"Communication and compatibility issues aside, she could just make him use a condom with HER."

Uh. They're a ciswoman and a trans man. Neither of them is going to be wearing a condom, no?

I think "you guys" as a gender-neutral thing might be a regionalism specific to the southern NY/NJ area. I've always used "you guys" to function almost exactly as people from other regions use "y'all," and I never thought about it as being potentially sexist until a couple of years ago.

I will adamantly defend my right to say to a group, usually a group of my female friends, "Did you guys hear about this thing that happened?" or "You guys, I can't believe how much homework I have!" Just like other dialects and regionalisms are legitimate uses of language, I think "you guys" is a regionalism that under certain usages can definitely be non-gendered. Certainly, the word "guys" is not always gender-neutral. It is usually used to refer to a group of men -- EXCEPT if someone is saying "you guys" to a mixed or female group!

I think the gender-neutral function is usually limited to second-person plural usage. For example, I could say something about "the guys I worked with" (third-person plural) in which I would be referring to males at my former workplace. Or I could say, "That guy doing ballet is cute" (third-person singular) to refer to a cute man doing ballet. Or, "Watch where you're going, guy!" (second-person singular) to an inconsiderate male jerk who bumped into me. But if I was at work and said, "Jeez, guys, can you believe how much resort we have?" (second-person plural) I would be referring gender-neutrally to whatever mixed, female, or male group I was talking to.

I don't see what's so controversial about saying that certain words/phrases mean different things in different contexts. For (non-existent) god's sake -- it's the way millions of people talk and it doesn't really hurt anybody. What are we doing, trying to promote erasure of females or something?

I don't ever want to say that anybody shouldn't be offended by something that genuinely offends them. That said, most of the people I've actually talked to about this have come across to me as LOOKING for something about me to be offended by, and this is the thing they've happened to latch onto in my lexicon.

I just read what I wrote, and I could see how someone would read it as me being a defensive jerk. Maybe I'm a defensive jerk. I'm just sensitive about this issue because I think it's a perfectly legitimate use of regionalistic language, it's the way I've always talked, and I usually find the people who tell me it's offensive to be intolerable.

Did a hospital employee in fact call the cops on Dukes and two other guys? What was actually going on, and what did the employee tell the cops?

Not to let the cops off the hook either, but if his history is accurate and a hospital employee called 911 to say "I see a suspicious dude stealing an IV stand and $75 worth of saline!" then that employee would have done a bad thing.

On reread -- the first stop was the hospital security guard who said he was trying to walk away with the IV, then called the cops. So that guy, he sounds like probably a racist dick, yeah?

Who are the other two men arrested, bystanders who said "you assholes are being ridiculous"?

I’ll need all weekend to read thru this!
To the person writing in going on about calling women, girls, get over yourself. The word girl is the only one used to describe us which doesn’t include men or male in it. I say it’s a liberating word.
Then I’m biased and have no issue using it.

I’m with you Muse.
ffs, the world is gender neutral in some circumstances. Of course you don’t ask a straight man how his straight guy spouse is going. You do say, hey guys, what’s up tonight, and then it’s gender neutral.
Perhaps guy becomes gender neutral by adding the S.

Word is gender neutral, Not world. I need an editor to edit my editing.

I did train my regular bridge players. Living in a state with a Basketball School, there are frequent references to the two teams. For a couple of seasons, regularly uttering incisively, "Women!" any time I heard "men" and "girls" from the same speaker eventually got people out of that particular bad habit.

I assume the woman who wrote in to complain is doing at least as much to eradicate the use of "ladies" when used as a counterpart to "men". I gave up watching figure skating over that.

Not keen on the word ladies, Mr Venn. That’s got Lad in it. No, girls is the one.. no reference to men in that word.

Another writer I disagree with. An unpleasant past can be a red flag, if it isn’t owned, faced and negative intimacy patterns learnt during that past, confronted. Especially if we are talking childhood, where we learn at our mother’s / father’s/ person’s knee, to trust and to love, or not.
These patterns are deep, unconscious, reactive parts of ourselves. They are wounds, negative experiences in childhood, and need to be healed. Can never go back and have a happy childhood, so there will always be scars.

@4 CalliopeMuse
"I think "you guys" as a gender-neutral thing might be a regionalism specific to the southern NY/NJ area."

Not uncommon here in the SF Bay Area too.

And I love /typing/ "y'all" (though I would never speak it).

Have to amend @9, because the writer used ‘guys’, when asking about dating.
Then it’s a word which changes meaning depending on context. Many other words are like this. My dear friend Ricardo would have such examples at his fingertips. They are out there.

@4 CalliopeMuse Your usage of "guys" in a gender neutral sense is your choice, but if somebody requests you to not use it to refer to them specifically, it's considerate to comply.

I use "dude" a lot, but a friend of mine said that it made her feel misgendered. It was really really EASY for me to avoid calling her "dude", so of course I did. Why wouldn't I do something so simple if it made her feel respected?

I also think that "you guys" bring gender neutral is very similar to the old formal use of "he" in the third person for an unspecified individual. As in, "Each person must make his own sandwich" even if you're addressing a group of all women with one single man. It didn't make sense and I like that "they" is becoming more common for that purpose. In the same vein, I think "you folks" or "you all" or just "y'all" is going to become more common and replace "you guys".

If they're under 30 (and in a city? Not sure if there's a rural/urban divide here), "girl" is a much more common self-appellation for young women than "woman". Fighting this battle was a BIG DEAL for second-wave feminists, and many of them will still take offense at anyone calling a feminine-gendered human over the age 18 a "girl," even when that's what she prefers; I had a long discussion with a former boss about this one day, where I was on the side of "I will call people whatever they prefer to be called, even if you don't like it." "Girl" is also a common affectionate diminutive among Black women, gay men (who appropriated it from Black women), and older White women (who appropriated it from gay men).

The mistake people taking objection make is thinking that anyone other than them still associates "girl" exclusively or even primarily with very young women (juvenile or infant females) rather than women who haven't hit late-young-adulthood or even middle age, as well as a heaping dose of adultism (whereby equating someone with a very young person is at all insulting in the first place). Additionally, twentysomething women refer to twentysomething men as "boys" (and they do each other, or even older men, as in "going out with the boys," "boys' night out," etc.) about as often; I suspect the trend has something to do with rejectibg dominant norms of adulthood within a generation thatvwas screwed out of access to many of them by austerity politics and the global financial collapse right as we were entering the workforce. It's a now-fruitless language battle stuck in 1964, when "girl" actually was dismissive and infantilizing in its common use and interpretation.

I've adopted "y'all" as a Yankee specifically to avoid gendered language fights.

@4: "You guys" (or "youguys," as my Bostonian linguistics professor liked to write it) as a gender-neutral, second-person plural pronoun is common in the (urban) Midwest as well. It very much is a regionalism that performs the same work as "you all"/"y'all," though the region is larger than you thought. "Guys" being contextually gender-neutral is related to "he" being contextually gender-neutral, due to patriarchy elevating masculine identification above feminine (so it's culturally more insulting to refer to men in the feminine than it is to refer to women in the masculine), as stonesoup suggests. Whether that means we should never use it - and, further, should confront people when they use it in that sense - is morr of a tactical question (in my experience, fighting battles against common-use linguistics is inevitably a losing proposition - which is why I tend toward descriptivism, along with the field overall - so energy may be more effective directed elsewhere, but there could be some value in continually highlighting the issue even if one knows that one won't ever change common use).

@16 stonesoup @18 John Horstman

I am also glad that "they" is growing in third-person singular usage. It is not by far a new usage, and is a very useful one.

I don't know that I would equate "you guys" with using "he" to refer to everyone -- there just seems to be a difference to me. Maybe it's because it's the way I talk; maybe this is something I need to examine. Maybe it will fall by the wayside as language changes, but I don't see that happening locally. I would get laughed at if I said "y'all" or probably even "you folks." Just "folks" I could say, maybe.

Of course if someone specifically said not to refer to THEM in a "you guys" group I wouldn't, but the few conversations I've had have gone more along the lines of the other person saying, "Wow, you're so sexist! Never say that ever, to anyone." It was the broad denunciation of my character at which I took umbrage.

@15 lavagirl

I don't listen to the podcast, so I have no knowledge of the context in which this came up. I merely reacted based on my personal experience with "you guys" as a second-person plural gender-neutral thing. In a singular third-person context, especially related to dating, I would almost certainly not consider "guy" to be gender-neutral.

...

I sort of regret making this a topic of discussion now. I feel silly for some reason, in a way I haven't about any other topic I've talked about here. Not sure what's up with that.

That’s why I don’t get so upset re the word girls or chicks. Thanks John @17; I was going thru the bare foot hippy mother stage during the second wave. It was hard enough working with the few tools I learnt during the first wave. Or which ever wave I surfed. More often I fell off the board.
There is no replacement for you guys, and dude of course is gendered. Dude. One could say you people, or you they, it just doesn’t have that ring.

In order to mix it up and confront the patriarchal model, we could start saying ‘hey,you gals’, or like in the show, the opposite to guys and say ‘hey, you dolls.’

Or ‘hey, you dames.’ Slang/ common usage words will always be around, can’t see what the big deal is about you guys. It is easy to say when addressing a group. You could always go bogan Australian and say ‘hey, youse lot.’

@5. Calliope. You didn't come over as defensive.

@11. venn. The English women's soccer teams have all changed their names over the last two years from e.g. Arsenal Ladies to Arsenal Women. Can't see past Djokovic for the final today.

/break/
Savage is right about almost everything. At many times in my life the blandest, most general heads-up from the Savage playbook would have saved me a lot of pain i.e. when I eschewed relationships, including with people I cared for, because I thought they were heteronormative, or when I stayed in a soured relationship out of misguided notions of commitment. Savage does still confuse 'you're' and 'your' too often for my liking, though.

I meant to post yesterday, "Cue Rita Moreno," but forgot. For the young, it flashes back to the 1970's, when the follow-up to Sesame Street for much of the decade consisted of The Electric Company (which opened with Ms Moreno's yelling, "HEY YOU GA-UYS!!!") and Zoom.

M?? Harriet - Up Arsenal, then. And I'm sure you and Mr Archer will be able to bring about The Death of Gay (as he titled his book), especially now it should only take about five to ten more years for Openly Anti-Gay to become the dominant sentiment among the young.

Mr Horstman - Do you know anything about the FeMRA claim that "girl" used to be the generic world for children while "boy" always referred to a servant?

Ms Muse - I'd no more invoke a singular they than I'd go to lunch at a Chick-fil-A. (One may occasionally slip out in a seven-times edited sentence when I forget how many times I've changed wording.) Now I'll be as gender-neutral as anyone wishes, just not in that manner. One of the greatest public humiliations in my life occurred when I was singled out and ridiculed by a teacher who generally disliked me and enjoyed taking me down when he could, probably mostly because I got on better than he liked with his son. Use it yourself all you like, but don't ask me to go there myself or to recognize any particular virtue in it.

"You guys" is quite common in the plains and mountain west, as well, and I have never met anyone who objected. I also say "y'all," but I think for many non-southerners, that can feel affected.

I would like to make the sort of funny point that recent arguments for a singular "they" have sometimes argued that "you" is both singular and plural, and therefore the distinction isn't necessary; but clearly, while speaking, it is, or we wouldn't be thinking so much about how to phrase our plurals appropriately.

I personally don't think "dude" is heavily gendered--it isn't in my vernacular, anyway, or that of people I know. I also think "girls" is fine, and frankly, I would probably find anyone who objects on grounds of sexism a bit of a bore. Can't that be one of those language-constantly-changes things people are always on about?

Wow, at last Dan listens on the topic of closing one's eyes during sex. Hope that closes the book on that misconception for good.

Lava @8: I mildly pulled that LW up on his use of the word "girl" too, because it revealed his hypocrisy in scolding his girlfriend for being politically incorrect in her attraction to black men. If he's going to play that card, he needs to be woker than woke in his own use of language. Otherwise, not really a big deal to me if someone uses the word "girl" in a dating sense, as John @17 says.

"You lot" is a gender neutral plural commonly used in the UK.

Calliope @19: I think the world would be a much better place if people stopped taking personal offence at statements that certain things/terms are sexist/racist. No one is calling YOU a sexist. They're simply suggesting general-you could use language less likely to be construed as sexist. Whew.

@27 BiDanFan I wasn't taking offense to the mere fact that they were pointing it out; it was their tone and choice of words that rankled me. I try to be as accommodating as possible to anything that offends anyone, but if they're overly nasty about it, of course it's going to rub me the wrong way. These were fellow patients in residential mental health treatment, and we all had issues we were working through. One of the ones for this small group happened to be being overly confrontational.

You weren't there, so it's going to be impossible to convince you that I wasn't being overly reactionary unless my word will suffice.

And yes, they were explicitly calling ME sexist. I'm not reading into that.

@25 vennominon Use whatever language you like! I'm not trying to impose any usage on you, just asking that you accept my usage. Since you're doing that, we have no issue. :)

I notice the word ‘girls’ coming out of Megan Rapinoe, during her speech in NY.
“ we’ve got white girls and black girls and everything in between..”
Its a good enough word for Megan to use.

I rest my case.
Dan Savage tweeted a cheeky comment about Megan. I was on twitter for five minutes,
yet they email me tweets and often Dan’s ones.

Sans Ricardo, I thought of a word which has a different meaning in different contexts. Facial.

Don’t stress Muse, one gets tumbled around a bit on first joining SL and forever after.. Toughens and sharpens you up. Don’t take it personally. Think of it as a martial arts class for ideas/ words.

Calliope @28-@29: My apologies, I thought you were referring to the person who wrote to Dan as calling YOU sexist. Some people are assholes, even people whose motives are in the right place. As you say, these people have issues. Bear in mind that they were not coming from a healthy place when they made these comments.
I'm currently away visiting family, so I haven't had as much time with SL and I've been skimming, so apologies to the rest of you lot (gender neutral familiar plural) for anything I've misread this week.

@35 BiDanDan
"...you lot (gender neutral familiar plural)..."

When not familiar, is it really "you mob"? (I see that on British TV recently.)

@35 BiDanFan Oh, okay. Yeah, I was taking about a specific difficult group of people I was in treatment with, not the LW. Do I have some stories to tell about that period in my life! (I was in residential treatment for almost exactly one year.) Treatment was very helpful to me and exposed me to some great people, but it also brought me into contact with some very difficult people, some of whom I had to live with...

Remind me to tell you about the girl who "identified" as various cartoon characters.

*talking specifically

And I like "you lot." I may just have to steal that from you.

@36 p.s.
""...you mob"? (I see that on British TV recently.).."

Or wait, maybe that was on Austrailian TV.

Ms Muse - Oh, I accept that there are quite a lot of things people do. I'm probably fairly neutral about that when done by others, and I could perhaps even go so far as to consider it somewhat chic if people began using singular verb forms with it.

You're on the angels' side about "whom" and that gives you a large plus, large enough that I shall refrain from the annoyance of predicting how "hopefully" the assembled company will be watching election returns next year.

I'm in 100% agree that unless you're fucking someone under 18, you are dating a woman, not a girl. I yell at your podcast all the time about this and am so glad someone else called it out.

Happy Non Binary Day.
It keeps turning up on my fb feed. What I don’t understand, re being non binary, is if you name is John or Rebecca, don’t one’s name gender one?
curious, Australian Aborigines use the term Mob, when describing different kinship groups. That’s so and sos’ Mob. Of which there are many. It’s sort of their word, in my mind.
Generally, they say white fellas and black fellas, with women included. So what’s the opposite to fellas. Is there one.

Doesn’t one’s name gender one.
the brain is slipping

@44 LavaGirl
"curious, Australian Aborigines use the term Mob, when describing different kinship groups. That’s so and sos’ Mob. Of which there are many. It’s sort of their word, in my mind.
Generally, they say white fellas and black fellas, with women included. So what’s the opposite to fellas. Is there one."

Ah yes, it /was/ Australian Aborigines using that word on the TV show. It sounds cool with an Australian accent.

Lava @44: Yes, which is why many non-binary and nearly all changing-to-the-other-gender trans people change their names. For instance, someone with the birth name Rebecca might change his name to Rob if he transitioned to male, or Reb, which carries no specific gender connotations, if non-binary. Some change their names legally, while many non-binaries just take a nickname, some of which incorporate the original name. For instance John might become Jonnie. To refer to them by their old name is known as "deadnaming" and considered very offensive.

@25. venn. If Savage is right about nigh-on everything, Bert Archer, at least a decade ago, was wrong about almost everything. He had insufficient respect for 'gay' as the name and marker of a culture, community and social identity. His emphasis was too much on how individuals felt, including about their sexuality--their twinges of affection and attraction--leading to a culturally damaging or destructive normalization of sexual fluidity, in the context of a discourse of self-indulgence, self-doubt (certainly) and concerns about symbolic rights, entitlements and exclusion.

I would have thought this close enough to what you think about Archer--close enough for me to be on your side about 'gay' and the gay cultures of the last fifty years.

But none of this affects the fact that many people are attracted to men, women, both, neither, and non-binarians. 'Queer' is more accommodating of these practices, not just of these self-conceptions, than gay; and it would be peculiar if queer cultures, comparable to the old nightclub, bathhouse and other SS-space cultures, did not spring up as the ordinary contexts for sexually fluid experience.

@36. curious. 'Youse' is the Irish. This is like 'y'all'.

I would happily eat in venn's chicken shack, without quite knowing what it is. However, chicken is probably the least ethically reared food, so my preference would be for farmyard chicken very occasionally.

@44. Lava. But you must know lots of GN names--Julian, Jocelyn for the Anglophiles amongst us, Hilary, Charlie, Alex, Billie/Billy/Bill etc., not to mention the nicknames that lay no claim to either gender.

I lived with one nonbinary person in treatment whose name was Bailey. I thought this was sufficiently unisex, but apparently they did not, as they later decided to go by "Lee."

There was another person who identified as nonbinary during my time there. Their name was Cameron, which I also though sufficiently unisex, but they did not, choosing instead to go by "Ron" (which I think is more gendered than "Cameron"). This person, however, was one of three who I do not think were actually nonbinary.

Hear me out -- the two who lived with me both dressed and otherwise presented (makeup, hair, etc.) as female (their biological sex), frequently misgendered (according to their stated identification) themselves as female, etc. Ron was also in what was effectively a heterosexual relationship with a person who stated they identified as nonbinary, but whose biological sex was male, who dressed and presented entirely as male, who frequently misgendered themselves as male, etc. The other one of them decided later to go by female pronouns again (and never changed their/her name from their/her female birthname, Margo, in the first place).

This was all in stark contrast to Bailey (as I knew them), who took pains to present in an androgynous way, skewing toward masculine because they got frequently misgendered as female (their biological sex) and preferred being misgendered as male to being misgendered as female. They never misgendered themselves. Lee is in my opinion undoubtedly truly nonbinary (they are also asexual, but that is another topic), while the others were, I believe, claiming this identity for attention (remember, these were all people in residential mental health treatment -- we all had issues to begin with), despite their presentation, style of dress, functional heterosexuality, and "misgendering" themselves.

This was all one to two years ago and I'm not in contact with anyone from treatment, so I don't know if any of them have reverted to their birth sexes, though, with the exception of Lee, I suspect many of them may have.

...

All of this is to say -- some nonbinary people will take on a new name even if their given name is already gender-neutral. Some people will also (in my opinion) take on the identity of nonbinary for attention, to get into the trans therapy group, what have you.

*thought
*WHOM

And now I hope no one I was in treatment with reads SL, for I used real names.
:/

Thanks Fan and Harriet, I was confused. I realised trans people would change their names.
I’ve not met a non binary in person, what I read here is what I know.

Not a good idea Muse, to use real names here. I must have done it early on, because someone mentioned my late eldest son’s name back to me at some point, and that was a little freaky.

I can call you Betty, and Betty, when you call me, you can call me Al.

All along, along, there were incidents and accidents; there were hints and allegations.

I may or may not have listened to Graceland in the car on the way home from school today.

@54. Lava. My female name is very close to my male name (like Harry/Harriet, but not Harry/Harriet) and I go by both situationally. I have both on my cv. I like it when someone uses my female name when I'm presenting as male (or gender-ambiguous).

@51. calliope. I don't like the idea of sorting the wheat from the chaff, the genuinely trans or NB from the troubled or attention-seekers. My preferred starting-point would be that very many of us are bigendered to some degree; but that most people can suppress these impulses and tolerate, live under, the restrictive conditioning according to which we usually have to appear and identify as just one gender or the other. A settled identification with a certain gender is a point of pride for some people, of comfort, self-knowledge and security in social positioning--and of course I wouldn't want to take that away from anybody. But it might be worth noting that the sources of gender identification, and of panicky and phobic responses to being misgendered, would seem to come from the urge that seeks accommodation with others, rather than anything more intrinsic. Aspies, who are exempt from many social pressures, do not have anything like the same attraction to gender-normativity as the neurotypical.

I say nothing about the people you lived with, who may have had issues of their own, and could well correspond to your analysis.

@59 Harriet_by_the_bulrushes. I would never question the identity of someone I didn't know very well -- indeed, I hope I go my whole life without questioning anyone else's sincerity in their identification. And I still use their preferred pronouns and names, even if I have my private thoughts.

@60. Calliope. I think what's pathological is our having to choose so fully, not some people's wanting to make a different choice or rejecting the terms of the choice. That's all I was saying.

Lava @54: In my experience, a gender-neutral nickname often predates a public non-binary identity by a decade or more. IE a girl who has called herself Jack for years suddenly states their pronoun is now "they". (I am using the example of the cook Jack Monroe here.) Other enbies keep their name as they are simply used to it.

Calliope @51: Sometimes a new name just corresponds to wanting to shed one's old self and embrace a new self. Sounds like that might be what happened in Lee's case. This happens often even with people who are not non-binary. We probably all know someone who changed their name from Patsy to Trish to try to escape childhood baggage (here I am using the example of a character from Jessica Jones). If someone changes their name for gender reasons or just because they hate their old name, the important thing is to just use their preferred name. Even if they later change it back. People are complex, we should have patience with those still trying to figure themselves out.

@62 Good point. Just a fresh start.

I have a friend from high school who, upon graduating and starting college, decided to go by her middle name instead in this new chapter. It was funny on her Facebook feed, seeing some people calling her one name and others calling her another.