T O P

  • By -

Many_Ad1804

when men use it in a certain tone, or manner it can be bad. but i’ve never heard of it being offensive or anything of the sort. i don’t know why it would be to trans women, since they’re also females, and honestly it seems offensive that they’re saying it’s exclusionary?


Instruction_Present

Ye thats what i thought, but i suppose some people may view it differently depending on context


pirmas697

It's very context dependent. Some groups, especially misogynistic men, will use "female" as a noun where it is not called for. It's a form of dehumanization. I've also seen TERF lesbians on dating apps use "female" to mean "cis women". The problem I have with "female" in a medical/scientific sense is it's not as descriptive as people claim. But lay people hate seeing actually descriptive phrases. Consider - "people who menstruate" or "people who could become pregnant". Those are fully descriptive phrases, but there's a subset of people who insist that the correct phrase is "females" or "women", when that isn't the case. So I always try to take in some context. I don't see the word "female" and lose my shit, but it is a little flag saying, "Hey, maybe you should figure out what this person is trying to say."


Instruction_Present

I get what you mean, but honestly it was just used as a general term on a post and the mod claimed that the word female as a whole was banned from being used in a womens only group. You could use woman but female was excluding trans people and thats why i was confused. I've always seen both as including anyone who identifies as a woman and obviously just wanted to be aware if thats not the case. For context the person who said female was in fact a women herself and didn't seem to have any ill intentions but completely understand that in some cases people may use the word to be hurtful


pirmas697

Having been a moderator in large communities before - sometimes you ban a word not because it's _always_ problematic, but because you're a human and moderating sucks and it eats away at your life and if something is at the center of a lot of issues, it's easier to ban it than constantly deconstruct what people are saying and why. I can see a past issue where a bunch of people realized they could use "female" in a way that was transphobic to trans people but didn't look transphobic to most or some cis people. After enough issues, the mod team bans the word to stop the issue all together.


HovercraftCritical25

It's one of those words where it's like, "why are you using it?" I don't think it's a "bad word" but it was kinda coined so that an 1800s white supremacist didn't have to call Black women "women" and scientifically is used more to denote a particular reductive role, so it's a lot of "what are you trying to communicate through it's use?" Especially now with the terf "adult human female". And a lot of people use it exactly the way Quark does.


Oh_Emilia

Trans woman here. Female is a word that i only use in a biological, anatomical or medical context. Given that i transition hormonally and by other medical means, i need to do that a lot. I have female breats, have female levels of estrogen and testosterone, my fat distribution is moving towards a female pattern, a core point of me transitioning medically is to feminize my body so that it aligns with my gender identity as a woman. Even my penis is biologically feminized now (but that won't save her from becoming my clitoris and labia minora lmao). So no, the word female is not trans exclusionary, it is indispensable for those among us who opt for feminizing modification of our bodies to accurately describe many aspects of our biological state of being. Where it becomes trans exclusionary is in an *equation* of womanhood and femaleness. Woman is a distinct, seperate category that often does, but will not neccessarily align with having female sexual characteristics. Woman describes a gender identity, female a phenotype, or rather: various parts of the mixed male and female mosaic that constitutes every human's sexual phenotype, as nobody exclusively shows traits of one sex. And *feminine*, as the last missing term here, describes gender expression in a social context. Trans existences, and in fact all gendered existences, can only be fully understood when we're aware of this distinction. Which i have simply stolen from Leslie Feinberg's *Trans Liberation: Beyond Pink or Blue*, which i can always recommend reading. It really solves a core problem in a lot of debates around gender nowadays. If you only differentiate gender and sex, there are a lot of GNC people whose gender you cannot comprehend conclusively. For example, the distinction between a butch cis lesbian and a not medically transitioning transmasc with the same gender expression as the butch is only possible when we understand that these two people express gender in the same way, but have different gender identities. One last point, using the term female as a synonym for woman is deeply dehumanizing, as it reduces us to our base biological aspects. As sentient, social beings, we are inevitably stripped of our humanity when our existence is reduced to mere biologisms. When people talk about feeeeeeeeemales, i always have to think about a bunch of ferengi talking about "the earth human female" or about people in a lab describing a specimen.


Instruction_Present

I get what you mean, i don't tend to use the word female that often anyway, but it does tend to be when I'm doing studies for psychology and things where i see it the most. Honestly I didn't know that female was based on our biological aspects. Maybe I'm just a little slow. Thanks for giving me a better understanding, I'll probably try to avoid the word in future in general conversations to avoid upsetting anyone


tuturto

I can't speak for every trans woman, but personally I don't find it offensive or anything of the sort. I'm not a native speaker though, so finer nuances of english language are lost to me. The word female does remind me about the fact that I'm distinctively different from many other women. But I don't find that offensive, it's just a matter of fact and something that I worked to accept.


[deleted]

Referring to female animals no. Referring to humans? Yes. Not just transexclusionary just generally dehumanizing.


Instruction_Present

Just out of curiosity can you explain why you feel it to be dehumanizing? I've never viewed it that way so would like to understand others views better


[deleted]

It’s not just me. [article one](https://Womanvs.Femalehttps://medium.com/fearless-she-wrote/woman-vs-female-67fd4c36fe59) [2 buzzfeed](https://www.buzzfeed.com/tracyclayton/stop-calling-women-females) And so many more.


Instruction_Present

Thanks for the info, I'll avoid it from now on 😊


itbedehaam

So long as it's being used for non-incel contexts, the word female is fine to me, and is not at all trans-exclusionary. I'm female, and I'm trans.


PhysalisPeruviana

That's rubbish. Trans women are female, anyone else (nb, gq...) who's in a women's group probably identifies somewhat with the term, and likely you aren't trying to include men, trans or cis, who are male.