While we’re on the subject of sex-related vocabulary, Holly of The Pervocracy reminds me of a tic that annoys me to no end.

I hate it when people call women “females.” I have one friend who does it because she was in the military and it was standard practice there, and occasionally I’ll say it when I specifically mean biological females rather than women, but 98% of the time it’s douchebaggery. Rule of thumb: if you say “females and males” it’s okay, but if you say “females and guys/men,” you’re probably a douchebag.

She said it here.

It really isn’t exclusive to misogynists: for instance the otherwise perfectly accessible bell hooks has the same completely annoying tic going the other way, and as Holly says they do the same thing to both genders in the military and, to a lesser extent, in police organizations.*

In the military or police it makes a little sense to put that layer of abstraction — it’s way easier to see or say (or, yikes, do!) when you can say something like “minor female down” rather than “a little girl is badly injured.” But whereas that sort of psychological separation might make it easier for soldiers, police, firefighters, or EMTs remain dispassionate in emotionally-charged situations, that kind of distancing is problematic in the extreme when you humanize one sex but “animalize” or objectify another.

At the very least it sounds alienated. At worst it sounds ominously creepy.

* While walking through a shopping mall I once overheard a mall cop pretentiously instructing a janitor that there had been some sort of disturbance “in the females’ restroom.”

Summary: This is more abstract than even I usually get it’s about a point Bond makes about a very concrete consequence of confusing gender and sex. The resulting mockery interfered with what might otherwise have become a perfectly unexceptionable relationship.

Bond of Dear Diaspora has what amounts to a lovely tone poem about the difference between sex and gender.

Butches are not men.

Butches are not failed men. Butches are not fake men. Butches are not wannabe men. Butches are not imitation or ersatz men. Butches are not men.

Butches can be and usually are mannish, manly, and masculine. But butches are not men.

What we need, and badly, is language to talk about butchness without deference to maleness. We need ways to celebrate butch gender specifically, distinct and definite, hale and whole.

Read the quote in context here.

I’m sure the same can be said of the need to talk about femme-ness (or feyness or whatever you want to call it) without dragging femaleness into it.

Bond was speaking by the way of a friend of a friend who, trying to relate to her crush on a butch-y woman in the face of her own comfortable lesbianism, chose to deprecate that woman’s “masculinity.” Which is, on the face of it, a compound absurdity.

Not absurdity in the sense of wariness of a sex towards which one isn’t oriented. Absurdity in the sense of confusing the assumed behavior and appearance of someone you’re oriented to with a sex you’re not oriented to. And absurd in the sense of assuming that a set of behaviors and appearance makes you of one sex or another. As opposed to, you know, being one sex or another. (Including, by the way, being trans or intersex which I get the repeated and distinct impression is about being what you are instead of how a majority of other people look or act.)

Finding language that allows separation of gender from sex would be pretty helpful in a lot of ways. Not least would be that it could be just one more of a way of being, like, say, sportiness or piousness or vegetarianism, than rule of biological conformity that can get you mocked, clocked, excluded, or assaulted for not having a sufficiency of.

Oof. That all sounds pretty abstract. If you’re still with me let’s look at examples: Mr. Rogers was a man. Bond is a woman. By most cultural signifiers Bond is almost certainly more “masculine” than was Mr. Rogers. Bond is most comfortable the way she is. Rogers was most comfortable the way he was. Yet, because of the way their pee-pees were shaped other people feel privileged to make judgments about both: for the comfort of others she should be more “womanly;” more “manly.” And yet both were, in Bond’s lovely words, “distinct and definite, hale and whole.”

Along the same lines, by the way, I remember a friend, herself a bit butch more often than not, returning from a week on Fire Island where she wound up rooming with a bunch of gay transvestites. She said one night they decided to dress her up so they could all go out partying. And dress her they did, and dressed her hair, and made up her face, and even gave her tips on how to move, shimmy, and turn her face and eyes. She said she’s never looked more gorgeously feminine in her life. But that there was a bit of competitiveness about it, like, she said, they were telling you “‘this is how you do it right, girlfriend,’ as if they thought they were better at being women than I was.”

See what I mean? It’s only weird if you equate “femininity” with being a woman. Or, in Mr. Rogers or Bond’s case or the case of the uncomfortable lesbian she mentioned, confusing being “masculine” with being man.

Point being that if you’re going to bother having these constructed and adopted aspects called “gender” the least we could do is cultivate language that disambiguates them from handed-to-us-at-birth attributes like biological sex, somatic bodies, sexual identities, and sexual orientations.