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.

  • TheDeed [he/him, comrade/them]
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    1 year ago

    I used to default to calling everyone dude unless they say otherwise. I call my sisters dude. Recently I have learned this is bad.

    Luckily I am not a giant baby so it is nbd. I have resolved to not be like a boomer and let my language evolve without complaining

    Side note I can understand why people may not want to be called dude. I hate being called “sis” or “girl” by gay dudes, it is both weirdly affirming and incredibly dysphoric all in the same package.

  • Frogmanfromlake [none/use name]
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    41 year ago

    Never called people dude because I found it too cringey and try hard. I find it especially weird when I see parents calling their kids that like they’re school buddies and not their parents.

  • keepcarrot [she/her]
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    41 year ago

    I think it can be (not always), but if someone is bothered by it I’m not going to bother them about it.

    One that annoyed me was saying “man” at the start of sentences. Like “man, this sucks”, which seems to me like “Allah, this sucks”. I’m not referring to people in the vicinity. But it took me a while to figure out what the annoyance was. Also only one person seemed to think I was referring to them and I stopped around them.

  • HexBroke [any, comrade/them]
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    71 year ago

    guy (n.2) “fellow,” 1847, American English; earlier, in British English (1836) “grotesquely or poorly dressed person,” originally (1806) “effigy of Guy Fawkes,”

    Dude. 1883, “fastidious man,” New York City slang of unknown origin; recent research suggests it is a shortening of Yankee Doodle, based on the song’s notion of “foppish, over-fastidious male” (compare macaroni). The vogue word of 1883, originally used in reference to the devotees of the “aesthetic” craze, later applied to city slickers, especially Easterners vacationing in the West (as in dude ranch “ranch which entertains guests and tourists for pay,” attested by 1921).

    I’m never using either of these again y’all

  • silent_water [she/her]M
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    121 year ago

    lol the speaker started talking about this during a lecture about unconscious bias training and I immediately checked out, especially because the rest of the lecture had literally nothing to do with implicit bias, even though she kept claiming it did. it was kind of infuriating.

    also 100 replies in this thread is extremely sus.

    • Cromalin [she/her]OPM
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      1 year ago

      idk what happened tbh, this was just something that frustrates me and i wanted to complain and then like 20 people made jokes and it ended up on the main page when sorting by hot

  • My dear ex-friend used to call me dude all the time, literally all the time and I loved it so much. And then another former friend, who I blocked because of shit related to this, just had to say some shit to me about this, when I was in the middle of having a meltdown over a fight I was having with them (my ex-friend), and it should’ve been fairly obvious that I didn’t care that they called me dude.

    (What made me block him in the end was that, he had met them, and because he’s known me for like 6 fucking years, I asked him to maybe try to talk to them. He didn’t want to because of something petty. He never took my feelings for them seriously. So fuck him.)

    • Cromalin [she/her]OPM
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      111 year ago

      to be clear this is not saying no one can ever call a trans woman dude under any circumstances, it’s just that if someone doesn’t like being called something then you shouldn’t call them that. and while some people use dude or guy gender neutrally, in my experience they’re both gendered terms more often than not

  • @[email protected]
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    61 year ago

    I’m a non native speaker and only officially learned basic grammar pronouns (I to they). All the street pronouns (dude, y’all, pardner) I’ve learned were from the internet.

    What are the best gender neutral street pronouns in current use?

    • Cromalin [she/her]OPM
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      81 year ago

      y’all, all, folks, would all be commonly acceptable. honestly i try to just avoid the matter entirely when possible

      • @[email protected]
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        1 year ago

        These are all plural, though.

        I’m thinking the case for dude is in expletives and third person references. Like “dude, totally tubular” and “the dude in front of me ordered a coke”.

        • silent_water [she/her]M
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          1 year ago

          “yo”, " hey", “the person”, " mate", “buddy”, " pal"

          going to be honest, though - directing any of these or even “dude”/“my guy” at the person you’re talking to is fairly accusatory. you were pointed to the plural forms because they soften the blow.

          • @[email protected]
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            31 year ago

            Really? I thought “how are you doing, buddy?” Was more endearing than without the buddy part. Also didn’t know mate, buddy and pal were neutral, thanks!

        • Cromalin [she/her]OPM
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          111 year ago

          ohhhh ok, yeah. gender neutral language is hard. usually for the latter i just say ‘person’ and for the former i just cuss. i do sometimes notice “man” slipping into my speech, like “man that sucked” and i try to avoid it but i’m only so successful. expletives are often less targeted at the conversation partner so it feels less problematic to me but i still think it’s generally polite to avoid unless you know someone is chill with it

    • Cromalin [she/her]OPM
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      111 year ago

      do not come into a post about a microaggression and then ironically do the microaggression

  • Awoo [she/her]
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • wild_dog [they/them]
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      51 year ago

      Trans people don’t have a fucking choice, life is conflict, so fuck it, every little thing shall be fought.

      unfortunately i know too many trans people that don’t feel like fighting and just give into it bc it’s easier to “seem normal” than it is to stand up for themselves. it sucks! (i’ve struggled in that way before too.)

  • JohnBrownNote [comrade/them, des/pair]
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    181 year ago

    “women are my favorite guy” thonk

    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.