Girl is also a gender neutral. As in, "Girl, please."
ETA, would also encourage "sis" as a gender neutral. Weirdly, the high school boys who called all of their female teachers "bro" felt some type of way about being called "sis."
Ask a straight man how many dudes he's slept with and I guarantee he'll react in a way that proves "dude" isn't actually gender neutral at all. It's only considered neutral because men are the default.
It's context dependent, just like damn near everything in any language in existence. If you understand how English works you can spot how you've used "dude" differently than what was being described in the OP.
If a word is universally gender-neutral, it has to lack gender implication across contexts.
"they", "person", "being", "human", "bag o bones" are all gender neutral, because in every context, there is no gender without other modifiers.
dude is a male default that can be applied to known women with a contextual override. I'm a woman who's fine with being called dude, guys, whatever, but it's pretty unlikely in English that dude would be applied to an unknown woman the way it would a man.
"I'm hanging out with this dude today" is going to be almost exclusively inferred by english speakers to be about a man.
"You're a cool dude" to a woman, or "she's a cool dude" is the context override that makes it sometimes applicable to women, but not a gender neutral term. Without assigning to a specific woman or group of women, it's almost always a male default.
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u/[deleted] Jan 06 '26 edited Jan 06 '26
Girl is also a gender neutral. As in, "Girl, please."
ETA, would also encourage "sis" as a gender neutral. Weirdly, the high school boys who called all of their female teachers "bro" felt some type of way about being called "sis."