make sure you ask your trans/non binary friends what they do and don’t like to be called 😊 it can mean a lot, if your unaware
make sure you ask your trans/non binary friends what they do and don’t like to be called 😊 it can mean a lot, if your unaware
“Dude” isn’t a slur though, it’s used as a term of familiarity or commonality, and really often as an exclamation like “wow” or “whoa,” and is entirely non-gendered in our present culture. Someone who decides they don’t want anyone to use such a common, basic, and genuinely benign word toward them is welcome to ask everyone they meet to not use it, but is going to be disappointed a lot.
The choice here is whether to hold on to a narrow, rigid, gendered definition of this word, put up walls with lots of very well-meaning and inclusive people, and put all those people in the “willfully ignorant ass” box, or whether to consider how your thoughts, fears, and anxieties about your identity and your place in society might be heightening your sensitivities to microaggressions to the point where you might be creating them where they don’t actually exist
Let’s take that dude isn’t generally considered a slur which is fine. It becomes one when someone asks you to not use that term in regards to them and you continue to do so.
People absolutely shouldn’t get offended if someone misterms them on first meeting. However if someone is constantly misgendering or what have you after being informed that the addressee doesn’t want to be addressed that way, that person does deserve to be shamed.
I get that. If someone is purposefully defying your request, that really speaks to their character flaws.
At the same time, the person making this request is probably also going to find a lot of people who are perplexed by the request, and who might subsequently keep their distance, because it’s really difficult to adhere to given its extremely common usage in the American lexicon. Rather than tempt fate and offend someone, it may be easier to just avoid talking to them.
So this is a decision to be made by the person making this request, I guess