I hope you are, because I don't think your "niggling feeling" has any rational basis. If you want to indicate the gender of a person, there is absolutely nothing wrong with using the terms "male" or "female".
I guess I need to clarify that I'm using the term "gender" in the traditional, biological sense of the word, rather than the current fashionable sense that vicious scolds and busybodies insist that everyone must use.
In English, "man" and "woman" are the preferred terms for male and female humans, respectively. "Male" and "female" are clinical and dehumanizing. It's like saying "Laura is gestating an embryo" instead of saying "Laura is going to have a baby." They're also just grammatically weird, because they're adjectives that have been turned into nouns. It's like saying "Ben is a Hispanic" instead of "Ben is a Hispanic person." Finally, they're one letter longer for no benefit.
Neither of the reasons people use "male" and "female" instead of "man" and "woman" are any good. The first is attempting to sound educated by using French-derived words like male and female in preference to German-derived words like man and woman. The second is that "male" and "female" punt on having to refer to the person's age, and in our era of perpetual adolescence people are terrified of being considered a "man" or a "woman."
Neither of the reasons people use "male" and "female" instead of "man" and "woman" are any good. The first is attempting to sound educated by using French-derived words like male and female in preference to German-derived words like man and woman. The second is that "male" and "female" punt on having to refer to the person's age, and in our era of perpetual adolescence people are terrified of being considered a "man" or a "woman."
No offense, rayiner, but I think everything you wrote is simply ridiculous on its face. Saying they're "clinical and dehumanizing" or "grammatically weird" are simply your opinion, which I do not share. And saying that "they're one letter longer for no benefit" just smacks of desperation.
If you want to indicate the gender of a person, there is absolutely nothing wrong with using the terms "male" or "female".
But, as evidenced by this thread, there are people who want to make that usage taboo.
None of the reasons I gave are "simply ... opinions." They're based on the rules of the language. First, English has specialized words for people and things people do, and we use those words in preference to their generic counterparts unless we are purposefully trying to dehumanize the subject. It's not necessarily wrong to use dehumanizing language. Consider the word "human" versus the word "person." They basically mean the same thing. But "human" focuses on the biological species, while "person" also implies things like legal status and rights. So we might talk about humans migrating to North America 10,000 years ago, but we say that several people transferred to Google's California office from New York.
Second, "female" and "male" are typically used as adjectives, and it is weird to use them as a noun ("weird" being by definition what people don't typically do). It's not wrong (the Oxford English Dictionary does recognize that the words can be used as nouns), but it's weird, especially when there are perfectly good nouns to use in their place.
You can obviously believe what you want but know that people will judge you in a negative light if you talk like that.
But many times you want to be clear you're referring to that sex, irrespective of age. So using "woman" isn't any shorter -- writers inevitably end up using clumsy constructions like "women and girls"[1]. We have a word for the union of the sets. Just use it already!
I'd be glad to entertain it as being dehumanizing if we had a less-dehumanizing, shorter term for the same semantic space. But as there isn't...
Similar issue for "male" and "female" as adjectives; to my ear, "woman doctor" and (especially) "man doctor" sound a lot clumsier than "male/female doctor".
[1] From a quick Google search, see the CDC and a big pharma comapny:
"Which girls/women should receive HPV vaccination? HPV vaccination is recommended for 11 and 12 year-old girls. It is also recommended for girls and women age 13 through 26 years of age...". (Emphasis added.) Lovely! http://www.cdc.gov/std/hpv/stdfact-hpv-vaccine-young-women.h...
"GARDASIL®9 ... helps protect girls and women ages 9 to 26..." https://www.gardasil9.com/
I think it's okay to use "female" when you need to refer to that sex, which often arises in a clinical context anyway (as in your example). But how often is that the case? Typically, you see people say things like "they hired three new males at my office." They didn't hire three little boys!
> Similar issue for "male" and "female" as adjectives; to my ear, "woman doctor" and (especially) "man doctor" sound a lot clumsier than "male/female doctor".
Embrace English's Anglo-Saxon roots! http://www.plainlanguage.gov/whatispl/definitions/orwell.cfm. There is nothing wrong with using two nouns to describe something or someone: http://grammarist.com/grammar/nouns-as-adjectives.
Yes, but enough writers take this confused hate seriously enough that they feel they have to tiptoe around using "female" even when it's majestically appropriate. You can't win!
>Typically, you see people say things like "they hired three new males at my office." They didn't hire three little boys!
If there were the possibility that they were boys (say, 13 year olds), and you wanted to make absolutely clear that the listener should not conclude they were all adults, and the gender was relevant to the point [1], then "males" would be preferable, yes. (I think this is the position the writer of the article was in!)
>Embrace English's Anglo-Saxon roots!
Sure thing! The vast majority of the population still rejects the construction "man doctor" or "man president", refuting the claim that "woman doctor" is somehow part of some consistent attempt to avoid dehumanizing language.
(I notice you still didn't provide an alternative to "female" as noun that indicates age irrelevance and is less dehumanizing.)
>There is nothing wrong with using two nouns to describe something or someone
There is when you do it inconsistently ("woman president" but not "man president"), and only in response to a collective outrage that won't provide you with a preferable alternative for the same semantic space.
[1] say, the role required you to only pair people of the same sex together, and finding enough males to meet the demand was an issue
This also leaves open that there is room for more genders while leaving sex as a somewhat resolved issue.
>This also leaves open that there is room for more genders while leaving sex as a somewhat resolved issue.
Until relatively recently, the terms "gender" and "sex" meant essentially the same thing and could be used interchangeably. But these days, a small, but very vocal, vicious and vindictive segment of the population has decided that their definition of the word "gender" is the only one that is acceptable in public forums, so they deploy tactics ranging from public shaming to career destruction to enforce their own cultural taboos.
If someone wants to hold the unscientific (and IMO weird) view that, for example, "otherkin" is a gender, that is perfectly fine by me. I'm not going to try to stop them or convince them they're wrong. What is not fine by me is any assertion that I may no longer use the term "gender" in its traditional (and IMO correct) sense of the word.
Um, no, absolutely not, it's literally the opposite, the term "gender," was essentially introduced to be distinct from biological sex. Its entire purpose for existing is to be different from "sex."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender
>Gender is the range of characteristics pertaining to, and differentiating between, masculinity and femininity. Depending on the context, these characteristics may include biological sex (i.e. the state of being male, female or an intersex variation which may complicate sex assignment), sex-based social structures (including gender roles and other social roles), or gender identity.[1][2][3] Some cultures have specific gender roles that can be considered distinct from male and female, such as the hijra (chhaka) of India and Pakistan.
>Sexologist John Money introduced the terminological distinction between biological sex and gender as a role in 1955. Before his work, it was uncommon to use the word gender to refer to anything but grammatical categories.[1][2] However, Money's meaning of the word did not become widespread until the 1970s, when feminist theory embraced the concept of a distinction between biological sex and the social construct of gender. Today the distinction is strictly followed in some contexts, especially the social sciences[4][5] and documents written by the World Health Organization (WHO).[3]
>If someone wants to hold the unscientific (and IMO weird) view that, for example, "otherkin" is a gender, that is perfectly fine by me.
Gender is not a scientific concept, it's a social one. Gender categories and concepts are not uniform throughout history or cultures.
Even biology isn't so clear cut, there also exists people who are intersexed to varying degrees. Is it "unscientific" to call someone who has female sexual organs but has a Y chromosome a women? Maybe, but it makes sense on a social level and if she wants to be referred to as a woman.
Of course, the aspect of cultural arbitrariness of grammatical gender (with different languages assigning a different gender to corresponding words) leads directly to the new psychological meaning of the word.
You left off the "or we will destroy you personally and professionally" part. Those are the people whom I describe as "vocal, vicious and vindictive".
If you are polite to others and "respect the wishes of people who want to be referred to in a specific way" you will have no issues.
If you're being a dick you can be expected to be called out for being a dick, we live in a polite society, this is how these things work.
True enough. And I happen to think that people who are trying to establish that referring to men as "male" and women as "female" are violating the rules of polite society are giant, throbbing dicks. So I'm going to call them out.
I've already agreed with that. And referring to men as "male" and woman as "female" is not violating any social norms, at least not in the United States.
You also claimed that gender is some sort of scientific concept, which is also objectively incorrect.
If someone asks you to call them by "him" and you call them "her" instead, you are just being unnecessarily mean. This is not a hard concept to understand, be polite to others if you don't want to face problems in your personal life and career. Refer to people as they wish to be referred as. Asking you to do that is not "vocal, vicious and vindictive... [people] ...enforc[ing] their own cultural taboos" and quite frankly I find it disturbing you think is it.
How frequently do you hear a friend, colleague or family member use the phrase "I met a new male/female the other day"?
This is deeply abnormal language use. It's perfectly rational to assume that such abnormal language use might be the product of these people receiving limited exposure to normal, healthy society.
It seems like we only started doing it because someone decided "female" was suddenly a word to be avoided regardless of context, for reasons that elude me. "Male" seems to still be fine, fortunately.
I'm told it's not that way in the military, but it definitely is in many subcultures. Working with poor urban kids, I saw this all the time. "Don't listen to that female", etc. It's not something progressives just came up with--it's very much used as a derogatory term by a lot of people in the US.
(There is also the probably-related progressive concept of "people-first language"--you're not an "addict", you're a person who's addicted. Funnily enough, my first introduction to this was Cryptonomicon, and only in the past couple years have I heard it pushed by progressives.)
I've probably heard Male Nurse vs. Nurse (who's a male) about 50/50 at this point. As the world learns that gender is not a prerequisite for nearly every job title, then these gender qualifiers will probably diminish.
Language is a slippery slope though. I don't think it should be read into too much.
[EDIT] word "noun" where I intended "adjective" fixed.
- man housekeeper
- man secretary
- man escort
Wow, these all sound absolutely awful. How did the female, err, woman version become such an accepted construct?
It's much worse! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murse