Googling "Is dude gender neutral?" results in a lot of sites telling you that it is.
"In the early 1960s, dude became prominent in surfer culture as a synonym of guy or fella. The female equivalent was "dudette" or "dudess," but these have both fallen into disuse, and "dude" is now also used as a unisex term." Dude - Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dude
Googling "Is dude gender neutral?".... why would I even have that question if my entire community has never called that in to question in the first place?
To understand and see how communities that aren't yours act, and interact with vernacular versus shuttering one's self behind the assumption that because your group sees x in a certain way, other groups must by default see it similarly.
When everyone you've ever known, and all media you've ever seen, for 30 years, has exclusively used "dude" for males only, is it really "gender neutral"?