• maynarkh
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    2
    ·
    12 days ago

    ESL person question here - isn’t “male” used as an adjective more than a noun? If you used “pregnant female” as a counterpart, it would sound weird to me, like we were talking about rabbits, not people.

    • MindTraveller@lemmy.ca
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      3
      ·
      12 days ago

      As an enby who was assigned male at birth, there’s a decent chance my penis could get somebody pregnant. I’d rather be referred to as a male than a man or a father. They’re all quite unappealing and untrue terms, but male is the most true out of them. I could have used the word seeder, but that’s less well known.

      • maynarkh
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        12 days ago

        I understand, then male would mean “people with a penis”?

        • MindTraveller@lemmy.ca
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          12 days ago

          Maleness is a complex many-faceted social construct unifying a set of correlated patterns in genetics, endocrinology, musculoskelature, reproductive biology, and possibly neurology. I’m mostly not male, but I do have the parts of maleness that relate to producing and delivering semen, and it might even be fertile.