this post was submitted on 31 Jan 2024
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I think the point is that to you, it's just semantics. But, to use your example, given that some people have started intentionally using "female" in place of "woman" as an (arguably) subtle way to exclude trans women, it suddenly becomes more than semantics to both trans and anti-trans populations. That's what Smotherlove is saying about "dog whistle" language only being transparent to the perpetrator and the victim.
So from your/my perspective (admittedly assuming you're neither trans nor anti-trans), it's largely a case of "a few rotten apples ruining it for the rest of the bunch." What should just be a semantic difference has been coopted and intentionally weaponized by some, so all of us have to be conscious of whether or not we're making that worse.
It's also not a new phenomenon. Many epithets start as PC terms and then become offensive based on how a specific group starts to use them, notably, almost every one-time PC terms for Black Americans and people of color. Unfortunately, it's basically the reason that, for at least 100 years, (responsible) individuals/media have had to change terms for many marginalized peoples every 10-20 years, with many other examples, like "Oriental" and the terms that predate it, and plenty of others.
Female is not just anti trans. It has also been used as a way of dehumanizing women for some time. It was in the 4chan playbook until they switched to femoid for extra dehumanizing.
Good to know, thank you! Yet more reasons to avoid it
I also referred to men as males in the post, but that didn't seem to bother anyone.
Though I do admit female was a more used term. I was trying to explain some of the differences (to the best of my knowledge) of why males are more agressive and just generally not so in touch with their emotions, as opposed to females. I mean, come on, I wasn't trying to offend anybody, but I do suppose that some people just saw "female, brain", thought I was talking smack about women and just started downvoting me 🤷. I was trying to explain that that is not the context and that those 2 terms were just the first ones that popped up in my mind, but it was too late.
I get the likely reason why you don't find it offensive, but I also get why plenty people do.
Note how the complains are usually towards the usage of "female" as a noun, not as an adjective. That's because of a small quirk of English, that marks adjective nominalisation rather heavily. To show it with a non-offensive example:
That likely sounds fine in the other language[s] that you speak (as it would do in my L1 and L2), but it sounds weird for English speakers - they'd expect "young", "old" and "bicolour" to be followed by nouns, not to be treated as nouns.
As a result, when you "promote" an adjective to a noun, people usually take it as creating a category aside from whatever category the relevant entities were formerly assigned to. And if the former category was "human beings", the nominalisation becomes dehumanising.
Another example [now offensive] to highlight this would be:
The same process actually does apply to "male"; the main difference is that men aren't seen as a disfavoured group by society, and people often take that into account when judging the offensiveness of an utterance.
Because there's no history of "males" being used in a derogatory way.