Esteemed personages.
this post was submitted on 05 Mar 2024
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I typically go with something like, "howdy, folks".
Dudes is fine - folks and yall also work. I use yall all the time even though I'm now in Canada and have never lived in the US south.
Guys, I think, is still a bit too gender associated but it's borderline. Man is often used in a gender neutral manner but it is very easy to misinterpret and a transwoman could reasonably assume you're trying to troll them.
You've also got fella and feller, I think the latter one is more gender neutral than the former.
I worked at a restaurant in Ohio in the early 2000s. Had a group of ladies come in once, probably in their 50s. Got super offended when I gave the standard "hi guys!" greeting. However, where I grew up, that had become a gender neutral greeting.
If you want to remove gendered pronouns entirely, "y'all" is what I would go with. I think the UK frequently uses "you lot", but that probably does not sound great to most in the US. I suppose "folks" is one that might work, but seems to rub some people the wrong way.
What I use is y'all or folks for plural, and dude for singular.
The south is objectively better than the rest of the USA (from my experience as foreigner). Just go with y'all.
Also I use dude with my NB friend pretty habitually.
I'm just going out on a limb to remind people it's totally ok to say sup man to legit anyone. People that care about that stuff are people you can choose to change it for if you want to be around that type of person.
Why are you trying to solve a problem that doesn't exist? Linguistics don't care about genders in biological sense.
amigo