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.
the linguistic angle here is genuinely fascinating, and relevant to a lot of this discussion. i think that even when used as discourse markers there's an amount of gender that remains attached, but i see what you're saying
i have to say though, that isn't the biggest issue the post was about. it was about being actually called a dude or a guy by people. a lot of the discussion here was about discourse markers but the og post is about people saying like. "hey dude, i'm not misgendering you" in reference to calling a trans woman "this guy" (real example!). very different problem, though i do appreciate your comment for putting a lot of ideas into words
Yes, absolutely. It's a case of linguistically defaulting to a masculine form. Not gramatically (grammatical gender is largely vestigial in contemporary English outside of personal pronouns), but semantically. This has been mentioned downthread, the original critique of these terms did not come from trans people, but ironically from radfems who opposed this default masculinity under a linguistic determinism angle, much moreso outside of the Anglosphere. For example, this is a major culture war issue in Germany, where reactionaries pretend that grammatically masculine terms, which are still commonly the default in German, are "gender neutral", whereas feminist and trans activists work on establishing actually gender neutral grammar as a new default.