5 ms·

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 thi

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?

notamy 4y ago
> 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.
- junofan 4y ago
  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.
- the_lonely_road 4y ago
  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.
  - philwelch 4y ago
    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%2Cwoman+lawyer&year_start=1920&year_end=2019&corpus=en-2019&smoothing=3 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=female+lawyer%...
  - Mountain_Skies 4y ago
    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.
  - andybak 4y ago
    > 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.
- badcppdev 4y ago
  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.
- SamoyedFurFluff 4y ago
  I have heard people use female and male as nouns to describe others, but this usually indicates a military background.
User23 4y ago
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?
- surgical_fire 4y ago
  I'm an egalitarian at heart. I treat both males and females with dehumanizing language, since I consider both to be equally worthless.
  - User23 4y ago
    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.
    - surgical_fire 4y ago
      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?
lupire 4y ago
"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).
- throwaway4aday 4y ago
  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.
  - philwelch 4y ago
    You’re using “female” as an adjective there, not as a noun.
    - throwaway4aday 4y ago
      Try playing that rule out for other terms and see how far it goes.
citizenkeen 4y ago
Females makes you sound like a Ferengi. It's weird.
Zach_the_Lizard 4y ago
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"
foobarian 4y ago
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..."
- throwaway4aday 4y ago
  It's used interchangeably with "woman" https://apnews.com/article/katie-ledecky-ap-female-athelete-of-2022-c4afef0df8baca7c8ddf7eb0314de441 https://apnews.com/article/katie-ledecky-ap-female-athelete-... https://www.forbes.com/sites/nickmorrison/2022/11/01/revealed-the-worlds-top-female-scientists-in-2022/?sh=7dd228634a71 https://www.forbes.com/sites/nickmorrison/2022/11/01/reveale... https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2016/apr/06/10-inspiring-female-writers-you-need-to-read https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2016/apr/06/10-i...
  - Kudos 4y ago
    Those are all adjectives. It is not used interchangeably as a noun.
    - throwaway4aday 4y ago
      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.
      - Kudos 4y ago
        I honestly can't think of any that aren't just repurposed adjectives rather than true nouns or vice versa.
  - fsociety 4y ago
    As an adjective you mean. Which is different.
optymizer 4y ago
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.
andybak 4y ago
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.
kerkeslager 4y ago
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-democracy-english-and-the-wars-over-usage-annotated https://genius.com/David-foster-wallace-tense-present-democr... [2] https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/issue/women-girls/ https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/issue/women-girls/

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?

notamy 4y ago

> 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.

junofan 4y ago
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.
the_lonely_road 4y ago
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.
- philwelch 4y ago
  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%2Cwoman+lawyer&year_start=1920&year_end=2019&corpus=en-2019&smoothing=3 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=female+lawyer%...
- Mountain_Skies 4y ago
  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.
- andybak 4y ago
  > 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.
badcppdev 4y ago
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.
SamoyedFurFluff 4y ago
I have heard people use female and male as nouns to describe others, but this usually indicates a military background.

User23 4y ago

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?

surgical_fire 4y ago
I'm an egalitarian at heart. I treat both males and females with dehumanizing language, since I consider both to be equally worthless.
- User23 4y ago
  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.
  - surgical_fire 4y ago
    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?

lupire 4y ago

"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).

throwaway4aday 4y ago
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.
- philwelch 4y ago
  You’re using “female” as an adjective there, not as a noun.
  - throwaway4aday 4y ago
    Try playing that rule out for other terms and see how far it goes.

citizenkeen 4y ago

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

Zach_the_Lizard 4y ago

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"

foobarian 4y ago

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..."

throwaway4aday 4y ago
It's used interchangeably with "woman" https://apnews.com/article/katie-ledecky-ap-female-athelete-of-2022-c4afef0df8baca7c8ddf7eb0314de441 https://apnews.com/article/katie-ledecky-ap-female-athelete-... https://www.forbes.com/sites/nickmorrison/2022/11/01/revealed-the-worlds-top-female-scientists-in-2022/?sh=7dd228634a71 https://www.forbes.com/sites/nickmorrison/2022/11/01/reveale... https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2016/apr/06/10-inspiring-female-writers-you-need-to-read https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2016/apr/06/10-i...
- Kudos 4y ago
  Those are all adjectives. It is not used interchangeably as a noun.
  - throwaway4aday 4y ago
    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.
    - Kudos 4y ago
      I honestly can't think of any that aren't just repurposed adjectives rather than true nouns or vice versa.
- fsociety 4y ago
  As an adjective you mean. Which is different.

optymizer 4y ago

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.

andybak 4y ago

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.

kerkeslager 4y ago

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-democracy-english-and-the-wars-over-usage-annotated https://genius.com/David-foster-wallace-tense-present-democr... [2] https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/issue/women-girls/ https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/issue/women-girls/