"Gonna head down to the bar and fuck some dudes."

- Straight men (apparently)

-- What's up duuu--

-- [disapproving glare]

-- --uuudayeva. Dudayeva.

-- ...Did you just compare me to Alla Dudayeva, wife of Dzhokhar Dudayev, the first president of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria?

-- ...Maybe?

all californians will be sent to re-education for being irritating as fuck about this

It's not that hard to be decent and respectful.

All it comes down to is owning up to it.

"Hey, I don't like it when you call me that, so can you please not?"

"Oh, I'm sorry. I won't call you that again."

vs.

"Hey, I don't like it when you call me that, so can you please not?"

"Well, have you ever tried not getting offended when I call you that? You're being too sensitive!"

Everyone has their own personal boundaries for comfort, even beyond things like gender. People just like to emphasize forgetting this principle for transgender people to show them as "crazies" and deny them their personhood due to their own hatred.

oh shit oh fuck i call any plural group of people "guys" when im working and addressing multiple customers

This is why I address everyone by saying "hey asshole(s)!"

I genuinely hope dude falls off heavily in use or disappears entirely. I hate having to explain to people why I'm not very fond of being called "dude"

The women I speak to about this all essentially boil down to "yeah I don't like it but it's so small I just ignore it" and I can feel hundreds of thousands of feminists turn in their graves each time I get that explanation.

Trans women are good for women for the simple fact that trans women absolutely do not accept all the tiny little things cis women have always just put up with due to a lifetime of it and not wanting their entire existence to always be conflict. Trans people don't have a fucking choice, life is conflict, so fuck it, every little thing shall be fought.

im one of these bros who calls everyone dude.. everyone except the couple transfem people who ask me not to.. it costs me literally nothing and avoids hurting people I care about. Some people have no convictions apart from refusing the be normal decent people.

I am an admitted "calls everyone dude"-er in person, but if someone asked me not to the only conceivable reaction for me is "understandable, have a good day and I will endeavor not to call you that in the future"

Also I was really confused by your last sentence and thought I had missed some discourse on someone referred to as "the word guy"

So I don't ever use it out of respect to people who are sensitive to it. But I did grow up with it in my dialect.

Sometimes it isn't even an address in my mind, it's an interjection.

Like when I say, "god, that's so annoying," I'm not addressing the person I'm talking to as my god. That's just an interjection. But if I say dude instead of god, in my conception, I'm still using it as an interjection in that instance. But, of course, it's ambiguous to the listener.

The problem is shitty transphobes use that ambiguity as cover to target people in a way that otherwise well meaning cis people won't pick up on. Then the trans person being targetted is treated as overly sensitive when they complain.

It's a lot like how people use "they" to target people sometimes, even when they know the proper pronouns. On its own, I don't really care if I catch an occasionally "they," and don't consider it misgendering. But then a transphobe comes along and only calls me "they", day after day to target me, then that's harassment. But go to your cis HR and the harrasser's plausible deniability will be taken seriously.

So anyways, I stopped using dude, and you can too. You can have it back when we eliminate transphobes from the face of the earth.

I switched to calling people nerds a long time ago

"women are my favorite guy"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-OgkNgxm3k

i see and hear women call eachother "guys" and "dude" pretty regularly even when there are no men in the group so it's not like my highschool spanish where the style guide used to be -os even if there was only one man. I don't think it's legitimate to argue that it's always gendered without getting into microdialects, but neither does that invalidate someone being uncomfortable because sometimes it is still gendered and of course we need to respect them.

taken to calling people "gamer" or "gamers"

All good, but you will take "buddy" from my cold dead hands

I don't really have a point but I find it funny that the "dude is gender neutral" debate predates mass awareness of the trans context. It was the first time I had encountered any discourse around misgendering and it was about cis people. I'm drawing a blank on what exactly, but I'm 99% sure I remember it appearing in some pop culture fiction stuff during the 90's too.

bonus: getting called bro by another trans woman and getting explained how that's a gender neutral term when you're a gamer

Like so many conversations, people are confusing is with ought.

Is:

"Dude" is gender neutral if used as a discourse marker because discourse markers aren't about addressing a particular person, but used in managing the flow of a discussion. It shares commonality with words and phrases like "well," "oh," "I mean," "I guess," "yeah," and so on. Notice how words like "man" and "bruh" can also be used as discourse markers. I suspect what happened was dude/man/bruh was originally just a way to address a male listener and through grammaticalization, it acquired an additional use as discourse markers. But the older way of using dude/man/bruh in order to address a male listener still exists. Ultimately, it's the difference between saying "man, let's get something to eat" and "man, this room is so big." But even then, there's also ambiguous cases like, "man, I'm hungry" which can go both ways as either a discourse marker "man, I'm hungry, I shouldn't've skipped breakfast" or directly addressing a male listener "man, I'm hungry, let's go out to eat."

Ought:

"Dude" ought to not be used as a discourse marker because there are ambiguous cases which causes confusion whether it's being used as a discourse marker or as a form of address. The consequence of this confusion is that non-male people risk being misgendered. It also can be weaponized by transphobes as well. I would say the easiest words to replace them with would be either "homie," which strictly speaking came from "homeboy" although "homegirl" has long since been adopted as well, or "cuz" from "cousin." The main obstacle is that both words are from AAVE and should these words be adopted for general use, it's going to be yet another case of non-Black people stealing words from Black people.

However, it's not just the case of not using "dude" as a discourse marker. It has to be replaced with another word. And in a sense, "dude" itself was the replacement word for "man." "Man, this sofa is fucking heavy." -> "Dude, this sofa is fucking heavy." But what does man/dude/bruh convey in those sentences? I suspect it's to be emphatic, the English equivalent of Japanese よ. Consider "this sofa is X," where X can be any appropriate adjective (heavy, cheap, brown, and so on)

To hesitantly or cautiously express that the sofa is X:

• I guess the sofa is X.

• I mean, the sofa is X.

• Uh, the sofa is X.

To emphatically express that the sofa is X:

• Man, the sofa is X.

• Dude, the sofa is X.

• Bruh, the sofa is X.

To make the sentence sound more natural, you add an appropriate adverb before X to get:

To hesitantly or cautiously express that the sofa is X:

• I guess the sofa is kinda X.

• I mean, the sofa is kinda X.

• Uh, the sofa is kinda X.

To emphatically express that the sofa is X:

• Man, the sofa is fucking X.

• Dude, the sofa is fucking X.

• Bruh, the sofa is fucking X.

Perhaps it's because man/dude/bruh originate as words for addressing men that it acquired its alternative use as a discourse maker used when you want to sound more assertive.

It becomes a lot more obvious when we're talking about "a dude" or "a guy" because those are absolutely gendered terms. Pluralizing a gendered term probably doesn't make it gender neutral.

Just say folks or yinz or something.

Alternative take that i dont necessarily beleive in but has been bouncing around in my head a while: In the dialect of the English language my sub-culture typically ascribes to, dude is gender neutral when used as an address, please don't assume I am using language incorrectly because it doesn't follow the rules of your dialect. Would you go to Australia and pear-clutch because someone called you a c*** (in the familiar/genial use of the word)

edit: https://hexbear.net/comment/4648973