It’s common these days for people to insist that “dude” (and “buddy” and “guy”) is gender neutral. “I call everyone and everything ‘dude’. It doesn’t matter.”
Then comes the reply: “‘Dude’ is a male-coded word. Its use for non-men is part of the masculine default nature of language. It’s still a male-coded word.”
Both claims are simplified perspectives on what is a linguistically complicated word.
First, let’s talk about referents and rhetorical devices.
Consider “Hey, man, what’s up?” and “Man, my car won’t start. Bummer!” In the second case, even if I’m talking to you, it’s unlikely that “man” is meant to refer to you. It’s an interjection:
In the first case, it does appear to be referring to the audience, but it’s more nuanced than simply suggesting that the referent is, in fact, a man. (Sidebar: “man” itself started in English as gender neutral, and spent a long time that way; “wer” and “wif” were the gendered terms, and survive today in “werewolf” and “midwife”. “Man” slowly shifted to gendered, still appearing as genderless in the Declaration of Independence, with “wifmann” [female human] becoming “woman”.)
Instead, I’d argue that in “hey, man, what’s up?”, “man” is a pragmatic rhetorical tool for establishing camaraderie. Certainly in “What’s up, dog?”, there’s no suggestion that the audience is a literal dog; it’s a slang use of “dog” to be friendly.
This, I think, is a significant part of the pushback that people give when told not to use “dude” as a referent: They actually aren’t, at least not in the sense of suggesting someone is a literal dude. (Often, someone will bring up “We’re All Dudes” from 1997’s “Good Burger”, but that’s not a nuanced linguistic article.) Instead, they’re using it in a friendly tone, and they’re offended to be told not to use it.
I get that, I do. One significant struggle for many of us trans people is being addressed by “sir” or “ma’am”: The person is trying to be polite, so it’s socially awkward to tell them they’re doing it wrong. It can be taken as a rejection of the politesse itself.
In the same way, rejecting “dude” when it’s used in that fashion can be taken as a rejection of the friendship or camaraderie that’s being implied.
At the same time, “dude” is a historically gendered term, and its shift into apparent genderlessness is part of a general trend of using masculinity as the default. “Unisex” and “men’s” sizes are usually identical; “women’s” sizes are different. “Man”, “bro”, “boy”, “bud(dy)”, “guy”… all have spent time as clearly male-coded, and all are currently sometimes used in genderless contexts.
Where does “dude” come from? Wiktionary says it is of unknown origin, but that it most likely is related to “Yankee Doodle Dandy”, which was originally a scoffing characterization of the colonists during the American Revolution. It may also have come from the same sources as “duds” (low-income clothing) or “dawdle”, or an Irish word for a fool. Regardless of the source, though, it was apparently an insult (albeit, as with “Yankee Doodle Dandy”, a possibly reclaimed one).
Importantly, it appears that all of the potential sources are genderless (Doodle coming from a Germanic word for fool), but “dude” itself was gendered masculine, perhaps from the very start. This rapid shift says something about the invisibility of women in conversation during that time period.
I do not believe that the current, genderless use of “dude” is a simple and knowing reclamation of its genderlessness prior to the 19th century. Instead, it’s the flipside of the masculine default: Words become gendered when women are excluded from conversation, and then male-coded words become degendered because of that masculine default.
But let’s return to the rhetorical conversation. It’s important to reflect on how often “dude” is really referring to someone, and how often it’s just a rhetorical marker.
“Guys” can clearly be used as a genderless collective. “Hey, guys…” and “You guys…” very often do not imply anything about the gender of the audience. “Guy” in the singular is more clearly male-coded, although there are certainly people who use it without gender; “guys” can also be used to imply gender, as in, “My girlfriend is studying, so I’m hanging out with the guys tonight.”
Unlike “man” or “boy”, I’m unaware of an interjection use of “guy”: “Guy! My car broke down!” is something that sounds very strange to me. Meanwhile, I would not be inclined to interpret “Man, where’s my car?” as being necessarily addressed to a man: “Man” is every bit the interjection as “hey” in “Hey, where’s my car?”
Since the protagonists of the 2000 film are both men, it seems like “Dude, where’s my car?” is being addressed to a dude. But… is it? It’s rhetorically ambiguous. Jesse says the line talking to Chester, but in the context, both “Chester, where’s my car?” and “Hey, where’s my car?” would work fine. In the context, I think “Hey, where’s my car?” would be a more natural replacement, but both work.
In a linguistically pivotal scene, Jesse and Chester discover they each got back tattoos. The first lines of the exchange have “dude” arguably being used as second person pronouns (“Dude! You got a tattoo.” / “So did you, dude!”), although the first of these could also be argued to be an interjection rather than a reference. And very quickly “Dude!” and “Sweet!” become parallel; certainly nobody would argue that “Sweet” is referring to anyone at all. It is purely an interjection.
In the 1998 film “Baseketball”, there is a scene where “dude” is used variously as a second person pronoun, rhetorical filler, an interjection, and finally as full sentences. For some of the uses, it’s difficult to definitively classify the role “dude” is playing.
Even for people who insist that “dude” is genderless, there are definitely contexts where it’s male-coded, the most blatant being “I heard you slept with a dude last night.” There are certainly some people for whom this would not imply gender, but that number is much smaller than people who see it genderless in “Hey, dude, what’s up?”
The reality is: “Dude” is, as a word, fluid and nuanced. Sometimes it very clearly implies gender; sometimes, it’s genderless. Unlike “man” and “boy”, which are only genderless when used as pure rhetorical devices (interjections and filler), “dude” can be used as genderless when referring to an audience.
And, as previously mentioned, the use of “dude” to refer to someone is akin to “friend” (which is so genderless it was used as a name by one of the earliest publicly nonbinary people), so correcting people can be seen as a rejection of that show of friendship.
At the same time, the degree to which “dude” is seen as gendered or genderless varies broadly across both geography and age, so the less predictable the audience, the more dangerous the word becomes. Certainly among a closed set of friends and acquaintances, there will be an understanding; across a general population, though, that understanding diminishes. We run the danger of sounding like Humpty Dumpty: “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.”
Regardless of everything else, though, one truth remains. That is: The Dude abides.