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Is "female" offensive? (lemmy.world)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml
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I am not a native English speaker and I have sometimes referred to people as male and female (as that is what I have been taught) but I have received some backlash in some cases, especially for the word "female", is there some negative thought in the word which I am unaware of?

I don't know if this is the best place to ask, if it's not appropriate I have no problem to delete it ^^

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[–] -1 points 2 years ago (8 children)

3 years ago, “man” in that context was considered gender neutral. More recently tho a lot of stink is being made about little language things like this. Theres no replacement word to use.

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  • [+] 13 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (6 children)
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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (4 children)

    Sensitivities during Covid ran high. A lot of things changed then. For instance in the software world removing the name “master” from git usage, and on the TV Show Survivor, the host not saying his famous line “come on in guys”. At the same time pronouns became a huge thing, and these seemingly gender specific or sensitive word terms were targeted.

    You are correct, there was a round of this in the 90s or so, where job titles like “waitress”, “stewardess”, “policeman” were all adjusted. I see that as a very different round of language change.

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  • [+] 1 point 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (3 children)
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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (2 children)

    Yeah, 2020 is the time period I’m referring to. I had never heard of it being a thing until George Floyd and BLM movement in 2020, then GitHub changed in response to that.

    I’ve been in IT for 35 years. And I never heard a single negative thing about branch names and master/slave terminology until 2020.

    Perhaps you think that was set aside because IDE hard drives are dead.

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  • [+] 1 point 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 child)
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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago*

    All this sensitivity being mainstream is new to me. It came from all angles in all aspects of life very suddenly.

    Yes you can find some things happening in the past, but sweeping changes were made in the 2020-2022 timeframe.

    That fact doesn’t minimize anyone’s prior efforts, thoughts, feelings, actions, movements, or otherwise. The attempts to fix the English collective masculine date back to 1795.

    As early as 1795, dissatisfaction with the convention of the collective masculine led to calls for gender-neutral pronouns, and attempts to invent pronouns for this purpose date back to at least 1850, although the use of singular they as a natural gender-neutral pronoun in English has persisted since the 14th century.

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