In my writing, if I’m going to refer to someone as “female” it’s usually because I’m also going to refer to someone else as “male” in that same context.

This new trend is kind of annoying because I wrote a book about sapient magical sugar gliders and since they’re not humans, I referred to them as “male” and “female”. That made the writing feel way too parochial and, well, awful so I came up with special words for male and female children and adults for the species instead.

Young females were called “kaydees” and the males were “keedos”. The species as a whole was named “kads”.

I actually had a reader say it was “a bad smell” that I used the word “female” too often (they did a search for that but not “male”, sigh).