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Feminist Instagram Claims Referring to Women as Females is ‘Degrading’

Photo by Gayatri Malhotra on Unsplash

The popular Instagram account “Feminist” has declared that referring to women as “females” is “degrading” — these “feminists” would rather the more humanizing terms like “chest feeder” and “birthing person.”

In three short bullet points, the Instagram community called the word “female” when used to describe women “reductive,” “misogynistic,” and “dehumanizing.”

“‘Female’ is a biological term to describe sex, and is often used in medical or scientific descriptions of human and animal bodies,” Feminist writes. “It is an extremely binary and narrow way to describe what makes us human — are we just a sum of our body parts? Are we defined by biological or reproductive function? It also doesn’t include all people who identify as women.”

The post continued, claiming that the term is “used as a way to sexualize, discriminate, or reduce women to offensive stereotypes.” Finally, the post claims that referring to women as “females” is dehumanizing because it’s “nearly always used by men to describe women. Women rarely refer to each other as ‘females’ or to men as ‘males.'” (Is there any quantitative evidence the writer has to support this odd and irrelevant claim? Or are they simply pulling these “facts” out of thin air? Spoiler alert: it’s the latter.) “The terms ‘female’ and ‘male’ are most commonly used when describing animals, like ‘female tiger’ or ‘male dog.’ Describing women as ‘females’ strips them of their humanity.”

The Feminist page is known for its eye-catching graphics and shockingly progressive takes, but when Instagram users take a moment to read through the content, they’re often left with a lot of questions. It doesn’t exactly help that the page restricts its comments section, limiting who can critique posts such as this.

The word “female” does accurately describe sex, which is the biological state of all women. Yes, the words “woman” and “female” are synonymous because both are objectively true and rooted in reality. What the writer of this post is actually searching for isn’t gender identity, but personality. We as human beings are not defined merely by our biological parts, but our sex is. Personalities, however, can be infinitely different and are able to define who you are in a different capacity. A person’s sex is not meant to be their personality trait.

The post also claims that the word “female,” when used to refer to women, is either too clinical or too sexist. It’s either a term used to “sexualize” women or a term to “describe a tiger” — apparently. See the fault in this logic? A clinical term isn’t sexual, and a sexual term isn’t clinical.

The comments that did make the cut weren’t very satisfied with the arguments presented by the either. One user wrote, “Female . . . feminist . . . do we need a new name for [the Instagram page] feminist as well since its origin is Female?? Derived from the Latin word femina which means woman.” Another wrote, “I am confused as to how we have got this far? I identify as a female, so why is this dehumanizing or degrading? I find these kind of posts to be pushing the impressionable in the wrong direction. I am a feminist but this is one step too far in my opinion. You are enforcing people to believe referring to a ‘woman’ as a female as politically incorrect when it is not.”

Some users were simply not putting up with it — and I’m here for it. “I don’t have time or the emotional capacity to be this sensitive.”

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