i'm not a
female|

please, just call me by my gender! 🙄

why not “a female” or “a male”?

  • those words describe sex, not gender.

    gender is about our identity and expression – things that actually matter in our everyday lives. “biological sex”, on the other hand, relates to things like chromosomes, gonads, genitals – if you're not someone's doctor or something, then focusing on them so much is… kinda creepy 😬

A drawing of a gingerbread person with its brain labeled “Identity”, heart labeled “Attraction”, a transgender symbol in the location of genitals labeled “Sex”, and overall body labeled “Expression”.

  • they're biological terms

    they're mostly used for animals (who don't have genders). think of nature documentaries and sentences like “the male tries to seduce the female with his birdsong”.

    sure, humans are part of the animal kingdom too. but we're undeniably different from other animals – reducing us to only our “zoological” nature while dismissing culture and civilisation is quite insulting.

A picture of an orange bird sitting on a branch in a forest and singing

  • it makes you sound like a cop

    law enforcement uses those terms to distance themselves from the perp's humanity.

    think of sentences like “the officers have identified a 45yo black male as a primary suspect, he was resisting arrest and got fatally wounded as a result”.

Screenshot of a police blotter from Bronx Times with the word “male” in search box, indicating 26 usages

  • it makes you sound like an incel

    “females” and even “femoids” or “foids” is a common vocabulary among incels – they don't consider women fully human and emphasise it in the language they use.

Screenshot from an article on “Incels wiki” that says: Femoid is a derogatory term used in the incel community to refer to a woman. "Femoid" comes from the contraction of the word "female" and "android" (robot), to emphasize the allegedly icy nature of women.[1] Another version of the expression is "foid", a contraction of "femoid". Another derogatory term used in the incel community to refer to women is "toilet".

  • it makes you sound like a transphobe

    transphobes are obsessed with people's genitals at birth and deliberately emphasise someone's “biological sex” to misgender them.

    they literally made “adult human female” their identification mark.

A screenshot of a Twitter seach for “Adult human female” showing multiple TERF profiles

  • the usage is usually not symmetrical, skewed against women

    There's an entire subreddit, /r/MenAndFemales, collecting instances of people using “a female” and “a man” in the same sentence (as well as infantalising adult women as “girls”).

A screenshot of a news article that says: Police said the 73-year-old resident of the building shot and killed three men and two females and wounded a 66-year-old, who is in hospital.

  • it makes you sound like a ferengi

    srsly, just stop

A meme of Quark from Deep Space 9 (from an alien race called Ferengi) saying “Females”

why not “a they/them”, “a she/her”, etc.?

  • people aren't pronouns

    pronouns are just parts of speech, they're tools that we use to communicate and to describe ourselves and the world around us. just because someone wants to be referred to using a particular set of pronouns, doesn't mean you should see their entire personhood as if it was solely defined by that fact.

Photo of a person holding a small whiteboard on which it's written in a rainbowy font: “Hello. My pronouns are (blank)/(blank)”

  • not all nonbinary people use “they/them”

    as a matter of fact, every person regardless of gender can use whatever pronouns they want. many enbies use binary forms (“she/her”, “he/him”), many use neopronouns (like “xe/xem”, “fæ/fær”). don't just assume.

Screenshot of a list of popular pronoun sets from the website Pronouns.page

  • its usage is not symmetrical, skewed against trans people

    i don't think i've ever seen a cis person described with “she's a she/her” or “he's a he/him”. for some reason people only tend to do that when they talk about trans and gender non-conforming people. almost as if they didn't treat our identity seriously or something…

Photo of a person holding a sign “Smash the patriarchy” up in the air during a demonstration

instead try…

“a woman”

simple as that. there's a perfectly good word to describe a woman that has none of the problems mentioned above. just call women “women” 🤷

“a man”

yup! this simple trick also works for men!

“an enby”*

well, to be honest, some nonbinary people don't like this word, because it was originally meant be an equivalent to “girl” and “boy”, not “woman” and “man”. although, it seems like adults are actually embracing it as well 😉

“a nonbinary person”

it's a bit long, sure… but calling a nonbinary person “a nonbinary person” is a definitely a safe and respectful way to describe / address them.

“a person”

because, well… how often does it really matter what gender someone is? we're all people. you can't go wrong with simply calling a person “a person”.