• Axolotl.cpp@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    2 hours ago

    Aa much as some people do use it in a dehumanizing way, I am gonna get angry at anyone who unleashes their anger to random people, someone might not realize their error or even have english as their second or third language which does create a problem; please before getting angry, consider their intent and situation.

  • ZILtoid1991@lemmy.world
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    3 hours ago

    Remember, it is okay to use “female” as an adjective when it comes to women, but don’t use it as a noun!

    And especially don’t say “Men and females”!

    • Garfunkel@lemmy.caB
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      2 hours ago

      Correct, males and females are sex designating terms. Men and women are the byproduct of social uses of biological terms (the sexes) which resulted in social characteristics we wound up calling genders. Recently we have added genders following historians discovering that other cultures, aside from our roman/pagan one, used more than genders than the binary ones. This being an obscured fact due to the colonial age, during which European settlers destroyed the cultural patrimony of the majority of other societies on this earth (often now referred to as the third world or global south). And before someone makes the mistake of calling these ideas woke, these ideas are the product of decades of work from historians, sociologists, archeologists, anthropologists and other doctors of the social sciences and are contested due to a gap in education between the average working class human and the average academic.

  • starik@lemmy.today
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    5 hours ago

    She was living in a single room with three other individuals. One of them was a male, and the other two? Well, the other two were females. God only knows what they were up to in there. And furthermore, Susan, I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised to learn that all four of them habitually smoked marijuana cigarettes… reefers.

  • GreyShuck@feddit.uk
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    18 hours ago

    As I noted the previous time this was posted, that is a sail, not a flag. They are different things, and I can’t get past that.

    No problem with the overall joke, but it is a sail!

    • kamen@lemmy.world
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      28 minutes ago

      I agree, but also understand that it’s probably done because of the comic format. If they were to do it properly, it would’ve required an additional panel to show an establishing shot of the whole ship and then a close up showing the flag.

        • tal@lemmy.today
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          3 hours ago

          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theseus

          On the third occasion, Theseus volunteered to talk to the monster to stop this horror. He took the place of one of the youths and set off with a black sail, promising to his father, Aegeus, that if successful he would return with a white sail.[iv]

          Theseus forgot to put up the white sails instead of the black ones, so his father, the king, believing he was dead, committed suicide, throwing himself off a cliff of Sounion and into the sea, causing this body of water to be named the Aegean Sea.

    • Zarobi@aussie.zone
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      12 hours ago

      It’s functionally a flag though. Like it’s both a sail and a flag at this point. Imagine a pirate ship with their entire sail being the black flag; now that’s what I call intimidation

  • CalypsoGirl@lemmy.today
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    15 hours ago

    I’d like to see a chart that explains which circumstances are suitable for using the word “female,” vs which circumstances are unsuitable tor using the word “female.” It might be an entertaining chart.

    • TheDoozer@lemmy.world
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      14 hours ago

      Fairly simple:

      Female as an adjective: acceptable, except when used unnecessarily to suggest their being female is an “other” category or otherwise seems irrelevant (e.g. “I went to the female podiatriast to get my ingrown toenail taken care of” or “I got cut off by a female driver on my way to work.”)

      Female as a noun: unacceptable, except in descriptive reports or scientific/medical references where the use of “female” can essentially be short for “female subject”, (e.g. “white female, five foot seven, blonde, with a tattoo on right forearm” or “the female of the species tends to be larger than the males…”)

      Basically, adjective: yes, when relevant

      Noun: no, unless your are specifically supposed to by policy or convention.

          • Corn@lemmy.ml
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            4 hours ago

            It is weird that there’s people who only vote and never post or comment.

            • Gonzako@lemmy.world
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              4 hours ago

              Oh, it’s actually very common. 90% of users never post or comment at all. Welcome to the 10%!

                • Gonzako@lemmy.world
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                  3 hours ago

                  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

                  They may like pressing the up/down button. Personalized feed. Being able to block people/instances, etc.

        • Gonzako@lemmy.world
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          4 hours ago

          Yeah, mate you shouldn’t really bother calling out downvotes or upvotes.we all vote for our personal reasons and you won’t be able to infer that at all from a single ± 1.

      • BlaestEgnen@feddit.dk
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        4 hours ago

        Statistics does also often have reasons to utilise male and female, rather than man or woman. If their sample size is large enough, then further categorisation might make sense, but ultimately it depends on what the statistics are about and whether it’s related to biological features (male/female) or social features (man/woman/non-binary)

  • Allero@lemmy.today
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    5 hours ago

    Men are male

    Women are female

    Whoever complicated things by somehow making a perfectly normal term offensive is a giant asshole

    P.S. but seriously, don’t just assume everyone using the word “female” and its derivatives is a jerk. People may not be aware of this odd shitstorm, and just use the word in its completely literal meaning, wishing no offence.

    P.P.S. I stand corrected by the commenter below who mentioned terms “male” and “female” are related to AGAB, not gender. In terms of trans individuals and those whose gender is unknown, it makes sense to avoid their misuse.

    P.P.P.S. Apparently, that too is debatable. I start to see why it makes sense to drop the words altogether, because it’s going to fire wrong either way.

    • BlaestEgnen@feddit.dk
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      4 hours ago

      Men can be male or female.

      Women can be male or female.

      Nonbinary people fan be male or female.

      (Okay there’s also a category of intersex)

      One is a social gender, one is a physical sex. There’s a big difference, let’s take a transgender man. Whom is a female and do not intend to transition. They’ll largely appear and act like most men do, but they’ll be female. Them being female only matters in a few contexts.

      But man is not equal male. Far from it.

      • Allero@lemmy.today
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        4 hours ago

        Similar idea was already mentioned in this thread and got disagreed with and downvoted into oblivion, so I assume this is controversial

        See P.P.S and P.P.P.S

    • wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz
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      15 hours ago

      The issue as I understand it is that the words “male” and “female” are adjectives, and when they’re used as nouns it can sound dehumanizing.

      A vet or a farmer might talk about their livestock as “males and females,” but people referring to other people that way is not only incorrect usage, but it’s also only ever really used that way by men discussing women as if they’re sex objects.

      “A female therapist/doctor/lawyer/relative” = ✅👍

      “That female over there” = ❌👎

      • Bubbaonthebeach@lemmy.ca
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        15 hours ago

        Yah I got schooled about the usage on a women’s page on Reddit a few years ago. Being a woman and female I didn’t know that I had been using the term female wrong for 40 years prior to that.

        • wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz
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          14 hours ago

          Yeah this place is a little better than reddit in terms of nuance and charitable interpretations, but we still have our share of toxic assholes who will deliberately misconstrue anything you say so they can shame you and put you down just to feel smug/superior.

          Sometimes it’s not easy to determine what to ignore and what to learn from, but yeah using “female” as a noun is definitely a big no-no these days, even offline.

          And honestly, increasingly I’ve started to notice it expanding to include using the term correctly as an adjective, which is annoying, but I’ve had to adjust my language accordingly. Now I say things like “a woman doctor” even though it’s incorrect and sounds awkward, because I’m afraid to say “a female doctor,” lest I be shunned.

      • FishFace@piefed.social
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        14 hours ago

        It’s both an adjective and a noun. Most English adjectives can be used as a noun in a pinch, but the connotation may be dodgy.

      • Allero@lemmy.today
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        15 hours ago

        Yeah, I see. I did get called out for using it as an adjective, though, which seemed particularly weird.

        Generally, my rule of thumb is: if you can say “male” and it isn’t wrong/weird, you should be able to say “female” to the same effect. But practice shows it isn’t true.

        • wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz
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          14 hours ago

          I think the issue is evolving a bit as people develop a knee-jerk reaction to hearing “female” and snap to the conclusion “🚩🚩🚩”

          It’s a bit annoying and anti-nuance, but what can you do? I’ve started self-censoring by using “woman” as an adjective instead, even though it’s a noun and sounds awkward as an adjective, i.e. “A woman doctor,” “a woman therapist,” “a woman lawyer,” “a woman relative,” etc.

          It sounds awkward because it’s incorrect, and that would be the correct way to use the word “female,” but I get super paranoid about that kind of stuff and overthink it because I’ve been shunned and flamed about stupid BS like that before and it isn’t pleasant, especially as someone politically progressive who happens to be a cishetero-passing white male, so it’s like everything I say is constantly under a microscope. And like, I believe in egalitarianism, but stuff like that could get me labeled as a misogynist in a heartbeat. So I try to be aware of it, even if it leaves me tongue-tied at times when I don’t know what fucking words are still okay to use, and I overthink how to phrase something precisely the right way so that nobody accuses me of malice…

          • Allero@lemmy.today
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            13 hours ago

            someone politically progressive who happens to be a cishetero-passing white male, so it’s like everything I say is constantly under a microscope

            Y E S.

            An extremely toxic angle to a lot of progressives and especially the discriminated folks is automatically assuming everything to be evil once it comes out of cishet male’s mouth. Like, I get it, quite some people actually are discriminatory, but verifying the person’s intent before lashing out shouldn’t be too hard. Many, many times the person really didn’t mean anything bad.

            Sometimes I genuinely wonder how much this toxicity contributes to the development of reactionary right-wing types, and the way they portray the left and progressives as a screaming crowd in search of another scapegoat.

            • wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz
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              10 hours ago

              Glad to hear I’m not just crazy.

              I am crazy, but not just that.

              Anyway yeah, I think a lot of us on the left could do better to avoid adding fuel to the caricatures that the right-wing reactionaries portray us as, cause it’s already a dumpster fire as it is.

              And seconded. Radicalization targets the vulnerable. When people feel they’re not welcome in any other spaces, they tend to wind up in toxic echo chambers where they get poached by nefarious actors.

              Not saying we should welcome everyone with open arms, but if someone’s problem is merely ignorance, that can be remedied. As long as there’s no malice in their intent, we should be willing to reach out a hand or at least give them a path forward, because it will ultimately grow the left’s reach, while minimizing the recruitment pool for right-wing extremists.

              I’ve been flamed for talking about this before, but I think it’s too important to ignore.

      • Walk_blesseD@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        11 hours ago

        I don’t think you’re necessarily being malicious here, but please, for the love of all that is good, think for just half a second and stop saying shit like this, especially in front of people who are well-meaning but not knowledgeable on the topic and might actually listen to you. It’s not only factually misleading, but also not helping us, you’re just disseminating the idea that on some level we aren’t actually who we say we are.

        My sibling in satan, you are the one spreading transphobia during the era of woke 2.0

      • Allero@lemmy.today
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        13 hours ago

        Alright, as a non-native English speaker, I missed the part about “male” and “female” being strictly about AGAB.

        The more I know!

        (And no, I’m not a transphobe. If anything, this comes as an illustration that people may be less knowledgeable, not more evil)

        • Hildegard (she/her)@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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          11 hours ago

          Eeeeeeeehhh its complicated. Gender and sex are different, but are sometimes used interchangeably. Male and female isn’t strictly AGAB in all circumstances. The sex field on all my documents says female, despite the circumstances of my birth. Many trans women self describe as female, while others don’t.

          Transphobes often say female as an attempt to be exclusionary of trans people. Misogynists often say females, because calling half the population women implies we are people. Generally its a bad sign when someone says “female” as a noun.

          But female as an adjective is pretty normal. A male model or a female engineer is a perfectly normal and fine way to describe people.

          • Allero@lemmy.today
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            5 hours ago

            I see, so on top of that, it’s extra confusing because everyone means different things. I see the angle many trans people take, and that’s what I assumed initially.

            Thanks for sharing!

        • Walk_blesseD@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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          11 hours ago

          It’s not about AGAB, this fucker is just talking confidently about shit they’re clueless on. “Male” and “female” are constructed categories that have always been used to describe social and physiological phenomena alike. And furthermore, even if for whatever reason one were to use the terms solely to describe biology, pretty much all the traits that are used to categorise “biological sex” that actually matter in people’s everyday lives can be changed.
          It’s neither accurate nor acceptable socially to describe trans women as “male” nor trans men as “female,” and anybody pushing the narrative that it is is not our ally.

          • BlaestEgnen@feddit.dk
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            4 hours ago

            So a trans man, being fully biological female ends on ER. The personnel shouldn’t refer to them as female and instead give them the treatment intended for males?

            It’s about precision and safety to use a correct language in the correct contexts. When talking to the patient, they should obviously not call them a woman or utilise a dead name. But that’s a social context. Not a medical biological relevant one

            • Hildegard (she/her)@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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              3 hours ago

              “Biological male” and “biological female” are transphobic slurs. The correct term is cis, which means on the same side, in contrast to trans which means across.

              If that trans man is on HRT, he will be better served by medical interventions intended for men than women. That is how HRT works. Cells only know sex from the hormones. Change your hormones, you change how every cell in your body behaves.

              In the case of an ER, trans people will almost always refuse to disclose that they are trans, or will outright deny it. That is the only way to get good care from doctors who are not experts in trans medicine.

              These unevidenced assertions that trans people are medially distinct from cis people are harmful, and gets people killed. Stop it.

    • Dozzi92@lemmy.world
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      16 hours ago

      I feel like the only time I referred to males and female were regarding things like census designations, medical terminology.

      Outside of that it’s bros and bitches.