Asklemmy

43916 readers

980 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
!lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

246

Is "female" offensive? (lemmy.world)

submitted 8 months ago by Trincapinones@lemmy.world to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

282 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I am not a native English speaker and I have sometimes referred to people as male and female (as that is what I have been taught) but I have received some backlash in some cases, especially for the word "female", is there some negative thought in the word which I am unaware of?

I don't know if this is the best place to ask, if it's not appropriate I have no problem to delete it ^^

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] TheBananaKing@lemmy.world 193 points 8 months ago (76 children)

Female as an adjective is perfectly fine.

A female patient, a female politician, a female customer, etc. That's the best way to refer to those.

What's bad is using 'female' as a noun: "A female. "

In general, you just don't use adjectives-as-nouns to refer to people. You don't call someone "a gay", "a black", or "a Chinese". That is offensive, and "a female" has the same kind of feel.

(there are exceptions to the above: you can call someone 'an American' or 'A German", but not "A French". I don't understand why - if you can't feel your way, best just avoid it)

Now, you could get around it by calling someone "a female person" - except that we already have a word for "female person", and that's "woman". And to go out of your way to avoid saying "woman" makes you sound like some kind of incel weirdo, and you don't want that.

[–] CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org 70 points 8 months ago (17 children)

And to go out of your way to avoid saying “woman” makes you sound like some kind of incel weirdo, and you don’t want that.

I'd just like to emphasise this. It's not that using a different term is intrinsically bad, it's just that the people who tend to do it are not cool and you don't want to look like you're associated with them.

load more comments (15 replies)

load more comments (73 replies)