In addition to teaching, AP Statistics teacher Debbie Frazier works as the COO of the company, Thyrm, led by her and her husband who design, create and sell solutions for tactical issues faced in the police and military department. However, according to Frazier, it’s mostly the men who serve that field so being a minority amongst them, it’s as though no woman has worked there before.

 

“[So] I take a little offense [to that] but not very much because I’m very secure with my identity,” Frazier said. “But if you’re an unknown entity across the Internet, they don’t know that [but] in a place where there are a lot of women, it could just be an oversight net and I let [it] go.”

 

While she could feel misguidedly left out by being regularly referred to as a male, Frazier makes it clear that there is a difference between being referred to as such and being called a “guy.”

 

“If I were to say ‘yeah, I’m just one of the guys,’ I don’t actually say that thinking I’m a male, I’m just saying that I’m not a defined member of the group who stands out, I blend in just like everybody else,” Frazier said. “You’re not drawing attention to yourself, so I think ‘guys’ might imply that we aren’t looking for individuals, we’re just talking about a collective group.”

Junior Rukmini Banerjee agrees with Frazier, stating that “guys” is used to incorporate everyone in the group.

 

“When people use certain words that do imply a certain kind of microaggression, it usually has an underlying meaning that’s harmful to some sort of group, but ‘hey guys’ is just a general way of greeting,” Banerjee said. “When you’re saying the phrase ‘hey guys,’ you’re assuming there will be girls and non-binary people there. It’s not meant to exclude anyone.”

 

However, transgender male junior Kaleb Gogue states otherwise, bringing up the concept of sensitivity when people can become uncomfortable with the terminology.

 

“We can be as sensitive as other people around us want to be. If someone told me that they were uncomfortable with [saying guys], I’d obviously try to refrain from using and apologize if I did and made them uncomfortable in past situations like I can see if a transgender female felt offended by that,” Gogue said. “Obviously, I think she’d want to distance herself away from that and honestly, if somebody told me that they didn’t like that, I would stop using it.”

 

Banerjee partially agrees with Gogue but believes that sensitivity shouldn’t be a problem if the term is meant to call everyone of different genders and backgrounds.

 

“What about girls, what about non-binary people? When you’re saying the phrase ‘hey guys,’ you’re assuming there will be girls and non-binary people there,” Banerjee said. “It’s not meant to exclude anyone.”

 

Frazier takes a different approach, also taking into account the English terminology and the usage of “guys” to pluralize “you.”

 

“People are often looking for a term that means ‘you’ without saying ‘you’ because ‘you’ has a sharp tone to it in our language and so ‘guys’ softens it a little bit and makes it feel more comfortable,” Frazier said. “‘Hey, you guys!’ It sounds like it’s a comfortable group that you’re with so I think that’s where words come from and it softens. It’s much more informal so I think it’s popular as a greeting for a group.”

 

Banerjee also believes that everyone caught onto the term and began using to associate it with a group of people.

 

“Eventually girls started saying it to their girlfriends, guys started saying it to their guy friends, non-binary people probably say it to their non-binary friends,” Banerjee said. “It’s just been used so much to address so many people, now you just associate it with people in general. It’s just who you address it to and now people use it to address everyone.”

Gogue adds that the term’s usage is affected by the way society acknowledges it.

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“There’s a male-dominated society [where] that’s probably where it stemmed from,” Gogue said. “It’s not something you really think about and as we progress, it’s just common.”

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However, Banerjee points out the potential of oversensitivity and how that permeates some of the feminist agenda, which she says can be unhelpful.

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“Political correctness culture is a really bad thing for feminists because as a result, people feel like they can’t say anything,” Banerjee said. “Some phrases like ‘boys will be boys’ or ‘stop acting like a girl,’ that actually implies something that’s negative, but now everyone feels like everything that they say is so offensive [so] people are too afraid to actually speak up when it is offensive.”

Gogue finds that feminists usually notice terms that have the possibility to offend someone where others don’t notice it most of the time; he also states that it relies on one’s perception upon the meaning of the term and its usage. Thus, according to Gogue, it’s important to see how it can affect others.

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“Feminists probably learned, besides transgender people, [and thought] about [these words and phrases] because most of us don’t think about it, we just use it,” Gogue said. “And unless it’s particularly harmful to you and your beliefs, I don’t think you notice it.”