I was thinking about this recently and I feel like maybe people use gendered terms of endearment is because they're gender affirming. The gendered aspect is not a side effect. Affirming someone's gender is a nice thing to do and feels nice to have it done to you and our language reflects this.
The obvious corollary is that it is the addressee that gets to decide what terms of endearment are gender affirming for them, not the person addressing them. There are too many people that insist they're being gender neutral when they say "dude" because their associations with the word are not gendered, but what they should be doing is bothering to ask what the person they're talking to would find affirming and using that.
The term you use is for the person you're addressing not for you, and you should want them to feel good about it. If someone tells you they don't like being called dude because they find it gendered, you should fucking stop calling them dude.
I was thinking about this recently and I feel like maybe people use gendered terms of endearment is because they're gender affirming. The gendered aspect is not a side effect. Affirming someone's gender is a nice thing to do and feels nice to have it done to you and our language reflects this.
The obvious corollary is that it is the addressee that gets to decide what terms of endearment are gender affirming for them, not the person addressing them. There are too many people that insist they're being gender neutral when they say "dude" because their associations with the word are not gendered, but what they should be doing is bothering to ask what the person they're talking to would find affirming and using that.
The term you use is for the person you're addressing not for you, and you should want them to feel good about it. If someone tells you they don't like being called dude because they find it gendered, you should fucking stop calling them dude.