I hope that you can extend some grace to people born in different eras. When I hear something like “woman employee,” I hear my Greatest Generation grandparents, and believe me, neither “woman doctor” or “woman driver,” nor any similar construction was complimentary.
I think it was the Boomers who started to use “female” as an adjective, because it sounded clinical, descriptive, and non-judgemental. So “female employee” sounds much better to my ear. (But, FWIW, the use of “female” as a noun is total cringe.)
Yeah, inceldom has coopted the word, and now I hear that “woman doctor” is preferred, but it’s not always easy to remember that on the fly when you grew up with the opposite connotation.
Only if we let them, and anyone who does is an incompetent advocate choosing to let sexists decide the meaning of words for everyone else when everyone else has at least as much power to do otherwise.
It’s complacent cooperation with the enemy that purports ethical superiority while being the opposite.
Older activists who understood the pitfalls of establishing their own stigmatization in the language at least had the sense not to cooperate with their enemies.
They’d more creatively reappropriate or reclaim words or embrace them as terms of pride.
That lesson seems lost here.
My comment was more about the use of “female” as a noun, but your comment about which to use as an adjective raises an interesting point, especially because, as you mention, the generation to regularly say things like “woman doctor” in a not-so-great way has mostly died out. I’m not sure where things stand currently on which adjective is preferred; I think it’s mostly contextual at the moment? (Like “I would feel more comfortable being examined by a woman doctor” sounds grammatically a touch clunky but connotatively fine to me, whereas “I can’t believe what that idiot female doctor diagnosed me with” sounds grammatically correct but otherwise awful)
I hope that you can extend some grace to people born in different eras. When I hear something like “woman employee,” I hear my Greatest Generation grandparents, and believe me, neither “woman doctor” or “woman driver,” nor any similar construction was complimentary.
I think it was the Boomers who started to use “female” as an adjective, because it sounded clinical, descriptive, and non-judgemental. So “female employee” sounds much better to my ear. (But, FWIW, the use of “female” as a noun is total cringe.)
Yeah, inceldom has coopted the word, and now I hear that “woman doctor” is preferred, but it’s not always easy to remember that on the fly when you grew up with the opposite connotation.
how much I hate the euphemism treadmill.
Only if we let them, and anyone who does is an incompetent advocate choosing to let sexists decide the meaning of words for everyone else when everyone else has at least as much power to do otherwise. It’s complacent cooperation with the enemy that purports ethical superiority while being the opposite.
Older activists who understood the pitfalls of establishing their own stigmatization in the language at least had the sense not to cooperate with their enemies. They’d more creatively reappropriate or reclaim words or embrace them as terms of pride. That lesson seems lost here.
My comment was more about the use of “female” as a noun, but your comment about which to use as an adjective raises an interesting point, especially because, as you mention, the generation to regularly say things like “woman doctor” in a not-so-great way has mostly died out. I’m not sure where things stand currently on which adjective is preferred; I think it’s mostly contextual at the moment? (Like “I would feel more comfortable being examined by a woman doctor” sounds grammatically a touch clunky but connotatively fine to me, whereas “I can’t believe what that idiot female doctor diagnosed me with” sounds grammatically correct but otherwise awful)