your preferences are though the less likely people are going to be to accommodate them, especially if those people aren't very close to you. Even people who do go through the trouble to accommodate someone's strange or burdensome preference might think less of them a little bit.

"I interpret a commonly used word or phrase as meaning something other than what the dictionary says that it means, and differently from what pretty much everyone, for hundreds of years, has intended it to mean when they say it, and so every time I hear it used by anyone that makes me unhappy so please stop using that word or phrase around me" is a pretty strange request that some people might find a bit unreasonable. At least it might not be too hard for some to constantly remember to alter their vocabulary around specific people.

In terms of human negotiation, part of working in a professional environment, or any large group of mixed company, involves understanding that you may not have your every preference catered to and that for some preferences it can even be impolite to impose on the group by asking them to take your weird hang up into account. The strength/impact of the preference, the size of the group and how well you all know each other will have to factor into that though.

I suspect that "I'll just try to remember and understand that people who say 'you guys' use it to mean what the dictionary says that it means" is a more reasonable position than "Every one of the 200,000+ people who work for the same company that I work for should alter their vocabulary to accommodate my personal preference because I want to cling to a non-standard definition of that particular phrase and I'll judge anyone who refuses to comply"

This is not about personal accommodations, though? Usually its coming from people who are supposedly trying to enforce this stuff to “protect” broader groups of people who they perceive need saving or just engaging in general virtue signaling.

> I don't understand this compulsion to make either party into some villain.

If someone replies as the GP suggested, they will be villainized by some subset of the people who hear that reply. In a professional setting, that could involve a visit from HR and/or be a career-limiting move, depending on the company culture.

It doesn't matter if you understand it or not. It happens, and that's what matters.

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 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.

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.

I think you're trying to have your cake and eat it too.

I get what you're saying on paper, but in the workforce, that's not how things go down.

I’m lumping you in with a broader movement, it’s true, but I think it’s disingenuous to pretend like no one out there is trying to eradicate “guys.” Maybe you personally aren’t, but a lot of people are agitating for not using it preemptively because you might make someone feel excluded etc.

What do you think of the scenario in which you ask someone to stop using “guys” when you’re around, and they comply but think less of you going forward?

> 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.

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.

Completely false, and this goes into reasons for performative activism.

Stop saying 'guys' is performative, it is not moving the needle at all on the big stuff. The strongest people also have strong wills, taking it or leaving it. They could be the best people to have on your side.

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.

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.

No one is offended by the use. Some folks feel excluded by it. Those are wildly different experiences.

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?