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sudo wrote

Reply to comment by Catsforfun in by !deleted1759

Yeah, that's using male/female as a noun, which is also wrong (they are adjectives). So I guess it is people trying to avoid using the word "female" as a noun, but overextending and avoiding using it properly as an adjective, and instead opting for woman/women as an adjective, which sounds weird and wrong.

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yaaqov wrote

On what grounds is it "wrong" to use 'male' and 'female' as nouns? Who decides that?

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sudo wrote

Common usage. Besides, if you say, "I saw a female walking down the street the other day," not only will you sound like the Ferengi, but that implies that you don't respect that person's humanity. We can refer to animals as "males" and "females", but don't refer to people that way.

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yaaqov wrote (edited )

I mean... people do refer to people that way, in some contexts, just as some people (as we have seen just in this thread) use 'man' and 'woman' as adjectives. When is exactly is usage "common" enough to be common usage?

Let me be clear about what I'm trying to push against: It's not that I think it's necessarily good to refer to people using 'male' and 'female' as nouns. (In fact, it's probably harmful in the sense that referring to people we don't know by gendered labels in the first place helps maintain violent cisheteropatriarchal views of gender.)

Rather, I don't think it's useful to think about some particular structure of language (which in my view includes the distributions of particular words) as being 'right' or 'wrong' in the first place. Language is arbitrary, and each variation on the human linguistic faculty that exists—whether a "distinct language", a local or socially-restricted dialect or variety, or the idiosyncratic usages of one person or social circle—is equally valid, equally expressive, equally "logical". In constructing some language structure as better, or making more sense, or whatever, than another, we're perpetuating the same ideas that allow for classist and racist understandings of the language of some some people as being inherently broken, illogical, primitive, limited, or alternatively, as being more nuanced, more structured, more pure, more intelligent, etc.

Now, you might see a contradiction in what I've said here given that I just conceded that some language usage (gendering people on sight, in this case) can be harmful. I think it's both possible and necessary to draw a distinction between linguistic structures on one hand, and how we choose to use whatever given language we're using, on the other. I can say shitty things in any language; what structures my language has—whether it doesn't show tense on verbs (eg Mandarin, Guaraní), or makes you say what evidence you have for whatever you're asserting (eg Turkish, Aymara) or doesn't have gender distinctions in pronouns (eg Hungarian, Korean most of the time), or has more or less sounds than, say, English happens to have (like Hindi or Hawaiian respectively)—has nothing to do with what I can or do say with that language.

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