I cringe every time I hear another guy refer to women like this
I had a woman boss who would always refer to women as female (like “you know the manager of that department is a female?!”). I’m still not sure how I feel about it.
I think the best response is always “you don’t know that”. Sex and Gender are not the same thing, and adults should know by now that they can’t tell what’s in someone else’s pants by looking at their face.
First it doesn’t really matter what’s between their legs unless you intend to date them. It’s easy enough to determine what most people identify as and thus what you ought to treat them as.
That said you can tell what virtually everyone has in there pants. 99.5% of people are cisgender. Of the people who are transgender it is usually not terribly hard to see most of the time both what their birth gender is and what gender they identify as which is why its pretty trivial to be polite. Although it is impossible to tell if someone has had surgery at least in the US you could bet on no and be right most of the time because of cost and inequality around here.
Male or female = sex = what’s in their pants.
Man or woman = gender = how they express and identify.
While I recognize that some may use these terms differently, I find that having a strict sex/gender seperation for them in my personal use helps greatly in keeping the concepts distinct and having empathy for those whose gender is not sex-conformant.
That it also leads to a pithy rebuttal to “what is a woman” bigotry is just a nice side effect. Apologies if my usage was not immediately apparent.
Well I did once explain the difference between sex and gender as she seemed confused and was unable to wrap her head around a colleague using they/them, but that led to a slightly vacant yet patronising expression on her face. Also, call me a coward but I’m not going to clap back at my own goddamn boss, I prefer my working days to not be more of a living hell than they already are. Regardless, she’s retired now.
I know it’s a really awkward phrasing, but “I had a boss, who was a woman…” sounded even more awkward to me than just “woman boss” 🤷♂️.
