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.
"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
Hawaiian surfers are absolute chads, the surfers in california just need some aloha spirit beat into their bones
I wouldn't know, I've never been to any US state.
Good to know if I'm ever near Hawaii though.
Hawaii would be so awesome if we could kick out the Mormons and millionaires
Only after the east coast is reeducated that being stressed and angry is not a quirky regional culture and midwesterners stop presenting alternating layers of ranch and sour cream as “local cuisine”
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.
yeah. if you say ''sorry, but i call everyone dude'' (which i've seen several times) that isn't an apology! just apologize for accidentally being rude and i guarantee everyone will be chill and you can move on
oh shit oh fuck i call any plural group of people "guys" when im working and addressing multiple customers
when it's a plural group of people i don't think it's as big a deal, but it would be good to find an alternative
local rednecks would murder me and local libs would probably think im calling them putin shills
kind of lose lose
After living in the South I stole "y'all" and I'm not giving it back. No more "dudes", "guys", or even "folks".
just start calling people comrades at work. people would probably find it funny
Funny enough a plural group of people being addressed as “guys” or “dudes” is the original source of this discourse, because early feminists were annoyed by being implicitly excluded in the language of people at work and school
doing it to a group is implicitly excluding women, but doing it to a specific women is explicitly misgendering. personally i wish neither would happen, but when it's the former it's something that happens to cis women too, and while it sucks it's not the worst thing in the world, whereas the latter feels really bad (to me, i understand if others feel differently)
From what I recall, referring to a group of people as “you guys” is a regional thing. I remember in that NY times dialect test that it was one of the questions that nailed me. That said, if I’m referring to group solely of women, it does seem odd, so I usually use party people or peeps in this situation. Using folks or y’all would get weird looks here.
makes sense. i think i say it because i'm originally from the more northern part of the mid atlantic and picked it up younger
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.
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.)
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"
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.
"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.
Language, especially English, is just too complicated for me. I’m at the “fuck it I’ll say whatever you want it makes no sense to me anyway” phase
The problem is that when dj crazy times is singing, the people want to make a fun. It's a little bit of a different context so that's why it's not a microagression send post
yeah i mean obviously the ESL comedy song isn't a serious position
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.
we need an american version of "comrade"
