Saying males or females is putting emotional distance between you and the subject. One possible reason for creating that distance might be to dehumanise, but it's far from the only reason, as you presumably know quite well.

If you or anyone else didn't know, consider a police report or a research paper in which the language is deliberately distant to avoid biasing the reader: "The two female victims were struck by the SUV, and the male suspect fled on foot", "we observed higher rates of CVD for males in the treatment group, but in females the effect size was not significant", and equally bloodless language. This may be dehumanising in some sense, but it's done in a benign way to help the reader be objective.

It's easy for a non-native speaker to make a mistake in informal language after reading formal material like the aforementioned, and it might not be great to call out minor breaches of etiquette in such a targeted and public way.

> It's easy for a non-native speaker to make a mistake in informal language after reading formal material like the aforementioned, and it might not be great to call out minor breaches of etiquette in such a targeted and public way.

It seemed to be addressed in a respectful and understanding manner, what's wrong with helping someone (and apparently a bunch of bystanders) learn from their mistake?

English is my first (and only) language and I’ve never heard of this. I would say that it not only doesn’t sound weird, but is totally normal. Who told you this isn’t correct?

> Who told you this isn’t correct?

The last few years aside, I've always had an issue with it. In my personal experience, people who tend to call women/girls "females" never, ever use the word "males" to describe men/boys in similar context. It's about using language consistently imo.

This is a new wave thing pretty much only prominent in online spaces like Reddit. Read some fantasy by female author Robin Hobb and she will regularly use the word. Spend anytime immersed in minority culture and you will frequently hear females used with affection. At best this argument is right up there with “chicks”. Some groups in some places decided to be offended while other groups in other places proudly refer to themselves as Dixie Chicks. It likely stems from online incel communities using the word frequently when discussing…females.

> This is a new wave thing pretty much only prominent in online spaces like Reddit.

Nah. It's always been a bit odd in certain contexts. And I'm pretty old and square.

It’s not entirely new. As late as the mid-20th century, the term “female” was considered vaguely dehumanizing when applied to women even as an adjective. Here’s a Google Ngram graph showing changes in usage over time:

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=female+lawyer%...

Yes, it wasn't that long ago that making the OK sign was the most evil Nazi thing one could do, and it didn't matter how many times it was started that it was a 4chan troll that society fell for, people who weren't in the know about the outrage news of the week got harmed for doing an action that for most their lives was viewed as completely harmless. Unable to admit they were trolled, the message was "Well, now Nazis are actually using it", with zero evidence or even thought of pushback against the "Nazis" who allegedly were controlling everyone's actions through negative identity.

Now you can make the OK symbol again and it's OK. The outrage over it got replaced by a new outrage and the victims of outrage culture during that period are simply seen as an acceptable cost for keeping the outrage fire burning. No apologies. No admissions of guilt or harm. Just the monster leaving behind its path of righteous destruction.

That’s fine, but it’s disingenuous to dress it up with an “in English it sounds weird...” There’s nothing wrong to my ears as a native speaker.

I empathise with your thoughts on this. It occurs to me that the different words aren't consistent across cultures and sometimes the word man and woman don't feel equivalent. Sadly I didn't pay attention when being taught grammar so can't explain why I think that in detail.

What do you think of the word lady? Gentlemen doesn't seem to be the male equivalent anymore.

I have heard people use female and male as nouns to describe others, but this usually indicates a military background.

"female" and "male" are only used as nouns in technical contexts like biological studies of sex and police reports, where dehumanization or objectification is intentional because the human part is irrelevant (Biologists because their work isn't human-specific or even about humans at all, police because they are describing attributes of a suspect).

That's entirely wrong, just google anything with "female" in front and watch the results roll in. I started with "female athlete" and there are plenty of headlines that match exactly from big name publications like Forbes.

You’re using “female” as an adjective there, not as a noun.

Try playing that rule out for other terms and see how far it goes.

British by birth and upbringing. In my 50s. It sounds a bit weird to me too. It would sound fine in a scientific or official context but not in normal conversation or an internet post. Context matters - and some usages are fine.

I speak 4 languages to various degrees, and female/male is either dehumanizing or an overly biological term to use in a normal conversation in all of them, like "oh let me pick your cortex about an idea".

I assume that English speaking folks who don't notice this just got used to hearing 'female' and never paid much attention to the sensibilities around it.

Females makes you sound like a Ferengi. It's weird.

I mean it's technically correct. But it is weird (to me) to use in conversational English, and I've been paying attention since before 2000. Speaking for New England region between and around the NYC/Boston metros.

Now that I think about it, you know where it is used a lot? In news reports/police reports. "A young male was injured.... a female was spotted leaving the scene..."

It's used interchangeably with "woman"

https://apnews.com/article/katie-ledecky-ap-female-athelete-...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/nickmorrison/2022/11/01/reveale...

https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2016/apr/06/10-i...

Those are all adjectives. It is not used interchangeably as a noun.

If one is derogatory then the other should be as well. Try it out with some more universally accepted derogatory nouns to see my point. Thinking about it, when applied as an adjective most terms sound even worse.

I honestly can't think of any that aren't just repurposed adjectives rather than true nouns or vice versa.

As an adjective you mean. Which is different.

I've heard "females" primarily in certain African American accents.

So it's "weird" to me in the sense of "I wouldn't use it and most people around me wouldn't use it" but that's about it.

I don't think anything derogatory is meant by it. It seems to be used like "chicks"

Also an English speaker, and nerd about this sort of semantics.

Just to keep the blood pressure low here: I want to be clear there are two sides to this issue. I'm not the sort of "enlightened centrist" who says that lightly: more often than not, there are not two sides to an issue, but this is one of the rare cases where there are two sides to this.

I'm going to explain this as briefly as I can, but it's complicated, so it's not actually going to be brief.

First, let's understand that communication is a two-person (or two-group) activity involving both communicator and audience. Effective communication of complex and charged topics requires that the communicator understand their audience and use language that their audience can understand without being distracted. Likewise, effective communication of complex and charged topics requires that the audience make a good-faith effort to understand the communicator by taking into account the communicator's background/motivations, and try to suss out the communicator's intended meaning, possibly by asking clarifying questions.

One of the important observations in David Foster Wallace's Tense Present[1] is that language doesn't just communicate its direct meaning, it also communicates membership in a group. As Wallace says:

> [M]ost of us are fluent in more than one major English dialect and in a large number of subdialects and are probably at least passable in countless others. Which dialect you choose to use depends, of course, on whom you're addressing. [... T]he dialect you use depends mostly on what sort of Group your listener is part of and whether you wish to present yourself as a fellow member of that Group. [... U]sage-as-inclusion is about much more than class. Here's another thought experiment: A bunch of U.S. teenagers in clothes that look far too large for them are sitting together in the local mall's Food Court, and a 53-year-old man with a combover and clothes that fit comes over to them and says that he was scoping them and thinks they're totally rad and/or phat and is it cool if he just kicks it and does the hang here with them. The kids' reaction is going to be either scorn or embarrassment for the guy — most likely a mix of both. Q: Why? Or imagine that two hard-core urban black guys are standing there talking and I, who am resoundingly and in all ways white, come up and greet them with "Yo" and call them "Brothers" and ask "s'up, s'goin on," pronouncing on with that NYCish oo-o diphthong that Young Urban Black English deploys for a standard o. Either these guys are going to be offended or they are going to think I am simply out of my mind. No other reaction is remotely foreseeable. Q: Why?

> Why: A dialect of English is learned and used either because it's your native vernacular or because it's the dialect of a Group by which you wish (with some degree of plausibility) to be accepted.

I think what a lot of conversations about the word "females" versus "women" or "girls" get wrong is making universal statements about English as if it's a single coherent language. There are many dialects, such as biology English or medical English, where using "female" is absolutely appropriate and using "woman" or "girl" would be unequivocally wrong. Likewise, there are dialects, such as gender theory English, where "female" isn't dehumanizing if used properly: using "females" refers to people with XX chromosomes, while "women" refers to people who identify with a feminine gender (although usually one would say "female assigned at birth" or "FAB" rather than saying "females" by itself).

Audience is everything here. Using gender theory English to a biology audience drastically changes the meaning, placing you as an outsider to the group, and if your intention was to speak biology English, you'd have failed to communicate in that dialect. In fact, the above paragraph, which I, a cisgender man, wrote, is fine only because the audience is a mostly-male, slightly-socially-inept audience of Hacker News denizens. If my audience were a group of American women, that paragraph would be horribly offensive because it's someone who hasn't directly experienced the effects of this sort of language, explaining it to people who have directly experienced the effects of this sort of language. In other words, mansplaining.

The problem with saying "[I]t's normal thing to see young females taking a dog out for a walk[.]" is twofold:

1. It is perceived by some as dehumanizing women. Note that I didn't say "it's dehumanizing women", because that a) assumes the word has some sort of inherent meaning (it doesn't) and b) assumes a lot of intention coming from the communicator. But actually, whether it's dehumanizing isn't as important as the fact that it's perceived as such. Remember that communication is a two-person activity. Yes, that means that it's up to the audience to not assume the worst, and to assume you aren't intentionally dehumanizing women. But it also means that as the communicator, if you find out that your audience perceives the wording as dehumanizing, it's now up to you to change your language to communicate your actual intent more effectively. If you as a communicator find out that your audience perceives your wording as dehumanizing to women, and then insist on staying with your wording, that really starts to communicate that you don't care about communicating effectively, about your audience's perceptions, or about the fact that you might be misunderstood to be dehumanizing women. In the worst case, it communicates that you do, in fact, intend to dehumanize women, although I'm not willing to go that far in your case: I think it's much more likely that you're just feeling attacked and being defensive.

2. As noted before, language communicates membership in a group. In this case, we're clearly not demonstrating membership in medical, biology, or gender theory communities, and the remaining groups which use "female" aren't groups you probably want to associate yourself with. Unfortunately, the other groups which say "females" are generally groups like incels, neckbeards, self-described misogynists, self-described alpha/sigma males, etc. Likely, this is the underlying reason why "females" is viewed as dehumanizing women: these groups really do intend to dehumanize women, and by associating yourself with them, you're implying that you agree with some of their ideas. Again, I assume it isn't your intent to associate yourself with these groups, but effective communication of your identity would avoid associating yourself with these groups. It's up to you, as the communicator, to understand your audience and how they will perceive your use of words, and to choose the words that your audience will perceive as your intended meaning.

Just to highlight the complexity of this: there are also contextual problems with referring to adult women as "girls" as this might be perceived as infantilizing. But, in other contexts, referring to adult women as "women" is denigrating to their youthfulness/attractiveness (i.e. some women would often take offense to being called "that woman" rather than "that girl"). Louis C.K. was adept enough to riff on this phenomenon with his "Nobody wants to see 'women gone wild'" joke, but we all know what happened with Louis C.K. later... But this is partly why Global Citizen has a "Girls and Women" issue rather than a "Girls" or "Women" category (and certainly not a "Females" category)[2]. Either "Girls" or "Women" would not be inclusive of the entire group they're trying to help in the context of their audience's dialect.

[1] https://genius.com/David-foster-wallace-tense-present-democr...

[2] https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/issue/women-girls/

Female is the word for any female sexed animal. Woman is the word for a female sexed human being. By using the more general term you are allowing the possibility that the individual in question is perhaps not fully human. Hence the term “dehumanizing.” Does that help?

I'm an egalitarian at heart.

I treat both males and females with dehumanizing language, since I consider both to be equally worthless.

That tells people considerably more about you than it does about other men and women.

Edit reply: Yes obviously you were talking about yourself and I used that to draw a conclusion about you. Why would that indicate I didn’t think it through? Your response however really does appear to have not been thought through since you failed to consider that point. That’s consistent with your apparent trend of denigrating yourself in attempts to denigrate others. If I were you I’d check my priors, but I expect you’ll continue to do you.

No surprise, as I was talking about myself.

Not sure if you're male or female, but you certainly didn't think your reply through.

Edit Reply:

> Yes obviously you were talking about yourself and I used that to draw a conclusion about you. Why would that indicate I didn’t think it through?

Your conclusion about a post where I spoke about myself is that it speaks about myself more than it speaks about others.

Not the sharpest tool in the shed, I see.

> Your response however really does appear to have not been thought through since you failed to consider that point. That’s consistent with your apparent trend of denigrating yourself in attempts to denigrate others. If I were you I’d check my priors, but I expect you’ll continue to do you.

Who exactly I attempted to denigrate?

I see nothing wrong with the previous poster's use of "females". Males/females is sometimes used instead of men/women in a forensic context (e.g. a police report or an objective description: "female athlete," "single white female," etc).

This isn't a forensic context, though.

>Using "female" as a noun for people can come off as dehumanising since it's how we refer to ex. animals in various situations.

Honestly, it's all about context and really the people say "oh he used female workers instead of women workers" what a pig are the people who are going to be mad no matter what they're literally just looking for an excuse.

And quite simply I find that demonisation of the word female to be rude and fundamentally sexist. We wouldn't have a problem saying "two males walking around" but in escence you would have a problem with "two females walking around". The fact being female is considered dehumanisng is a problem in itself and sexist. Being male is not dehumanising. See how that got turned around? You had good intentions then I got mad and used your words againist you.

> We wouldn't have a problem saying "two males walking around"

I do. Say "men" or similar. Calling men/boys "males" is just as dehumanising as calling women/girls "females." Treat EVERYONE properly.

Police and military use male and female, perhaps to avoid ambiguity. This is the first time I've heard some feel the terms are dehumanizing.

Police are also fond of saying "individual" instead of "person," which is another way of dehumanizing the people they encounter. It's always a red flag to me when I hear someone say the word "individual."

No they do it because it’s the correct term. If you say “a man wearing a white T-shirt” and the actual suspect is a 14 year old boy. Many of the people searching with disregard them in the search because they got told to look for a man. When it goes to court the defence lawyer would use it as doubt since the description is for a man and not a boy.

Dehumainzing others is one of the main characteristics of the military in wartime, and often the police in peacetime. You maybe have a pretty cool life experience not to have experienced that.

It is very common to say "I saw two males doing x" when reporting what you saw. Just as common as saying you say two men. And this proves my point, you would have a problem no matter what. You're just wanting to be outraged.

Imagine thinking someone's gender dehumanising them. It makes no sense. The idea "You're not as human as them because you're male" is an asburd one.

> Imagine thinking someone's gender dehumanising them. It makes no sense. The idea "You're not as human as them because you're male" is an asburd one.

Absolutely not what I'm saying. My objection to it is specifically that referring to someone with "male"/"female" as a noun, in common contexts, can -- not will -- come off as dehumanising, particularly when some people tend to only use "male" or "female" for one gender and not the other.

> You're just wanting to be outraged.

I want people who both don't know that smth may make others uncomfortable and want to change in that case have the relevant information. If you don't want to change, then... good for you? That's not my problem. You do you, I guess?

As I said, its' all about context. And the context it was used it was perfectly fine, normal, etc. In fact it was perfect English, it's common to see 16 year old girls walking late at night just as common to see 40 year old women walking late at night. They're both female, one group are girls and the other group are women.

> I want people who both don't know that smth may make others uncomfortable and want to change in that case have the relevant information. If you don't want to change, then... good for you? That's not my problem. You do you, I guess?

Right back at you. It makes other people uncomfortable when others go around saying a gender is dehumanising. Especialy, when in English it's the correct word. Female/male is refers to gender, woman/man refers to gender and age. It makes people very uncomfortable when you imply they were some how rude when they weren't.

But as I said, people who would be outraged would always be outraged. It's the new trend, to show they're thinking of other people while disregarding others.

It is not outrage. It is demanding that women get respected in the ways that they want to be respected. Perhaps you have not noticed the tendency for some people to consistently refer to men as “men” and women as “female” or “girl”. If you don’t like it, too bad. We will continue demanding respect. It takes exactly zero seconds to use the word “woman” over “female”.

You demand respect for women by saying their gender dehumanises them?

Perhaps you've not noticed but some of those people are women. You going to start correcting women when they say they're off on a girls night out and tell them it's a womens night out? You going to start correct them when they say they have an all female executive board and tell them it's an all women executive board?

The reality is, when you say that the word female is offensive, which you are, you're making their gender offensive. And that is not respectful.

It's very common to call kids 'boys and girls'.

What would you use if you were referring to two male 15 year olds? Two boys? Two men? Two male adolescents? Two teenage boys?

Young adults or teenagers.

Not kids. Kids would be elementary students, for example.

FWIW, you are using female as an adjective in your example, which isnt what the OP is talking about.

I don't know about this either. It sounds fine to me and I hear both used interchangeably (from NYC area). I've also seen it written both ways. To the original comment, you're fine IMHO.

Why are all of your sources from reddit?

No, it always sounded weird. Its certainly not a word my grandparents nor parents would've used in casual conversation.

In the last few years there's been a hyperfocus on restricting genders that has caused a minority of native-English speakers to start overusing the word "female" with extra emphasis: which may be leading to learners to consider it a normal word to use casually, but historically it has mainly been applied in formal medical/scientific settings.

> Its certainly not a word my grandparents nor parents would've used in casual conversation

I think this is accurate. In fact, my grandmother would have said 'ladies' or 'girls' ('gals') rather than 'women'.

I'll go further than "sounds weird". It's a shibboleth that associates the speaker with certain misogynistic red-pill internet subcultures. Anybody who doesn't want that association should probably just say "women" instead.

Or perhaps, just perhaps, they're non-english natives who speak English as a second (or third, fourth, etc) language and have no knowledge or interest in absurd internet-american-english witchhunts?

Yes incels are utterly annoying despicable broken records of tediously uncreative low quality mental illness, i also strongly dislike them - but for monolinguist americans to start to paint with such an absurdly wide brush is far worse. Choose your bloody battles.

I don't. I mean it genuinely sounds odd to me. Most people who word things that way don't use the term "males" in a similar way; what's wrong about wanting people to use language consistently? Don't push your biases onto me.

Do you have any evidence that "Most people who word things that way don't use the term "males" in a similar way". I think it's highly likely that you do not have enough (anecdotal) data to legitimately make a claim like that. At most you could make such a claim about "most people in my experience" but then, you wouldn't have monitored them for quite long either, just for an internet convo or so.

>I mean it genuinely sounds odd to me.

"To me" is the key bit here. I'm conscious of this particular issue since I've run into it on the internet a few times. Whenever I've mentioned it to a woman in a face to face conversation (in the UK) they've looked at me like I was barking mad. I even corrected my mother (she referred to "females" when talking about women) which resulted in a lengthy tirade. She is old though to be fair.

I blame the Ferengi.

>Most people who word things that way don't use the term "males" in a similar way

Conversely, I'm not sure many people are keeping track of this since no-one objects to be called male if they're a man.

> it genuinely sounds odd to me.

What sounds odd to you can be perfectly normal to others.

> Don't push your biases onto me.

Might want to try taking your own advice.

> Might want to try taking your own advice.

Please show me where I did any of:

- Assume why people are using the words they are

- Assume why people care/don't care about a certain issue

- Tried to force my values onto people.

Saying "if you didn't know, wording things this way can come off weird. Maybe try X instead? No pressure (:" is very different from "yeah well obviously your intent here is X [because of the last few years]." I'm not here to force people to change. But if people didn't know something, and do want to change on their own, I'd rather the information be there for them if they want it.

I don't care about this issue, but you opened with stating "it sounds weird". An absolute statement. Not like you are wording it here. Way to derail a thread about someone loosing their life with semantics policing.

I didn't accuse you of doing any of the things in your bullets so I can't really respond to them.

What I did say is that you're pushing your biases onto others while simultaneously telling others not to do the same thing.

Your life experiences have led you to the point today where you object to a certain use of the word "female". That's fine.

But taking your personal objection, which is not a universially agreed upon truth, and using it to lecture someone else in a condescending "you must not know English" way is another matter and probably why you're catching heat right now.

The “n” word was socially acceptable for white folks to use to refer to Black people only a few decades ago.

No it just sounds weird. I use the word female everyday but I would never say "young females."

Thanks, I guess, for diverting the discussion into something unimportant.

it's pretty common in aave/ebonics, that's probably how it's become more common. lots of slang has mainstreamed from the black community in the past few yrs

It's common in certain circles.