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.

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.

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

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?

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.

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.