Young people gathered in Berlin’s central Potsdamer Square on Thursday and marched through the German capital to protest against the government’s plans to reintroduce military service. While the police counted around 3,000 participants, organizers claimed there were 6,000 demonstrators in Berlin and 50,000 in more than 130 towns and cities across Germany.
English is not my first language, so please do not judge my language too harshly. Can you tell me what I should have used here? Because I know “male” and “female” is the official translation of the german gov for my sex/gender in my passport , f.e. used here. So why is it wrong?
So you never learned basic English? And now you have to refer to your passport in order to be able to distinguish men from women? lol, sure bro.
Man/men, woman/women, people, humans.
Male and female are adjectives to describe sex. Man and woman are cultural gender roles, which would be the right choice here.
Probably a bit complicated in some cases, as all this a a fairly recent cultural topic and some people actively struggle with a changing culture that‘s not strongly patriarchal, but either way, male and female is something you use maybe in more clinical or scientific settings, i.e. a female human.
Using female for woman is a bit like using „Weib“ in German.
Ok, I know learned that you attacked me for no reason. Do you know what? Military service in germany does not work like you think in regards of gender. And german law also does not work like that. As you might know we have the “Selbstbestimmungsgesetz” allowing you to legally change your “Geschlecht” (which is not the Gender you are talking about) and that law has a part that states that you can’t change your Geschlecht in the case of a war (“Spannungsfall”) in order to get around the draft. So military service is really only mandatory for “males” (or to be correct: for the german “Männer”) and having a different cultural gender role will not exempt you.
So please don’t go around and accuse people of sexism if you have no idea what you are actually talking about. Different countries really have different laws about those topics. And german law is totally not having this difference between sex and gender.
I know in Spanish «male» and «female» is used in a biological way, as in «a male human», so calling a woman «a female» (or a man «a male») is seen as treating them as animals, as not the same as you. I think it’s the same in English (as the r/MenAndFemales Reddit page suggests), but I can’t confirm this in any dictionary.
I really feel that I stumbled into a kind of crazy debate. I googled around and you can find articles referring to “males” and “females” in a human context from the most reliable sources. Wikipedia does it. The NIH does it. You can find it in newspapers like the Guardian. You can find statistics from the world bank about “females” and “males” per country. And then you have a vicious debate on Reddit (and here) where users are attacking others as sexist if they use the term.
English is not my native language, but I am not sure where this is coming from. The animal connection doesn’t seem to be correct to me as the general usage just seems to be a plural of “male” and “female”? And some people seem to think that “men” and “women” would be better terms, but those terms are usually referring to adults and not boys and girls?
Here’s a German native with that same question. So yes, it seems like a loaded term, but a very common one.
Yes, from what I’ve seen that’s also a problem, because people use «men» and «girl», so a child term for women and an adult term for men. I think the point is to use the adult form, if you’re not talking about literal children.