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Am I the only one who gets the niggling feeling that anyone who uses the words "males" and "females" in their public dissertations like it's normal to refer to

Am I the only one who gets the niggling feeling that anyone who uses the words "males" and "females" in their public dissertations like it's normal to refer to people the same way one does cable connectors must have a tenuous and possibly weakening grip on the real world?

pjc50 9y ago
It is often a bit of a red flag, but he only does it in one sentence. Overuse of "females" in particular is usually a bad sign.
- ashark 9y ago
  I continue to find the use of "woman" or "women" as an adjective to be really grating. "Women firefighters", for example—we don't say "men nurses", ya know? Reads/sounds awful to me, like we're referring to someone who only fights fires for (on?) women, or does nursing stuff for men. To take dictionary.com's adjectival example, "woman plumber" seems like a gross euphemism for a gynecologist. Imagine "man teacher". Wow is that an ugly and misleading construction. 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.
  - biggc 9y ago
    I think the point is that using "male/female" as a noun is clinical and dehumanizing, but there aren't any issues with using the words as an adjective.
  - thatwebdude 9y ago
    I think women find most of these clarifiers (that's how I see it, anyway) as a title worth being proud of. They've overcame social and potentially physical adversity to obtain this position (Female Firefighter, etc.) 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.
    - ashark 9y ago
      I don't care about using a sex/gender modifier on the names of the positions, but using the adjectives women/men woman/man instead of female/male. Comes off really weird to me. We don't do it for men, we use "male X", which sounds/reads way better, and until very recently we just used "female X" too—I think the allergy to over/misuse of the noun "female" has bled over into these phrases, too, and the result is jarring and strange. [EDIT] word "noun" where I intended "adjective" fixed.
      - thatwebdude 9y ago
        +1, I read Woman Firefighter and auto-corrected it to Female Firefighter without second thought.
      - QuantumGravy 9y ago
        - man nurse - man housekeeper - man secretary - man escort Wow, these all sound absolutely awful. How did the female, err, woman version become such an accepted construct?
        deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
  - creepydata 9y ago
    >we don't say "men nurses", ya know? It's much worse! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murse
  - lkbm 9y ago
    "Male" and "female" are fine as adjectives, but "female" as a noun is routinely used as a derogative, and definitely has that connotation in (at least parts of) the US. 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.)
rhapsodic 9y ago
> Am I the only one who gets the niggling feeling that anyone who uses the words "males" and "females" in their public dissertations like it's normal to refer to people the same way one does cable connectors must have a tenuous and possibly weakening grip on the real world? 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.
- nxc18 9y ago
  The preferred usage (I'm told) is that man/woman is used for gender and male/female is used for sex. Gender is largely limited to humans, but humans also have a biological sex that is both difficult to ascertain in some cases and also completely irrelevant to most discussions around the workplace. This also leaves open that there is room for more genders while leaving sex as a somewhat resolved issue.
  - rhapsodic 9y ago
    >The preferred usage (I'm told) is that man/woman is used for gender and male/female is used for sex. Gender is largely limited to humans, but humans also have a biological sex that is both difficult to ascertain in some cases and also completely irrelevant to most discussions around the workplace. >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.

pjc50 9y ago

It is often a bit of a red flag, but he only does it in one sentence. Overuse of "females" in particular is usually a bad sign.

ashark 9y ago
I continue to find the use of "woman" or "women" as an adjective to be really grating. "Women firefighters", for example—we don't say "men nurses", ya know? Reads/sounds awful to me, like we're referring to someone who only fights fires for (on?) women, or does nursing stuff for men. To take dictionary.com's adjectival example, "woman plumber" seems like a gross euphemism for a gynecologist. Imagine "man teacher". Wow is that an ugly and misleading construction. 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.
- biggc 9y ago
  I think the point is that using "male/female" as a noun is clinical and dehumanizing, but there aren't any issues with using the words as an adjective.
- thatwebdude 9y ago
  I think women find most of these clarifiers (that's how I see it, anyway) as a title worth being proud of. They've overcame social and potentially physical adversity to obtain this position (Female Firefighter, etc.) 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.
  - ashark 9y ago
    I don't care about using a sex/gender modifier on the names of the positions, but using the adjectives women/men woman/man instead of female/male. Comes off really weird to me. We don't do it for men, we use "male X", which sounds/reads way better, and until very recently we just used "female X" too—I think the allergy to over/misuse of the noun "female" has bled over into these phrases, too, and the result is jarring and strange. [EDIT] word "noun" where I intended "adjective" fixed.
    - thatwebdude 9y ago
      +1, I read Woman Firefighter and auto-corrected it to Female Firefighter without second thought.
    - QuantumGravy 9y ago
      - man nurse - man housekeeper - man secretary - man escort Wow, these all sound absolutely awful. How did the female, err, woman version become such an accepted construct?
      - deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
- creepydata 9y ago
  >we don't say "men nurses", ya know? It's much worse! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murse
- lkbm 9y ago
  "Male" and "female" are fine as adjectives, but "female" as a noun is routinely used as a derogative, and definitely has that connotation in (at least parts of) the US. 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.)

rhapsodic 9y ago

> Am I the only one who gets the niggling feeling that anyone who uses the words "males" and "females" in their public dissertations like it's normal to refer to people the same way one does cable connectors must have a tenuous and possibly weakening grip on the real world? 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.

nxc18 9y ago
The preferred usage (I'm told) is that man/woman is used for gender and male/female is used for sex. Gender is largely limited to humans, but humans also have a biological sex that is both difficult to ascertain in some cases and also completely irrelevant to most discussions around the workplace. This also leaves open that there is room for more genders while leaving sex as a somewhat resolved issue.
- rhapsodic 9y ago
  >The preferred usage (I'm told) is that man/woman is used for gender and male/female is used for sex. Gender is largely limited to humans, but humans also have a biological sex that is both difficult to ascertain in some cases and also completely irrelevant to most discussions around the workplace. >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.