Yah I got schooled about the usage on a women’s page on Reddit a few years ago. Being a woman and female I didn’t know that I had been using the term female wrong for 40 years prior to that.
Yeah this place is a little better than reddit in terms of nuance and charitable interpretations, but we still have our share of toxic assholes who will deliberately misconstrue anything you say so they can shame you and put you down just to feel smug/superior.
Sometimes it’s not easy to determine what to ignore and what to learn from, but yeah using “female” as a noun is definitely a big no-no these days, even offline.
And honestly, increasingly I’ve started to notice it expanding to include using the term correctly as an adjective, which is annoying, but I’ve had to adjust my language accordingly. Now I say things like “a woman doctor” even though it’s incorrect and sounds awkward, because I’m afraid to say “a female doctor,” lest I be shunned.
Yah I got schooled about the usage on a women’s page on Reddit a few years ago. Being a woman and female I didn’t know that I had been using the term female wrong for 40 years prior to that.
Yeah this place is a little better than reddit in terms of nuance and charitable interpretations, but we still have our share of toxic assholes who will deliberately misconstrue anything you say so they can shame you and put you down just to feel smug/superior.
Sometimes it’s not easy to determine what to ignore and what to learn from, but yeah using “female” as a noun is definitely a big no-no these days, even offline.
And honestly, increasingly I’ve started to notice it expanding to include using the term correctly as an adjective, which is annoying, but I’ve had to adjust my language accordingly. Now I say things like “a woman doctor” even though it’s incorrect and sounds awkward, because I’m afraid to say “a female doctor,” lest I be shunned.