• Notyou@sopuli.xyz
      0·
      2 days ago

      I’ve had a few conversations with my wife about this. Not army but military. We said either male Marines or female Marines depending on the situation or planning out movements and counts.

      She said as long as you call the male version male then it’s less problematic. The problem is when you use the adjective female as a noun and call them females instead of female _________. That’s one persons opinion anyway.

      • moakley@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        1 day ago

        It’s no different than any other group. If you refer to a Black person as “a Black” or a trans person as “a trans”, that’s not the polite way to say those things. It’s not like saying a slur or anything, but it is as the comic suggests a red flag.

      • redditmodssucks@lemmy.worldBanned
        0·
        2 days ago

        We did the same we said either rank, or what they looked like and then male or female type. That’s literally just how we were talked to in training and then while in garrison or down range that was still something they said especially in situations with similar names/ranks. I never used it civie side though so I guess I can see how it is offensive to just group people like that. But in the military when we’re all dressed the same sometimes it just works?

  • Axolotl.cpp@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    0·
    2 days ago

    Aa much as some people do use it in a dehumanizing way, I am gonna get angry at anyone who unleashes their anger to random people, someone might not realize their error or even have english as their second or third language which does create a problem; please before getting angry, consider their intent and situation.

    • Raviolius@europe.pub
      0·
      2 days ago

      I learned English as a 2nd language and was always confused why Anglophones call women females. My language calls them women, full stop. Stop protecting it.

    • x0x7@lemmy.world
      0·
      2 days ago

      They also might be doing it because woman and female satisfy different grammatical properties. It bugs me when people say “woman president”. It’s just bad grammar. No one would say “Bill Clinton was a man president”. It makes people sound like they are in preschool.

        • Jason2357@lemmy.ca
          0·
          2 days ago

          Exactly. Female is an adjective to describe an aspect of a person, so the argument above you is disengenuous. Saying someone is a “black woman” is also not offensive because a woman is a person. Calling someone “a blackie” absolutely would be offensive, just like referring to women as “females” reduces their humanity to a sex organ. Its not complicated until people start trying to normalize mysogeny. Pretending “female president” is equally respectful as “a female” is rediculous.

  • ZILtoid1991@lemmy.world
    0·
    2 days ago

    Remember, it is okay to use “female” as an adjective when it comes to women, but don’t use it as a noun!

    And especially don’t say “Men and females”!

    • Garfunkel@lemmy.ca
      0·
      2 days ago

      Correct, males and females are sex designating terms. Men and women are the byproduct of social use of biological terms which resulted in social characteristics we now call genders, and we have added genders after historians realized that other cultures, aside from our roman pagan one, used more than 2 genders. This being a relatively unknown fact due to the colonial ages during which european settlers destroyed the cultural patrimony of the majority of other peoples on this earth. And before someone makes the mistake of calling these ideas woke, I wish to highlight that these ideas are the product of decades of work from historians, sociologists, archeologists, anthropologists and other doctors of the social sciences and are contested due to a gap in education between the average working class human and the average academic.

      • captainlezbian@lemmy.world
        0·
        2 days ago

        Not really, male is just the adjectival form of man. I’d absolutely describe a trans men’s meetup as an extremely male space, even if everyone there was assigned female at birth.

        • Garfunkel@lemmy.ca
          0·
          2 days ago

          You’re confusing transgenderism with transsexuality. This man can have a vagina and be he/him, it s really his business if he wants to take testosterone and grow a beard whilst having a vajayjay. Meanwhile, a MtF woman can have a dick if she did not go through sex reassignement surgery. In this instance, both are not transsexual. The trans man is female (vagina=female) whilst socially being a man. The woman has a penis (male sex organ). This confuses some people and is why it is still a debate.

          The real reason this all makes social practical sense is because a lot of males in society are not very manly and a lot of women are not very feminine. In the past the words to describe these people would be faggot, queer, dyke, or other slurs. Simply because they did not fit what society defined as “a real man” or “a real woman”.

          It’s also important to highlight that a lot of transsexual men and women do not believe in transgenderism because it leads to non-binary genders, genders which are unclear or vague (like the "they/them which means the person feels equally masculine and feminine). To these trans men and women, sex reassignment is acceptable but since they do not understand the nuance between gender and sex (or they do not accept it) like a lot of cisgender people who lean right politically, the debate keeps occurring because of willful ignorance whilst this debate has been closed for over 20 years within academia.

  • starik@lemmy.today
    0·
    2 days ago

    She was living in a single room with three other individuals. One of them was a male, and the other two? Well, the other two were females. God only knows what they were up to in there. And furthermore, Susan, I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised to learn that all four of them habitually smoked marijuana cigarettes… reefers.

  • CalypsoGirl@lemmy.today
    0·
    3 days ago

    I’d like to see a chart that explains which circumstances are suitable for using the word “female,” vs which circumstances are unsuitable tor using the word “female.” It might be an entertaining chart.

    • TheDoozer@lemmy.world
      0·
      3 days ago

      Fairly simple:

      Female as an adjective: acceptable, except when used unnecessarily to suggest their being female is an “other” category or otherwise seems irrelevant (e.g. “I went to the female podiatriast to get my ingrown toenail taken care of” or “I got cut off by a female driver on my way to work.”)

      Female as a noun: unacceptable, except in descriptive reports or scientific/medical references where the use of “female” can essentially be short for “female subject”, (e.g. “white female, five foot seven, blonde, with a tattoo on right forearm” or “the female of the species tends to be larger than the males…”)

      Basically, adjective: yes, when relevant

      Noun: no, unless your are specifically supposed to by policy or convention.

      • BlaestEgnen@feddit.dk
        0·
        2 days ago

        Statistics does also often have reasons to utilise male and female, rather than man or woman. If their sample size is large enough, then further categorisation might make sense, but ultimately it depends on what the statistics are about and whether it’s related to biological features (male/female) or social features (man/woman/non-binary)