august 🇲🇰🏳️‍⚧️ (@august)

My policy is that the second somebody starts broadly referring to women as females and men as males I block them because they’re probably either a radfem or a conservative. Sometimes those two are the same thing.

@august I did that a few times unintentionally in the past until someone told me because I wasn't aware of the connotations of female vs women and male vs men thinking of them as pure synonyms (as a non native speaker) :(

@flokke @august The hill I will still die on in this regard is that “male/female” are the gendered adjectives: I am a woman and a scientists, but I am a “female scientist” not a “women scientist”; “woman” is a noun and shouldn’t be placed there.

Adjectives can be used as nouns (well established elsewhere), so the issue with “a male”/“a female” is not that it’s fundamentally wrong but a question of connotation; and sometimes it is actually the only right thing, especially when not talking about (adult) humans.

But yeah, I also basically had to be told, because language courses tend to not teach political connotations, especially give that these connotations tend to develop over time, sometimes rapidly. I haven’t heard anyone use the term “negro” colloquially in a while, and you would probably catch some looks for that today, but in MLK’s time this was just fine…

it’s also not okay then to call trans women “male” or trans men “female”

@august yeah, cuz it's still misgendering!

@august Of course not: Trans women are:

* women
* female
* biologically female, if on HRT (I will die on that hill too!)
* trans

Using the adjectives as nouns has a correlation with problematic views that justifies investigating further, but using them like this is just flat out misgendering and objectively wrong, because it’s not what those words mean.

@august corporate needs you to find the difference between these two pictures