if you call everyone dude and a transfem person gets mad about it, don’t get defensive. just say like “sorry, i won’t do it again” and don’t argue “actually it’s gender neutral” or “i call everyone dude”. even if you do, i guarantee she’s heard that argument from someone who very much does not call people they see as women dude. i certainly have
same goes double for the word guy.
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.
Yeah it was a rad fem issue regarding men excluding women implicitly in their language (using guys, dude, etc to refer to large groups). It was less about misgendering and more about acknowledging that you were overlooking/ignoring women in the group.
meanwhile today you’ll catch groups of women and no men using guys and dude to address eachother.
Interestingly here in the UK referring to a group as “ladies” regardless of men or women being in the group is actually pretty common.
Like “alroight ladiesss how’s everyone doin then?” isn’t an uncommon phrase you’d here someone say meeting up with a group in the pub.
it’s done here in the states too, usually by a male speaker, when the context is extremely unserious and the audience is presumed to be majority or entirely men.
I wasn’t familiar with the rad fem angle, neat.
I’d only personally experienced it in small groups, usually where there were more women than men. There it was definitely more akin to misgendering than the rad fem variant. There was a lot of anxiety about not being “feminine” enough, I think probably because we were teenagers, especially if some women were more likely to get called ‘dude’ than others in the group. Also a lot of friction about becoming “one of the guys” or getting friendzoned, because again we were horny teenagers.
Horrible time for people presenting in even slightly non-gender conforming ways. I remember when one girl cut her hair short then being relentlessly teased for being a lesbian despite not being one.