I've still never heard, for example "this guy" when referring to eg a specific female coworker. I live in the midwest. "You guys" is frequently used as a genderless plural sure I guess but "guy" is not gender neutral.
Right, it's only the plural that's gender neutral. Kinda like how in Spanish "abeula" means "grandma", "abuelas" means "grandmas", and "abuelo" means "grandpa", but "abuelos" means "grandparents", not "grandpas". The masculine plural is gender inclusive in most contexts.
Ok but that's a different claim than the one I was originally replying to.
And anyway the masculine plural being genderless is a convention of romance languages, which english is not. It is not useful or consistent to describe expectations for english usage in terms of the features of other languages. Negative concord and invariant be are common language features globally but you don't hear white americans scrambling to include them in standard usage.
There are plenty of other situations in English where the masculine plural is gender inclusive (probably because so much of English is borrowed from romance languages). For example, "actors" can refer to both male and female actors, "actresses" cannot.
Identity politics has resulted in certain groups making concerted efforts to try to eliminate such usages, but it's still an ingrained part of our language.
"it" in this case referring to gender inclusive masculine plural nouns as a feature of the English language, not the particular use of "you guys" as one. That phrasing may well be new. Actually it seems like the phrase "you guys" is itself pretty new, see: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=you+guys&year_...
Context changed the use of language. If you know any foreign languages you know two words that are more or less the same carry a different meaning in context.
Because it's for group greetings and not addressing individuals. e.g. My female friend from Long Island uses it to address her friends in group settings but never has referred to her wife as "guy" and neither has anyone I ever knew growing up in NY.
