“Bro” and “bruh” are two very common exclamations that actually share cultural overlap with dude, and yet they did not experience the same magical side-by-side growth.
And if you’re from California, congratulations, those folks using “dude” as a passive way to insult trans women are relying on your reflexive defense of this word as a way to shield themselves. So. Are you playing along?
The word’s ambiguity actually goes a step further, and it can lead to trans women not knowing if they’re safe. And I don’t mean feelings-safe, I mean physically safe. When you call me “dude” in public places, I can’t be sure if you’ve clocked me or not. (Clocking means to recognize that somebody is trans.) Because I can’t tell if you clocked me, I can’t ask you if you’ve clocked me. Why? Because cis people don’t typically respond strongly to the word, as they have little-to-no traumatic history related to denial of their gender. Often times my response to being referred to in this way is precisely what causes someone to pay extra attention to me. I’ve had to learn to stop responding to it at all, and it sorta sucks.
When you call me “dude,” I have no way of knowing if something in my appearance is giving me away or if you’re just being casual unless I out myself to you; so I get to play a fun game of trying to suss out if I’m going to make it home safely that night.
And in our male-as-norm linguistic culture, most cis women don’t have a strong response to this word. Why? Their perceived womanhood has been an inescapable fact of their lives since they were children, and especially since people started to sexualize their bodies at a young age. Trans women, on the other hand, had a differently traumatic experience of being forced to play out masculine roles that were harmful to them. So, this language can be, and often is, ignored by cis women, where trans women will often have a reaction to it because it’s pressing a very sensitive bruise on their hearts — which is the goal of using it.
So, look. No amount of insistence that “dude” is gender-neutral is going to override the data in those charts or the word’s historical and present day uses. Kel might have hit a real sweet note with that song, but people are using his lyrics to explain away behavior that is openly, and knowingly, antagonistic to trans people and paint trans people as hyper-emotional.
You don’t have to stop saying it. You also can’t control what people hear when it’s said, and increasingly people hear a word designed to make trans people (and especially trans women) uncomfortable. Because that’s what they mean to do. If you call someone a dude, and they respond to it poorly, just correct yourself. It’s better not to use it to reference people, though.
As more and more cis women (especially) are pushing back when the word is used for them, it’s going to become more obviously gendered term — which it always was, underneath that mask.
We did it, gang. Justice is served.