this post was submitted on 25 Apr 2025
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And why isn't "women birds" the normal word for it? And do you think scientific studies call them girls or ladies?
Nah.
You can, but it works because it's essentially joke-y, because clearly female penguins aren't women, but female.
Kinda like referring to a granny as "young lady/miss", even though everyone knows they're not.
Scientific studies also use male and female in reference to human subjects' gender identities. Woman and female are both incredibly old terms which have been used interchangeably as there was no widespread concept of gender identity in the English-speaking world until recently. We had to invent the term "gender identity" to separate gender from sex because they'd previously been used to refer to the same thing.
You seem to be saying that a trans man is female because he was assigned the female sex at birth. Have I understood that correctly?
Sources:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex%E2%80%93gender_distinction
https://www.etymonline.com/
Small sample of studies using male/female to refer to gender:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6748626/
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10685922/
Well, sort of. I know sex isn't as black-and-white as people make it out to be, but since we're already having troubles explaining gender being a spectrum, I'd thought I'd leave out the more nuanced bits in favour of succinctness.
I mean yeah, the word gender, meaning "male or female sex" is from as early as 15th century, but only came to be the more common word for "sex" as "sex" started getting erotic connotations.
https://www.etymonline.com/word/gender
Edit whops I posted before finishing writing just a moment
As I was saying language nor gender identities are never as black and white as we'd like them to be. So yeah, you are right in that in different contexts, scientific studies like you say, may as well use female and male to refer to subjects. As in male for trasnmen and female for transwomen. As it should. If they're not like studying uteruses, I don't see why them being trans would matter.
Trans women are women. Trans men are men.