this post was submitted on 11 Mar 2024
246 points (88.4% liked)
Asklemmy
43811 readers
882 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy π
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
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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.
My wife tells me that using as an adjective is just as bad and that I should always say "woman", e.g. a woman politician and never a female politician.
I generally disagree and it seems fine and not disrespectful at all. But it's somehat less up to me - I'm not a female.
Using a noun as an adjective is just weird, honestly.