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Is "female" offensive? (lemmy.world)

submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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 ^^

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[–] [email protected] 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).