After this “fun” little catastrophe of a thread concerning the use of the word “female”, looking at the comment section, it’s painfully obvious that the majority of Lemmy’s userbase are men. That’s not a generalization, that’s a literal fact.
“It’s just a word!”, “Maybe English isn’t their first language!”, and “Overact much?” seem to be the most common replies.
So let’s do what should have been done in the first place and ask women their opinion:
What do you think of the word “female” being used? Especially in the context of the linked post in question? When is the use of the word appropriate vs. not appropriate?
EDIT: I think the post linked got taken down. Good.
Female and Male are the two sexes for sexually dimorphic plants and animals, primarily differentiated by what gamete they produce for sexual reproduction.
Man and Woman are the gendered terms explicitly used for grown humans.
You typically wouldn’t call a dog a man, except when humanizing the dog… like if perhaps the dog is wearing a very distinguished little bow tie :p
Male/female are clinical terms and primarily only used in a scientific way to refer to animals in general. Like you would say “Females of this species…”
If you refer to a woman as a “female”, you have literally dehumanized her.
The only time really I’d expect you refer to a human female us explicitly when referring to sexually demographic features and you intentionally want to exclude gendered language.
IE “The Female Reproductive System includes the Uterus…” etc etc, as this then is trans inclusive. Female is not gendered, as it removes the human element.
The use case here is extremely niche as it should pretty much only be used when clinically discussing the sexual organs explicitly. So in say, a paper discussing a new safer methodology of performing sexual correction surgery for a trans person, this terminology actually matters because a man can have a uterus, so you don’t want to say “woman” as not all uterus owners are women.
That’s largely the only time the distinction matters though. 99.9999% of the time, “man” and “woman” is the appropriate word to use to avoid dehumanizing language, because it’s gender inclusive and you typically refer to people by their gender, not what sexual organs they were born with.