Asklemmy

43856 readers

1822 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

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

250

Is "female" offensive? (lemmy.world)

submitted 8 months ago by Trincapinones@lemmy.world to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

289 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I am not a native English speaker and I have sometimes referred to people as male and female (as that is what I have been taught) but I have received some backlash in some cases, especially for the word "female", is there some negative thought in the word which I am unaware of?

I don't know if this is the best place to ask, if it's not appropriate I have no problem to delete it ^^

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] MinekPo1@lemmy.ml 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

ah I must have misunderstood your comment , I think you may have replied to a different comment than you have intended to ?

also just as a side note , one counter example is many autistic people , myself included prefer the term autistic person rather than person with autism , though to be fair that is moreso an adjective but the way you worded that sentence suggests its also incorrect in some cases yeah um

also I have never met a single copper , really must open myself to new experiences /j :)

[–] JoBo 1 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

No, I was responding to your perfectly correct comment about the way we learn language, which is as little kids gradually working out the rules from exposure, not by being taught them.

We pick up on how language is used, not why it is used like that.

And that is exactly why some people with a condition like autism or epilepsy find attempts to rehumanise the language used to refer to them patronising or unhelpful. In my examples, "an epileptic" would be the dehumanising nounisation. And because of those attempts to rehumanise the language, people sometimes avoid the adjective too (in exactly the same way it's happened with woman/female).