It's international women's day. Lots of articles and toots are being posted about women in various industries, sports etc...
An unfortunately far too common phrasing will be to use the word "females" instead of women, or girls, or women and girls. Now there's a strong grammatical argument that says female is an adjective and should only be used as such. "Female engineer" "female president" "female assassin". But this hides a much darker historical reason why we shouldn't use "females"
1/n
The rest of this thread is behind a CW.
Back in the 1800's a surgeon in the US was doing some unethical research that would go on to form the basis of the medical discipline of gynaecology. To do this, he experimented on white women, and black slave women. When publishing his findings, he didn't want to humanise the black women he was using as test subjects. So he described them as "females". This is the origin of the usage.
2/n
An interesting idea, but it originated much, much earlier in Europe. Derived from Latin and frequently used here.
https://www.etymonline.com/word/female
I'd prefer not to use any word that adds us to a male word, eg male to female, man to women, he to she. There are languages that are less patriarchal, so English adopted words such as uncle and aunt, son and daugther. Or ones which both have a suffix or prefix such as father and mother.
Quixoticgeek
Tiggy
