Me personally? I’ve become much less tolerant of sexist humor. Back in the day, cracking a joke at women’s expense was pretty common when I was a teen. As I’ve matured and become aware to the horrific extent of toxicity and bigotry pervading all tiers of our individualistic society, I’ve come to see how exclusionarly and objectifying that sort of ‘humor’ really is, and I regret it deeply.
I know it’s controversial, but moving away from “guys” when I address a group and more or less defaulting to “they” when referring to people I don’t know.
They was practical, because I deal with so many students exclusively via email, and the majority of them have foreign names where I’d never be able to place a gender anyways if they didn’t state pronouns.
Switching away from guys was natural, but I’m in a very male dominated field and I’d heard from women students in my undergrad that they did feel just a bit excluded in a class setting (not as much social settings) when the professor addresses a room of 120 men and 5 women with “Guys”, so it just more or less fell to the side in favour of folks/everyone.
I use “guys” even when address a group of women. I feel it’s basically become a gender neutral term.
I argue this as well. I think things turning gender-neutral is more progressive than them being cut, unless I’m missing something. I got kicked out of a progressive community (that I really wanted to stay in) partially because they disagreed with me on that opinion (along with the word “dude” as an interjection) and wanted everyone in lock-step. I will never forgive them.
I also think “guys” and “dude” have a level of informality and nuanced humor that doesn’t have an easy substitute.