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skeletorfw@lemmy.world 1 year agoSorry, bit of a long one here, but bear with me ♥️
Specifically it is more often in the phrase “biological females”.
It’s a very unnatural way to refer to a person, and as such is usually a very specifically chosen wording. In a very literal sense everyone who can be described as female can also be described as biological, however here the term has an implied delineation in it. A “biological” and a “non-biological” or “artificial” female. This is where the anti-transness comes in; the appeal to nature of “artificial” women being inferior to the “biological” women.
Now there’s an extra little bit of subtlety here in that it often is contextual. Usually you would not refer to a person as a female as a noun, but rather as female as an adjective. There is a significant subset of people thus who use “female” as a noun either as a substitute for “biological female” or sometimes just as a chauvinistic way of dehumanising women. Either way it’s rarely a good look.
The anti-trans movement, and the right wing in general has a distinct trend in not quite saying what they mean too. So in the same way that the right wing will demonise “groomers”, “scroungers”, and “the woke left” (i.e. LGBTQ+ people, the homeless, anyone that will call them out), the TERFs will demonise the implied “non-biological” females.
It is a parlour trick, an extremely thin veneer of plausible deniability that means they can go “nooooo you’re overreacting, I never SAID that I hate trans people, I just don’t like it when people deny that biology exists”. It’s a way of shutting down arguments so the right wing can say whatever they want with impunity.
Tldr: some nasty folk use “females” as a shorthand for “biological human females” which is a very terfy phrase in the same way as “blood and soil” is very distinctly fascistic.
In this particular case however I don’t think that the reddit OP was being a terf and the mods were definitely just flat out wrong.
porkins@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
If bad people adopt a word or mannerism, does that become immediately cancelled from the acceptable lexicon. Shouldn’t Webster’s update their dictionary or something. Is their a rule book. It is hard to keep up with the times. In the context of classifying the content of an image in a very scientific manner, the poster correctly identified that this person was the female gender based upon their outward appearance. Are we really going to get to a point where we can’t assume someone is male or female and have to refer to everyone as a person and they/them until the person has identified themselves. As someone edging upon 40, that reality seems overly complex and makes it feel like everyone has to walk a fine line or be cancelled.
skeletorfw@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Not at all, but it does add context. I’m sure you agree the phrase “build a wall” has a significantly different implication to what it had in 2005.
Well a dictionary is descriptive, and so describes how people use words. It’ll change with societal meaning as it always has.
I am very much a scientist here specifically I am a biologist but we weren’t doing science in this meme were we? More specifically we weren’t asking what gender the people in the image had.
Nonetheless maybe it’s easier to think of gender like a name. You are given one at birth and you don’t get to choose it. For the majority of people they’re okay with their name. Others feel that their name doesn’t fit them and so change it. If you don’t know someone’s name then I assume you don’t just call them “Bob”, you probably ask them what their name is. Same goes with pronouns, you can just ask. Or if they seem like if you ask they’ll punch your face in, maybe just assume, that is okay in context.
In the end we’re not very different in age, I do understand that the world changes and adds an extra load to the stresses you already face. That said it really is just a case of trying not to assume too much and bring chill if someone says “hey actually I’d prefer they rather than she”. You are really unlikely to get cancelled by anyone that matters if you just say “oh of course, I’ll remember that”.
I say that as someone who has definitely put my foot in it many times before when not understanding a social nuance and making a faux pas.