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Is "female" offensive? (lemmy.world)

submitted 9 months ago by Trincapinones@lemmy.world 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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[–] locuester@lemmy.zip 1 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months 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.