In the last few years there's been a hyperfocus on restricting genders that has caused a minority of native-English speakers to start overusing the word "female" with extra emphasis: which may be leading to learners to consider it a normal word to use casually, but historically it has mainly been applied in formal medical/scientific settings.
I think this is accurate. In fact, my grandmother would have said 'ladies' or 'girls' ('gals') rather than 'women'.
"To me" is the key bit here. I'm conscious of this particular issue since I've run into it on the internet a few times. Whenever I've mentioned it to a woman in a face to face conversation (in the UK) they've looked at me like I was barking mad. I even corrected my mother (she referred to "females" when talking about women) which resulted in a lengthy tirade. She is old though to be fair.
I blame the Ferengi.
>Most people who word things that way don't use the term "males" in a similar way
Conversely, I'm not sure many people are keeping track of this since no-one objects to be called male if they're a man.
What sounds odd to you can be perfectly normal to others.
> Don't push your biases onto me.
Might want to try taking your own advice.
Please show me where I did any of:
- Assume why people are using the words they are
- Assume why people care/don't care about a certain issue
- Tried to force my values onto people.
Saying "if you didn't know, wording things this way can come off weird. Maybe try X instead? No pressure (:" is very different from "yeah well obviously your intent here is X [because of the last few years]." I'm not here to force people to change. But if people didn't know something, and do want to change on their own, I'd rather the information be there for them if they want it.
What I did say is that you're pushing your biases onto others while simultaneously telling others not to do the same thing.
Your life experiences have led you to the point today where you object to a certain use of the word "female". That's fine.
But taking your personal objection, which is not a universially agreed upon truth, and using it to lecture someone else in a condescending "you must not know English" way is another matter and probably why you're catching heat right now.
Yes incels are utterly annoying despicable broken records of tediously uncreative low quality mental illness, i also strongly dislike them - but for monolinguist americans to start to paint with such an absurdly wide brush is far worse. Choose your bloody battles.
By "it sounds weird" you actually mean "in the past few years there's been a movement to hyperfocus on this small language quirk that nobody really cared about in the past". Just so we're clear.