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On July 05 2026 07:19 Liquid`Drone wrote:
I mean, I just asked my wife 'do you think there's anything problematic about the term female tournaments' and she didn't understand the question. When I clarified that it was about using female as opposed to woman/women, she chuckled and said no.
She's a far left individual whose most recent job was as a PhD candidate specializing on political communication/emotions on social media. Presumably- more in tune to this stuff than your average individual.
There's a point where microaggressions are so small that paying heed to them is counterproductive because the request/demand will largely be considered unreasonable even by people who are broadly in ideological agreement with you. I think this is an example of that.
It's like, in the world cup, before the national anthems, they say 'please rise' (if you're able). I obviously don't mind that they added 'if you're able' - but I would find it ridiculous if they didn't include it and someone wrote an angry letter about how 'please rise' was offensive to the wheelchair bound.
My wife, who doesn’t have yours qualifications but does annually help with the schools pride float which we ride on, and is left. Said “what? That’s stupid? What does he even mean?”
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On July 05 2026 06:55 Artesimo wrote:Show nested quote +On July 05 2026 06:47 WombaT wrote:On July 05 2026 06:39 Simberto wrote:On July 05 2026 06:36 EnDeR_ wrote:On July 05 2026 06:20 Dan HH wrote:On July 05 2026 05:56 Billyboy wrote:On July 05 2026 05:22 Dan HH wrote:On July 05 2026 04:00 Gorsameth wrote:On July 05 2026 03:15 Liquid`Drone wrote:
Why is female problematic? That is a genuine question, because I don't get it. Because its 'the tournament' and 'the female tournament' Male is the default, female is the 'other'. Ofcourse GH doesn't actually answer a question and can't give an answer because he doesn't have one and doesn't give a shit. he just wants to claim to be high and might and presumably boost his ego by feeling like he is 'better'. He sure as shit isn't here to discuss or educate anyone because he can't answer basic fucking questions. 'The tournament' doesn't have a male requirement, women can and sometimes do participate. It makes sense to only label the restrictive type. That said I do find the word 'female' a bit weird and gamery, would rather use 'women's tournaments' like most other sports/competitions do. Sure but anyone getting mad at it is just looking for a reason to be mad, and if not this something else. It would be especially questionable if the person mad about it constantly complains that the thread is not talking about the hard hitting issues. On July 05 2026 06:00 Liquid`Drone wrote:On July 05 2026 05:22 Dan HH wrote:On July 05 2026 04:00 Gorsameth wrote:On July 05 2026 03:15 Liquid`Drone wrote:
Why is female problematic? That is a genuine question, because I don't get it. Because its 'the tournament' and 'the female tournament' Male is the default, female is the 'other'. Ofcourse GH doesn't actually answer a question and can't give an answer because he doesn't have one and doesn't give a shit. he just wants to claim to be high and might and presumably boost his ego by feeling like he is 'better'. He sure as shit isn't here to discuss or educate anyone because he can't answer basic fucking questions. 'The tournament' doesn't have a male requirement, women can and sometimes do participate. It makes sense to only label the restrictive type. That said I do find the word 'female' a bit weird and gamery, would rather use 'women's tournaments' like most other sports/competitions do. I mean I can get behind female being a bit weird, in an awkward nerd kind of way, but I still can't understand how it is offensive. Aside from that I agree with the first point, at least in esports you don't have men only tournaments, so labeling them the men and women tourneys would be factually wrong. But either way the idea that 'female tournament' as opposed to 'women's tournament' is a cause of outrage is just ridiculous. If we said tournament for hoes and bitches, then yeah, sure, fight us on that, but female isn't offensive, no more than male would be. I agree it's not offensive or some big outrage, just a bit cold in the context of a community/hobby group since we're used to seeing male and female in data, or nature documentaries, or medical and police reports, and impersonal contexts like that. This may be explicitly a US issue then. We always referred to male and female students when I was in the UK and there didn't seem to be any baggage attached to the word "female". Is that the whole thing GH's argument hinges on? I think it is about the incel-style somewhat dehumanizing usage of "females" as a noun to describe women and girls. But i agree that i don't think this extends to female as an adjective. That after pages one has to ‘think’ what GH’s point is actually based on probably speaks poorly on him as a communicator. I would agree 100% that the incel sphere use ‘female’ in a generally dehumanising manner. Equally I don’t think it invalidates its use as a descriptor at all, there’s just some unfortunate associations. I thought the incel one was "femoid" or something like that. If they indeed just use "Female" now then my stance on that would be firmly "we can't let these clowns dictate out language". Its a normal word, already in everyday use, and overall this would just be the alt right dogwhistle bullshit all over again. They use an either ridiculous or normal term for their heinous shit, the normies catch up on it with a bit of a delay, have overreaction to it, alt right moves on, picks another term and points fingers at the rest making a fuzz over a word that is now harmless again. You can't win that by letting them dictate language, you need actions that show "this is not what we mean when saying female", not a different word. In general that is what seems to always be missing in the first place, actions that speak louder than the big nono words.
I'm just catching up on the discussion now - I've been away for most of the day - and I'd like to share my understanding of the issue.
I think everyone has brought up different ways where the word "female" (or similar words) may or may not be perceived as microaggressions... or at least awkward. One more related example: changing an adjective to a noun - like "the females" or "the gays" or "the Blacks" - is also no longer used by most people because it defines someone as that (and only that) trait.
If you say "gay people" or "the Black community" or "women" (i.e., "female people"), then you're still humanizing those individuals and just using the adjective for additional context. Some of this is semantics and I'm sure a lot of this doesn't translate well or matter to everyone, but marginalized communities have historically been reduced to a single aspect of their identity, and an argument could be made that calling them the noun version of that trait perpetuates that prejudice.
Now, that's only the first part of this two-part thought process: changing the adjective to a noun is one thing, but what's wrong with the adjective itself? Can't we use "female" as an appropriate and accurate adjective without it being seen as offensive? My answer is: usually yes, but there are some unique situations where the wording is adjacent enough to the first part that it's been poisoned even as an adjective.
We say our pets are male or female, and that's fine because not everyone uses a collective term that indicates "male dogs" or "female cats" (and in fact, we even humanize them by saying they're a good boy or a good girl), and we can use "assigned male or female at birth" when talking about a person's sexual identity. However, even with good intentions, saying "Female League" or "Female Team" or "Female Sport Association" doesn't quite work the same way. "The men's team" is said almost universally, yet there are still conversations about whether we need to match that wording with "The women's team" - which I think is still said most of the time, thankfully - or whether we can also say "The female team". The men's team refers to "a team of men". The women's team refers to "a team of women". And even though "female" is used as an adjective in "the female team", it is reasonably adjacent to "a team of females", which is a problematic use of a noun as per part one. It's essentially been tainted by association.
We also have Women's Tennis Association, Women's National Basketball Association, National Women's Soccer League, Professional Women's Hockey League, and more. They use "Women", not "Female", and if that's their preferred name, then I'm going to respect it and use it, even if I didn't think it was a big deal.
Now with all this being said, GH first brought up this issue when they criticized you for writing "I can tell you what I have done, I build up and coached some female cs teams." But your sentence right before that one is "Lets purity check on this, what have you done to further say women in gaming?" So it's not like you were refusing to use the ideal term of "women", and you were clearly making a good-faith effort to contribute over the past few pages. This was a missed opportunity for an interesting academic conversation about sociological nuance, and I think it was mostly because GH started off by demonizing everyone, hyper-focusing on a single word instead of the overall posts, and not elaborating on their concern when they were prompted to do so.
Edit: Corrected pronouns.
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On July 05 2026 06:35 Simberto wrote:
I think i get what GH is on about here. There is a very specific incel type usage of the word "female" as a noun that does indeed try to remove humanity from women, and which is indeed not acceptable. But that does not mean that any use of the word female falls in that category. For example, i do not think that this subtext is present when using female as an adjective, because there simply is no other adjective for this.
Yes, it's very clear that GH encountered some of that discourse, misunderstood it, and thought "female" was problematic even as an adjective.
Which I find really fucking funny.
When confronted with this, he had to deflect like crazy.
That said, I think DBP's post right above mine has it pretty right.
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I desperately hope that some day we get to the point where the biggest issue in sexism, hell all the isms is female compared to girl or women. But for now, what a fucking waste of time.
Lucky the guy driving the conversation doesn’t constantly complain about people fixating on the little shit l, instead of tackling the big main issues. Because that would be hella embarrassing…
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Northern Ireland27272 Posts
On July 05 2026 10:17 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:Show nested quote +On July 05 2026 06:55 Artesimo wrote:On July 05 2026 06:47 WombaT wrote:On July 05 2026 06:39 Simberto wrote:On July 05 2026 06:36 EnDeR_ wrote:On July 05 2026 06:20 Dan HH wrote:On July 05 2026 05:56 Billyboy wrote:On July 05 2026 05:22 Dan HH wrote:On July 05 2026 04:00 Gorsameth wrote:On July 05 2026 03:15 Liquid`Drone wrote:
Why is female problematic? That is a genuine question, because I don't get it. Because its 'the tournament' and 'the female tournament' Male is the default, female is the 'other'. Ofcourse GH doesn't actually answer a question and can't give an answer because he doesn't have one and doesn't give a shit. he just wants to claim to be high and might and presumably boost his ego by feeling like he is 'better'. He sure as shit isn't here to discuss or educate anyone because he can't answer basic fucking questions. 'The tournament' doesn't have a male requirement, women can and sometimes do participate. It makes sense to only label the restrictive type. That said I do find the word 'female' a bit weird and gamery, would rather use 'women's tournaments' like most other sports/competitions do. Sure but anyone getting mad at it is just looking for a reason to be mad, and if not this something else. It would be especially questionable if the person mad about it constantly complains that the thread is not talking about the hard hitting issues. On July 05 2026 06:00 Liquid`Drone wrote:On July 05 2026 05:22 Dan HH wrote:On July 05 2026 04:00 Gorsameth wrote:On July 05 2026 03:15 Liquid`Drone wrote:
Why is female problematic? That is a genuine question, because I don't get it. Because its 'the tournament' and 'the female tournament' Male is the default, female is the 'other'. Ofcourse GH doesn't actually answer a question and can't give an answer because he doesn't have one and doesn't give a shit. he just wants to claim to be high and might and presumably boost his ego by feeling like he is 'better'. He sure as shit isn't here to discuss or educate anyone because he can't answer basic fucking questions. 'The tournament' doesn't have a male requirement, women can and sometimes do participate. It makes sense to only label the restrictive type. That said I do find the word 'female' a bit weird and gamery, would rather use 'women's tournaments' like most other sports/competitions do. I mean I can get behind female being a bit weird, in an awkward nerd kind of way, but I still can't understand how it is offensive. Aside from that I agree with the first point, at least in esports you don't have men only tournaments, so labeling them the men and women tourneys would be factually wrong. But either way the idea that 'female tournament' as opposed to 'women's tournament' is a cause of outrage is just ridiculous. If we said tournament for hoes and bitches, then yeah, sure, fight us on that, but female isn't offensive, no more than male would be. I agree it's not offensive or some big outrage, just a bit cold in the context of a community/hobby group since we're used to seeing male and female in data, or nature documentaries, or medical and police reports, and impersonal contexts like that. This may be explicitly a US issue then. We always referred to male and female students when I was in the UK and there didn't seem to be any baggage attached to the word "female". Is that the whole thing GH's argument hinges on? I think it is about the incel-style somewhat dehumanizing usage of "females" as a noun to describe women and girls. But i agree that i don't think this extends to female as an adjective. That after pages one has to ‘think’ what GH’s point is actually based on probably speaks poorly on him as a communicator. I would agree 100% that the incel sphere use ‘female’ in a generally dehumanising manner. Equally I don’t think it invalidates its use as a descriptor at all, there’s just some unfortunate associations. I thought the incel one was "femoid" or something like that. If they indeed just use "Female" now then my stance on that would be firmly "we can't let these clowns dictate out language". Its a normal word, already in everyday use, and overall this would just be the alt right dogwhistle bullshit all over again. They use an either ridiculous or normal term for their heinous shit, the normies catch up on it with a bit of a delay, have overreaction to it, alt right moves on, picks another term and points fingers at the rest making a fuzz over a word that is now harmless again. You can't win that by letting them dictate language, you need actions that show "this is not what we mean when saying female", not a different word. In general that is what seems to always be missing in the first place, actions that speak louder than the big nono words. I'm just catching up on the discussion now - I've been away for most of the day - and I'd like to share my understanding of the issue. I think everyone has brought up different ways where the word "female" (or similar words) may or may not be perceived as microaggressions... or at least awkward. One more related example: changing an adjective to a noun - like "the females" or "the gays" or "the Blacks" - is also no longer used by most people because it defines someone as that (and only that) trait. If you say "gay people" or "the Black community" or "women" (i.e., "female people"), then you're still humanizing those individuals and just using the adjective for additional context. Some of this is semantics and I'm sure a lot of this doesn't translate well or matter to everyone, but marginalized communities have historically been reduced to a single aspect of their identity, and an argument could be made that calling them the noun version of that trait perpetuates that prejudice. Now, that's only the first part of this two-part thought process: changing the adjective to a noun is one thing, but what's wrong with the adjective itself? Can't we use "female" as an appropriate and accurate adjective without it being seen as offensive? My answer is: usually yes, but there are some unique situations where the wording is adjacent enough to the first part that it's been poisoned even as an adjective. We say our pets are male or female, and that's fine because not everyone uses a collective term that indicates "male dogs" or "female cats" (and in fact, we even humanize them by saying they're a good boy or a good girl), and we can use "assigned male or female at birth" when talking about a person's sexual identity. However, even with good intentions, saying "Female League" or "Female Team" or "Female Sport Association" doesn't quite work the same way. "The men's team" is said almost universally, yet there are still conversations about whether we need to match that wording with "The women's team" - which I think is still said most of the time, thankfully - or whether we can also say "The female team". The men's team refers to "a team of men". The women's team refers to "a team of women". And even though "female" is used as an adjective in "the female team", it is reasonably adjacent to "a team of females", which is a problematic use of a noun as per part one. It's essentially been tainted by association. We also have Women's Tennis Association, Women's National Basketball Association, National Women's Soccer League, Professional Women's Hockey League, and more. They use "Women", not "Female", and if that's their preferred name, then I'm going to respect it and use it, even if I didn't think it was a big deal. Now all this being said, GH first brought up this issue when critiquing Artesimo for writing "I can tell you what I have done, I build up and coached some female cs teams." But Artesimo's sentence right before that one is "Lets purity check on this, what have you done to further say women in gaming?" So it's not like Artesimo is refusing to use the ideal term of "women", and Artesimo was clearly making a good-faith effort to contribute over the past few pages. This was a missed opportunity for an interesting academic conversation about sociological nuance, and I think it was mostly because GH started off by demonizing everyone, hyper-focusing on a single word instead of the overall posts, and not elaborating on his concern when he was prompted to do so.
It’s almost like GH is chatting absolute shite, to use some of my local vernacular.
Coulda been an interesting discussion. Wasn’t. Hey I tried, Artemiso tried. It’s an area that interests me.
Completely fucking pointless. I look forward to the next GH lecture about how our collective discourse is fruitless having witnessed him completely derailing a thread and being unable to answer simple questions about his positions at absolutely every juncture imaginable.
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Northern Ireland27272 Posts
On July 05 2026 11:29 Billyboy wrote:
I desperately hope that some day we get to the point where the biggest issue in sexism, hell all the isms is female compared to girl or women. But for now, what a fucking waste of time.
Lucky the guy driving the conversation doesn’t constantly complain about people fixating on the little shit l, instead of tackling the big main issues. Because that would be hella embarrassing…
Ye of little faith. I’m sure GH’s nebulous ‘organising’ sees him do way more for women in gaming than someone who actively set up coaching sessions and competition for women players.
I’m sure his piety is justified by him simply being better than the rest of us and doing way more tangible things for his causes.
I can only assume his inability to bring any kind of receipts on any of this is just because he’s so damn humble. Which also makes him better than the rest of us
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I actually struggled with how to refer to the team. The women in the team kept referring to the team as the 'girls' team', even though they were mostly in their 30s. I never felt comfortable saying the "girl's team" and it got even more confusing when they kept saying to each other "come on guys, let's go!" And stuff like that. I asked how I should say it, and the answer was some combination of 'whatever' and 'just don't say gals, that makes me feel old'.
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United States44247 Posts
What in the world is this nonsense.
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On July 05 2026 11:59 WombaT wrote:Show nested quote +On July 05 2026 10:17 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On July 05 2026 06:55 Artesimo wrote:On July 05 2026 06:47 WombaT wrote:On July 05 2026 06:39 Simberto wrote:On July 05 2026 06:36 EnDeR_ wrote:On July 05 2026 06:20 Dan HH wrote:On July 05 2026 05:56 Billyboy wrote:On July 05 2026 05:22 Dan HH wrote:On July 05 2026 04:00 Gorsameth wrote:
[quote]Because its 'the tournament' and 'the female tournament'
Male is the default, female is the 'other'.
Ofcourse GH doesn't actually answer a question and can't give an answer because he doesn't have one and doesn't give a shit. he just wants to claim to be high and might and presumably boost his ego by feeling like he is 'better'.
He sure as shit isn't here to discuss or educate anyone because he can't answer basic fucking questions. 'The tournament' doesn't have a male requirement, women can and sometimes do participate. It makes sense to only label the restrictive type. That said I do find the word 'female' a bit weird and gamery, would rather use 'women's tournaments' like most other sports/competitions do. Sure but anyone getting mad at it is just looking for a reason to be mad, and if not this something else. It would be especially questionable if the person mad about it constantly complains that the thread is not talking about the hard hitting issues. On July 05 2026 06:00 Liquid`Drone wrote:On July 05 2026 05:22 Dan HH wrote:On July 05 2026 04:00 Gorsameth wrote:
[quote]Because its 'the tournament' and 'the female tournament'
Male is the default, female is the 'other'.
Ofcourse GH doesn't actually answer a question and can't give an answer because he doesn't have one and doesn't give a shit. he just wants to claim to be high and might and presumably boost his ego by feeling like he is 'better'.
He sure as shit isn't here to discuss or educate anyone because he can't answer basic fucking questions. 'The tournament' doesn't have a male requirement, women can and sometimes do participate. It makes sense to only label the restrictive type. That said I do find the word 'female' a bit weird and gamery, would rather use 'women's tournaments' like most other sports/competitions do. I mean I can get behind female being a bit weird, in an awkward nerd kind of way, but I still can't understand how it is offensive. Aside from that I agree with the first point, at least in esports you don't have men only tournaments, so labeling them the men and women tourneys would be factually wrong. But either way the idea that 'female tournament' as opposed to 'women's tournament' is a cause of outrage is just ridiculous. If we said tournament for hoes and bitches, then yeah, sure, fight us on that, but female isn't offensive, no more than male would be. I agree it's not offensive or some big outrage, just a bit cold in the context of a community/hobby group since we're used to seeing male and female in data, or nature documentaries, or medical and police reports, and impersonal contexts like that. This may be explicitly a US issue then. We always referred to male and female students when I was in the UK and there didn't seem to be any baggage attached to the word "female". Is that the whole thing GH's argument hinges on? I think it is about the incel-style somewhat dehumanizing usage of "females" as a noun to describe women and girls. But i agree that i don't think this extends to female as an adjective. That after pages one has to ‘think’ what GH’s point is actually based on probably speaks poorly on him as a communicator. I would agree 100% that the incel sphere use ‘female’ in a generally dehumanising manner. Equally I don’t think it invalidates its use as a descriptor at all, there’s just some unfortunate associations. I thought the incel one was "femoid" or something like that. If they indeed just use "Female" now then my stance on that would be firmly "we can't let these clowns dictate out language". Its a normal word, already in everyday use, and overall this would just be the alt right dogwhistle bullshit all over again. They use an either ridiculous or normal term for their heinous shit, the normies catch up on it with a bit of a delay, have overreaction to it, alt right moves on, picks another term and points fingers at the rest making a fuzz over a word that is now harmless again. You can't win that by letting them dictate language, you need actions that show "this is not what we mean when saying female", not a different word. In general that is what seems to always be missing in the first place, actions that speak louder than the big nono words. I'm just catching up on the discussion now - I've been away for most of the day - and I'd like to share my understanding of the issue. I think everyone has brought up different ways where the word "female" (or similar words) may or may not be perceived as microaggressions... or at least awkward. One more related example: changing an adjective to a noun - like "the females" or "the gays" or "the Blacks" - is also no longer used by most people because it defines someone as that (and only that) trait. If you say "gay people" or "the Black community" or "women" (i.e., "female people"), then you're still humanizing those individuals and just using the adjective for additional context. Some of this is semantics and I'm sure a lot of this doesn't translate well or matter to everyone, but marginalized communities have historically been reduced to a single aspect of their identity, and an argument could be made that calling them the noun version of that trait perpetuates that prejudice. Now, that's only the first part of this two-part thought process: changing the adjective to a noun is one thing, but what's wrong with the adjective itself? Can't we use "female" as an appropriate and accurate adjective without it being seen as offensive? My answer is: usually yes, but there are some unique situations where the wording is adjacent enough to the first part that it's been poisoned even as an adjective. We say our pets are male or female, and that's fine because not everyone uses a collective term that indicates "male dogs" or "female cats" (and in fact, we even humanize them by saying they're a good boy or a good girl), and we can use "assigned male or female at birth" when talking about a person's sexual identity. However, even with good intentions, saying "Female League" or "Female Team" or "Female Sport Association" doesn't quite work the same way. "The men's team" is said almost universally, yet there are still conversations about whether we need to match that wording with "The women's team" - which I think is still said most of the time, thankfully - or whether we can also say "The female team". The men's team refers to "a team of men". The women's team refers to "a team of women". And even though "female" is used as an adjective in "the female team", it is reasonably adjacent to "a team of females", which is a problematic use of a noun as per part one. It's essentially been tainted by association. We also have Women's Tennis Association, Women's National Basketball Association, National Women's Soccer League, Professional Women's Hockey League, and more. They use "Women", not "Female", and if that's their preferred name, then I'm going to respect it and use it, even if I didn't think it was a big deal. Now all this being said, GH first brought up this issue when critiquing Artesimo for writing "I can tell you what I have done, I build up and coached some female cs teams." But Artesimo's sentence right before that one is "Lets purity check on this, what have you done to further say women in gaming?" So it's not like Artesimo is refusing to use the ideal term of "women", and Artesimo was clearly making a good-faith effort to contribute over the past few pages. This was a missed opportunity for an interesting academic conversation about sociological nuance, and I think it was mostly because GH started off by demonizing everyone, hyper-focusing on a single word instead of the overall posts, and not elaborating on his concern when he was prompted to do so. It’s almost like GH is chatting absolute shite, to use some of my local vernacular. Coulda been an interesting discussion. Wasn’t. Hey I tried, Artemiso tried. It’s an area that interests me. Completely fucking pointless. I look forward to the next GH lecture about how our collective discourse is fruitless having witnessed him completely derailing a thread and being unable to answer simple questions about his positions at absolutely every juncture imaginable.
A simple "some women find it dehumanising when you refer to them as female or from the female team" would've been enough.
I hope both of you don't get turned off by this and continue doing things for the community. I stopped coaching when I moved and I don't think I have the energy to start again, it's so much effort.
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How fun that we have gotten derailed first by the one side of the horse shoe and their favorite issue and then by the other side with their mocking, gawking and purity testing, and that is the extent of US politics discussion on the 250th anniversary of the country.
Given how the last 10 years of US politics went I think it's kind of perfect, I can't say that this is the type of content that keeps me interested and engaged with the topic but I can't deny that it's very appropriate.
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Authentic fascists versus political correctness lunatics doing virtue signaling is indeed kind of a good painting of the state of US politics these days.
What’s a pity is that there is very little politics in all of that. Reading people defend a bumbling idiot’s serial blunders and crimes because they are too small to admit they fucked up voting for him is about as interesting as hearing about what GH - or rather whoever he is parrotting - finds “problematic”.
So happy not to live in the US.
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On July 05 2026 10:17 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:Show nested quote +On July 05 2026 06:55 Artesimo wrote:On July 05 2026 06:47 WombaT wrote:On July 05 2026 06:39 Simberto wrote:On July 05 2026 06:36 EnDeR_ wrote:On July 05 2026 06:20 Dan HH wrote:On July 05 2026 05:56 Billyboy wrote:On July 05 2026 05:22 Dan HH wrote:On July 05 2026 04:00 Gorsameth wrote:On July 05 2026 03:15 Liquid`Drone wrote:
Why is female problematic? That is a genuine question, because I don't get it. Because its 'the tournament' and 'the female tournament' Male is the default, female is the 'other'. Ofcourse GH doesn't actually answer a question and can't give an answer because he doesn't have one and doesn't give a shit. he just wants to claim to be high and might and presumably boost his ego by feeling like he is 'better'. He sure as shit isn't here to discuss or educate anyone because he can't answer basic fucking questions. 'The tournament' doesn't have a male requirement, women can and sometimes do participate. It makes sense to only label the restrictive type. That said I do find the word 'female' a bit weird and gamery, would rather use 'women's tournaments' like most other sports/competitions do. Sure but anyone getting mad at it is just looking for a reason to be mad, and if not this something else. It would be especially questionable if the person mad about it constantly complains that the thread is not talking about the hard hitting issues. On July 05 2026 06:00 Liquid`Drone wrote:On July 05 2026 05:22 Dan HH wrote:On July 05 2026 04:00 Gorsameth wrote:On July 05 2026 03:15 Liquid`Drone wrote:
Why is female problematic? That is a genuine question, because I don't get it. Because its 'the tournament' and 'the female tournament' Male is the default, female is the 'other'. Ofcourse GH doesn't actually answer a question and can't give an answer because he doesn't have one and doesn't give a shit. he just wants to claim to be high and might and presumably boost his ego by feeling like he is 'better'. He sure as shit isn't here to discuss or educate anyone because he can't answer basic fucking questions. 'The tournament' doesn't have a male requirement, women can and sometimes do participate. It makes sense to only label the restrictive type. That said I do find the word 'female' a bit weird and gamery, would rather use 'women's tournaments' like most other sports/competitions do. I mean I can get behind female being a bit weird, in an awkward nerd kind of way, but I still can't understand how it is offensive. Aside from that I agree with the first point, at least in esports you don't have men only tournaments, so labeling them the men and women tourneys would be factually wrong. But either way the idea that 'female tournament' as opposed to 'women's tournament' is a cause of outrage is just ridiculous. If we said tournament for hoes and bitches, then yeah, sure, fight us on that, but female isn't offensive, no more than male would be. I agree it's not offensive or some big outrage, just a bit cold in the context of a community/hobby group since we're used to seeing male and female in data, or nature documentaries, or medical and police reports, and impersonal contexts like that. This may be explicitly a US issue then. We always referred to male and female students when I was in the UK and there didn't seem to be any baggage attached to the word "female". Is that the whole thing GH's argument hinges on? I think it is about the incel-style somewhat dehumanizing usage of "females" as a noun to describe women and girls. But i agree that i don't think this extends to female as an adjective. That after pages one has to ‘think’ what GH’s point is actually based on probably speaks poorly on him as a communicator. I would agree 100% that the incel sphere use ‘female’ in a generally dehumanising manner. Equally I don’t think it invalidates its use as a descriptor at all, there’s just some unfortunate associations. I thought the incel one was "femoid" or something like that. If they indeed just use "Female" now then my stance on that would be firmly "we can't let these clowns dictate out language". Its a normal word, already in everyday use, and overall this would just be the alt right dogwhistle bullshit all over again. They use an either ridiculous or normal term for their heinous shit, the normies catch up on it with a bit of a delay, have overreaction to it, alt right moves on, picks another term and points fingers at the rest making a fuzz over a word that is now harmless again. You can't win that by letting them dictate language, you need actions that show "this is not what we mean when saying female", not a different word. In general that is what seems to always be missing in the first place, actions that speak louder than the big nono words. I'm just catching up on the discussion now - I've been away for most of the day - and I'd like to share my understanding of the issue. I think everyone has brought up different ways where the word "female" (or similar words) may or may not be perceived as microaggressions... or at least awkward. One more related example: changing an adjective to a noun - like "the females" or "the gays" or "the Blacks" - is also no longer used by most people because it defines someone as that (and only that) trait. If you say "gay people" or "the Black community" or "women" (i.e., "female people"), then you're still humanizing those individuals and just using the adjective for additional context. Some of this is semantics and I'm sure a lot of this doesn't translate well or matter to everyone, but marginalized communities have historically been reduced to a single aspect of their identity, and an argument could be made that calling them the noun version of that trait perpetuates that prejudice. Now, that's only the first part of this two-part thought process: changing the adjective to a noun is one thing, but what's wrong with the adjective itself? Can't we use "female" as an appropriate and accurate adjective without it being seen as offensive? My answer is: usually yes, but there are some unique situations where the wording is adjacent enough to the first part that it's been poisoned even as an adjective. We say our pets are male or female, and that's fine because not everyone uses a collective term that indicates "male dogs" or "female cats" (and in fact, we even humanize them by saying they're a good boy or a good girl), and we can use "assigned male or female at birth" when talking about a person's sexual identity. However, even with good intentions, saying "Female League" or "Female Team" or "Female Sport Association" doesn't quite work the same way. "The men's team" is said almost universally, yet there are still conversations about whether we need to match that wording with "The women's team" - which I think is still said most of the time, thankfully - or whether we can also say "The female team". The men's team refers to "a team of men". The women's team refers to "a team of women". And even though "female" is used as an adjective in "the female team", it is reasonably adjacent to "a team of females", which is a problematic use of a noun as per part one. It's essentially been tainted by association. We also have Women's Tennis Association, Women's National Basketball Association, National Women's Soccer League, Professional Women's Hockey League, and more. They use "Women", not "Female", and if that's their preferred name, then I'm going to respect it and use it, even if I didn't think it was a big deal. Now with all this being said, GH first brought up this issue when he criticized you for writing "I can tell you what I have done, I build up and coached some female cs teams." But your sentence right before that one is "Lets purity check on this, what have you done to further say women in gaming?" So it's not like you were refusing to use the ideal term of "women", and you were clearly making a good-faith effort to contribute over the past few pages. This was a missed opportunity for an interesting academic conversation about sociological nuance, and I think it was mostly because GH started off by demonizing everyone, hyper-focusing on a single word instead of the overall posts, and not elaborating on his concern when he was prompted to do so.
I understand the nuances on how and why normal seeming words can be seen as bad, I just don't feel like this here in a meaningful way. Ofc I am not a native english speaker and not from the US, so maybe I am missing a whole lot of nuance and context, but to me this really seems like looking for an issue rather than there being an issue. I quipped at it earlier that I could just as much come up with reasons why "women" would be a bad term. I understand now how "female" could be seen as a bad word to use there - but it just isn't. Not by any women that I asked about it, and others have shared how their spouses feel about it. Like you said, whatever they prefer overall I am happy to use, the problem is that in the last decades, science discovered that women are in fact not a hive mind, they display a shocking amount of individualism and independent characters. Some may indeed not be happy with the term "female tournament" or "female league", and once I encounter them I am happy to temporarily accommodate that. But if the vast majority is fine with it, then I really don't see any point in making a general change there, and the only time where objecting to to the term seemed reasonable to me would be when someone who I know objects to the term "female" is present, and then you would do it in a diplomatic "quickly take the person speaking aside and tell them that someone would prefer if they'd say "women" instead.
Language is fuzzy and imperfect, I am happy to work on mine if necessary, but if the issue seems so fringe and also feels a bit retroactively justified, then I am out sorry.
A different example would be gender neutral language. It is something I struggle quite a bit with since my native language is heavily gendered, and referring to someone in a gender neutral way often reminds me of rhetoric that is aimed at denying someone their humanity or personhood. But I also understand that this is not the case in english, that there is a much higher chance someone I interact with in the online community is trans/nonbinary, that there is a very real issue of dipshits deliberately misgendering trans/nonbinary people. And it is not just the full blown dipshits, its also people who I would see as general more normal, just not as tolerant as I would like, and non trans- /binary people would also often take offence with being addressed by the wrong pronoun. So that is a pretty clear cut example of "yep, gotta work on changing that" because the harm is very clearly to see, the bad intentions of some of the people using wrong pronouns is clear to see, it is an issue that comes up commonly enough, it is extremely easy to find an affected person who is hurt by it.
The female/Female issue here just doesn't seem to have any of that. It strikes me as a online leftist issue, created in one of their bubbles, not because its an actual issue, but mainly because they need an issue. To see the harm you have to do bring out a longer explanation and basically create a case for it, it is only used in bad faith by a small group of massive dipshits, it seems very difficult to find someone who would themselves be affected by this and who are genuinely offended by it.
Like a counter example to the women's soccer league would be that in cs there are a bunch of womens teams who carry "female" in the name, or an abbreviation of it - and its usually the og roster that picks or at least has a strong influence on the name. So I'll be happy to start caring about that issue once there is more of a consensus among the people affected by it, until then I firmly stick to "yeah fuck the incels, I am not playing their game" and "sorry I was not aware you object to that term, I will try remembering it in the future in your presence. feel free to remind me when I slip up".
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On July 05 2026 18:26 Artesimo wrote:Show nested quote +On July 05 2026 10:17 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On July 05 2026 06:55 Artesimo wrote:On July 05 2026 06:47 WombaT wrote:On July 05 2026 06:39 Simberto wrote:On July 05 2026 06:36 EnDeR_ wrote:On July 05 2026 06:20 Dan HH wrote:On July 05 2026 05:56 Billyboy wrote:On July 05 2026 05:22 Dan HH wrote:On July 05 2026 04:00 Gorsameth wrote:
[quote]Because its 'the tournament' and 'the female tournament'
Male is the default, female is the 'other'.
Ofcourse GH doesn't actually answer a question and can't give an answer because he doesn't have one and doesn't give a shit. he just wants to claim to be high and might and presumably boost his ego by feeling like he is 'better'.
He sure as shit isn't here to discuss or educate anyone because he can't answer basic fucking questions. 'The tournament' doesn't have a male requirement, women can and sometimes do participate. It makes sense to only label the restrictive type. That said I do find the word 'female' a bit weird and gamery, would rather use 'women's tournaments' like most other sports/competitions do. Sure but anyone getting mad at it is just looking for a reason to be mad, and if not this something else. It would be especially questionable if the person mad about it constantly complains that the thread is not talking about the hard hitting issues. On July 05 2026 06:00 Liquid`Drone wrote:On July 05 2026 05:22 Dan HH wrote:On July 05 2026 04:00 Gorsameth wrote:
[quote]Because its 'the tournament' and 'the female tournament'
Male is the default, female is the 'other'.
Ofcourse GH doesn't actually answer a question and can't give an answer because he doesn't have one and doesn't give a shit. he just wants to claim to be high and might and presumably boost his ego by feeling like he is 'better'.
He sure as shit isn't here to discuss or educate anyone because he can't answer basic fucking questions. 'The tournament' doesn't have a male requirement, women can and sometimes do participate. It makes sense to only label the restrictive type. That said I do find the word 'female' a bit weird and gamery, would rather use 'women's tournaments' like most other sports/competitions do. I mean I can get behind female being a bit weird, in an awkward nerd kind of way, but I still can't understand how it is offensive. Aside from that I agree with the first point, at least in esports you don't have men only tournaments, so labeling them the men and women tourneys would be factually wrong. But either way the idea that 'female tournament' as opposed to 'women's tournament' is a cause of outrage is just ridiculous. If we said tournament for hoes and bitches, then yeah, sure, fight us on that, but female isn't offensive, no more than male would be. I agree it's not offensive or some big outrage, just a bit cold in the context of a community/hobby group since we're used to seeing male and female in data, or nature documentaries, or medical and police reports, and impersonal contexts like that. This may be explicitly a US issue then. We always referred to male and female students when I was in the UK and there didn't seem to be any baggage attached to the word "female". Is that the whole thing GH's argument hinges on? I think it is about the incel-style somewhat dehumanizing usage of "females" as a noun to describe women and girls. But i agree that i don't think this extends to female as an adjective. That after pages one has to ‘think’ what GH’s point is actually based on probably speaks poorly on him as a communicator. I would agree 100% that the incel sphere use ‘female’ in a generally dehumanising manner. Equally I don’t think it invalidates its use as a descriptor at all, there’s just some unfortunate associations. I thought the incel one was "femoid" or something like that. If they indeed just use "Female" now then my stance on that would be firmly "we can't let these clowns dictate out language". Its a normal word, already in everyday use, and overall this would just be the alt right dogwhistle bullshit all over again. They use an either ridiculous or normal term for their heinous shit, the normies catch up on it with a bit of a delay, have overreaction to it, alt right moves on, picks another term and points fingers at the rest making a fuzz over a word that is now harmless again. You can't win that by letting them dictate language, you need actions that show "this is not what we mean when saying female", not a different word. In general that is what seems to always be missing in the first place, actions that speak louder than the big nono words. I'm just catching up on the discussion now - I've been away for most of the day - and I'd like to share my understanding of the issue. I think everyone has brought up different ways where the word "female" (or similar words) may or may not be perceived as microaggressions... or at least awkward. One more related example: changing an adjective to a noun - like "the females" or "the gays" or "the Blacks" - is also no longer used by most people because it defines someone as that (and only that) trait. If you say "gay people" or "the Black community" or "women" (i.e., "female people"), then you're still humanizing those individuals and just using the adjective for additional context. Some of this is semantics and I'm sure a lot of this doesn't translate well or matter to everyone, but marginalized communities have historically been reduced to a single aspect of their identity, and an argument could be made that calling them the noun version of that trait perpetuates that prejudice. Now, that's only the first part of this two-part thought process: changing the adjective to a noun is one thing, but what's wrong with the adjective itself? Can't we use "female" as an appropriate and accurate adjective without it being seen as offensive? My answer is: usually yes, but there are some unique situations where the wording is adjacent enough to the first part that it's been poisoned even as an adjective. We say our pets are male or female, and that's fine because not everyone uses a collective term that indicates "male dogs" or "female cats" (and in fact, we even humanize them by saying they're a good boy or a good girl), and we can use "assigned male or female at birth" when talking about a person's sexual identity. However, even with good intentions, saying "Female League" or "Female Team" or "Female Sport Association" doesn't quite work the same way. "The men's team" is said almost universally, yet there are still conversations about whether we need to match that wording with "The women's team" - which I think is still said most of the time, thankfully - or whether we can also say "The female team". The men's team refers to "a team of men". The women's team refers to "a team of women". And even though "female" is used as an adjective in "the female team", it is reasonably adjacent to "a team of females", which is a problematic use of a noun as per part one. It's essentially been tainted by association. We also have Women's Tennis Association, Women's National Basketball Association, National Women's Soccer League, Professional Women's Hockey League, and more. They use "Women", not "Female", and if that's their preferred name, then I'm going to respect it and use it, even if I didn't think it was a big deal. Now with all this being said, GH first brought up this issue when he criticized you for writing "I can tell you what I have done, I build up and coached some female cs teams." But your sentence right before that one is "Lets purity check on this, what have you done to further say women in gaming?" So it's not like you were refusing to use the ideal term of "women", and you were clearly making a good-faith effort to contribute over the past few pages. This was a missed opportunity for an interesting academic conversation about sociological nuance, and I think it was mostly because GH started off by demonizing everyone, hyper-focusing on a single word instead of the overall posts, and not elaborating on his concern when he was prompted to do so. I understand the nuances on how and why normal seeming words can be seen as bad, I just don't feel like this here in a meaningful way. Ofc I am not a native english speaker and not from the US, so maybe I am missing a whole lot of nuance and context, but to me this really seems like looking for an issue rather than there being an issue. I quipped at it earlier that I could just as much come up with reasons why "women" would be a bad term. I understand now how "female" could be seen as a bad word to use there - but it just isn't. Not by any women that I asked about it, and others have shared how their spouses feel about it. Like you said, whatever they prefer overall I am happy to use, the problem is that in the last decades, science discovered that women are in fact not a hive mind, they display a shocking amount of individualism and independent characters. Some may indeed not be happy with the term "female tournament" or "female league", and once I encounter them I am happy to temporarily accommodate that. But if the vast majority is fine with it, then I really don't see any point in making a general change there, and the only time where objecting to to the term seemed reasonable to me would be when someone who I know objects to the term "female" is present, and then you would do it in a diplomatic "quickly take the person speaking aside and tell them that someone would prefer if they'd say "women" instead. Language is fuzzy and imperfect, I am happy to work on mine if necessary, but if the issue seems so fringe and also feels a bit retroactively justified, then I am out sorry. A different example would be gender neutral language. It is something I struggle quite a bit with since my native language is heavily gendered, and referring to someone in a gender neutral way often reminds me of rhetoric that is aimed at denying someone their humanity or personhood. But I also understand that this is not the case in english, that there is a much higher chance someone I interact with in the online community is trans/nonbinary, that there is a very real issue of dipshits deliberately misgendering trans/nonbinary people. And it is not just the full blown dipshits, its also people who I would see as general more normal, just not as tolerant as I would like, and non trans- /binary people would also often take offence with being addressed by the wrong pronoun. So that is a pretty clear cut example of "yep, gotta work on changing that" because the harm is very clearly to see, the bad intentions of some of the people using wrong pronouns is clear to see, it is an issue that comes up commonly enough, it is extremely easy to find an affected person who is hurt by it. The female/Female issue here just doesn't seem to have any of that. It strikes me as a online leftist issue, created in one of their bubbles, not because its an actual issue, but mainly because they need an issue. To see the harm you have to do bring out a longer explanation and basically create a case for it, it is only used in bad faith by a small group of massive dipshits, it seems very difficult to find someone who would themselves be affected by this and who are genuinely offended by it. Like a counter example to the women's soccer league would be that in cs there are a bunch of womens teams who carry "female" in the name, or an abbreviation of it - and its usually the og roster that picks or at least has a strong influence on the name. So I'll be happy to start caring about that issue once there is more of a consensus among the people affected by it, until then I firmly stick to "yeah fuck the incels, I am not playing their game" and "sorry I was not aware you object to that term, I will try remembering it in the future in your presence. feel free to remind me when I slip up".
I think those are all reasonable points, and I think you're totally fine with how you're handling language. No judgment from me 
To repeat the most important point that we all already know: we can always just ask the individual or the team if they have a preference for what labels to use or not use (women, ladies, females, girls, gals, guys, everyone, you all, pronouns like she/her, etc.). Communication and transparency are great ways to show respect and thoughtfulness, and then after the ideal language is quickly established - if they even care - everyone can focus on the actual tasks and training and competing!
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On July 05 2026 20:20 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:Show nested quote +On July 05 2026 18:26 Artesimo wrote:On July 05 2026 10:17 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On July 05 2026 06:55 Artesimo wrote:On July 05 2026 06:47 WombaT wrote:On July 05 2026 06:39 Simberto wrote:On July 05 2026 06:36 EnDeR_ wrote:On July 05 2026 06:20 Dan HH wrote:On July 05 2026 05:56 Billyboy wrote:On July 05 2026 05:22 Dan HH wrote:
[quote]
'The tournament' doesn't have a male requirement, women can and sometimes do participate. It makes sense to only label the restrictive type. That said I do find the word 'female' a bit weird and gamery, would rather use 'women's tournaments' like most other sports/competitions do. Sure but anyone getting mad at it is just looking for a reason to be mad, and if not this something else. It would be especially questionable if the person mad about it constantly complains that the thread is not talking about the hard hitting issues. On July 05 2026 06:00 Liquid`Drone wrote:On July 05 2026 05:22 Dan HH wrote:
[quote]
'The tournament' doesn't have a male requirement, women can and sometimes do participate. It makes sense to only label the restrictive type. That said I do find the word 'female' a bit weird and gamery, would rather use 'women's tournaments' like most other sports/competitions do. I mean I can get behind female being a bit weird, in an awkward nerd kind of way, but I still can't understand how it is offensive. Aside from that I agree with the first point, at least in esports you don't have men only tournaments, so labeling them the men and women tourneys would be factually wrong. But either way the idea that 'female tournament' as opposed to 'women's tournament' is a cause of outrage is just ridiculous. If we said tournament for hoes and bitches, then yeah, sure, fight us on that, but female isn't offensive, no more than male would be. I agree it's not offensive or some big outrage, just a bit cold in the context of a community/hobby group since we're used to seeing male and female in data, or nature documentaries, or medical and police reports, and impersonal contexts like that. This may be explicitly a US issue then. We always referred to male and female students when I was in the UK and there didn't seem to be any baggage attached to the word "female". Is that the whole thing GH's argument hinges on? I think it is about the incel-style somewhat dehumanizing usage of "females" as a noun to describe women and girls. But i agree that i don't think this extends to female as an adjective. That after pages one has to ‘think’ what GH’s point is actually based on probably speaks poorly on him as a communicator. I would agree 100% that the incel sphere use ‘female’ in a generally dehumanising manner. Equally I don’t think it invalidates its use as a descriptor at all, there’s just some unfortunate associations. I thought the incel one was "femoid" or something like that. If they indeed just use "Female" now then my stance on that would be firmly "we can't let these clowns dictate out language". Its a normal word, already in everyday use, and overall this would just be the alt right dogwhistle bullshit all over again. They use an either ridiculous or normal term for their heinous shit, the normies catch up on it with a bit of a delay, have overreaction to it, alt right moves on, picks another term and points fingers at the rest making a fuzz over a word that is now harmless again. You can't win that by letting them dictate language, you need actions that show "this is not what we mean when saying female", not a different word. In general that is what seems to always be missing in the first place, actions that speak louder than the big nono words. I'm just catching up on the discussion now - I've been away for most of the day - and I'd like to share my understanding of the issue. I think everyone has brought up different ways where the word "female" (or similar words) may or may not be perceived as microaggressions... or at least awkward. One more related example: changing an adjective to a noun - like "the females" or "the gays" or "the Blacks" - is also no longer used by most people because it defines someone as that (and only that) trait. If you say "gay people" or "the Black community" or "women" (i.e., "female people"), then you're still humanizing those individuals and just using the adjective for additional context. Some of this is semantics and I'm sure a lot of this doesn't translate well or matter to everyone, but marginalized communities have historically been reduced to a single aspect of their identity, and an argument could be made that calling them the noun version of that trait perpetuates that prejudice. Now, that's only the first part of this two-part thought process: changing the adjective to a noun is one thing, but what's wrong with the adjective itself? Can't we use "female" as an appropriate and accurate adjective without it being seen as offensive? My answer is: usually yes, but there are some unique situations where the wording is adjacent enough to the first part that it's been poisoned even as an adjective. We say our pets are male or female, and that's fine because not everyone uses a collective term that indicates "male dogs" or "female cats" (and in fact, we even humanize them by saying they're a good boy or a good girl), and we can use "assigned male or female at birth" when talking about a person's sexual identity. However, even with good intentions, saying "Female League" or "Female Team" or "Female Sport Association" doesn't quite work the same way. "The men's team" is said almost universally, yet there are still conversations about whether we need to match that wording with "The women's team" - which I think is still said most of the time, thankfully - or whether we can also say "The female team". The men's team refers to "a team of men". The women's team refers to "a team of women". And even though "female" is used as an adjective in "the female team", it is reasonably adjacent to "a team of females", which is a problematic use of a noun as per part one. It's essentially been tainted by association. We also have Women's Tennis Association, Women's National Basketball Association, National Women's Soccer League, Professional Women's Hockey League, and more. They use "Women", not "Female", and if that's their preferred name, then I'm going to respect it and use it, even if I didn't think it was a big deal. Now with all this being said, GH first brought up this issue when he criticized you for writing "I can tell you what I have done, I build up and coached some female cs teams." But your sentence right before that one is "Lets purity check on this, what have you done to further say women in gaming?" So it's not like you were refusing to use the ideal term of "women", and you were clearly making a good-faith effort to contribute over the past few pages. This was a missed opportunity for an interesting academic conversation about sociological nuance, and I think it was mostly because GH started off by demonizing everyone, hyper-focusing on a single word instead of the overall posts, and not elaborating on his concern when he was prompted to do so. I understand the nuances on how and why normal seeming words can be seen as bad, I just don't feel like this here in a meaningful way. Ofc I am not a native english speaker and not from the US, so maybe I am missing a whole lot of nuance and context, but to me this really seems like looking for an issue rather than there being an issue. I quipped at it earlier that I could just as much come up with reasons why "women" would be a bad term. I understand now how "female" could be seen as a bad word to use there - but it just isn't. Not by any women that I asked about it, and others have shared how their spouses feel about it. Like you said, whatever they prefer overall I am happy to use, the problem is that in the last decades, science discovered that women are in fact not a hive mind, they display a shocking amount of individualism and independent characters. Some may indeed not be happy with the term "female tournament" or "female league", and once I encounter them I am happy to temporarily accommodate that. But if the vast majority is fine with it, then I really don't see any point in making a general change there, and the only time where objecting to to the term seemed reasonable to me would be when someone who I know objects to the term "female" is present, and then you would do it in a diplomatic "quickly take the person speaking aside and tell them that someone would prefer if they'd say "women" instead. Language is fuzzy and imperfect, I am happy to work on mine if necessary, but if the issue seems so fringe and also feels a bit retroactively justified, then I am out sorry. A different example would be gender neutral language. It is something I struggle quite a bit with since my native language is heavily gendered, and referring to someone in a gender neutral way often reminds me of rhetoric that is aimed at denying someone their humanity or personhood. But I also understand that this is not the case in english, that there is a much higher chance someone I interact with in the online community is trans/nonbinary, that there is a very real issue of dipshits deliberately misgendering trans/nonbinary people. And it is not just the full blown dipshits, its also people who I would see as general more normal, just not as tolerant as I would like, and non trans- /binary people would also often take offence with being addressed by the wrong pronoun. So that is a pretty clear cut example of "yep, gotta work on changing that" because the harm is very clearly to see, the bad intentions of some of the people using wrong pronouns is clear to see, it is an issue that comes up commonly enough, it is extremely easy to find an affected person who is hurt by it. The female/Female issue here just doesn't seem to have any of that. It strikes me as a online leftist issue, created in one of their bubbles, not because its an actual issue, but mainly because they need an issue. To see the harm you have to do bring out a longer explanation and basically create a case for it, it is only used in bad faith by a small group of massive dipshits, it seems very difficult to find someone who would themselves be affected by this and who are genuinely offended by it. Like a counter example to the women's soccer league would be that in cs there are a bunch of womens teams who carry "female" in the name, or an abbreviation of it - and its usually the og roster that picks or at least has a strong influence on the name. So I'll be happy to start caring about that issue once there is more of a consensus among the people affected by it, until then I firmly stick to "yeah fuck the incels, I am not playing their game" and "sorry I was not aware you object to that term, I will try remembering it in the future in your presence. feel free to remind me when I slip up". I think those are all reasonable points, and I think you're totally fine with how you're handling language. No judgment from me To repeat the most important point that we all already know: we can always just ask the individual or the team if they have a preference for what labels to use or not use (women, ladies, females, girls, gals, guys, everyone, you all, preferred pronouns like she/her, etc.). + Show Spoiler + Communication and transparency are great ways to show respect and thoughtfulness, and then after the ideal language is quickly established - if they even care - everyone can focus on the actual tasks and training and competing!
So what's the opinion of TL's women's teams?
|
Mine is feeding the angry troll does more harm than good, in spite of the short term fun.
|
On July 05 2026 22:26 GreenHorizons wrote:Show nested quote +On July 05 2026 20:20 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On July 05 2026 18:26 Artesimo wrote:On July 05 2026 10:17 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On July 05 2026 06:55 Artesimo wrote:On July 05 2026 06:47 WombaT wrote:On July 05 2026 06:39 Simberto wrote:On July 05 2026 06:36 EnDeR_ wrote:On July 05 2026 06:20 Dan HH wrote:On July 05 2026 05:56 Billyboy wrote:
[quote]
Sure but anyone getting mad at it is just looking for a reason to be mad, and if not this something else.
It would be especially questionable if the person mad about it constantly complains that the thread is not talking about the hard hitting issues.
On July 05 2026 06:00 Liquid`Drone wrote:
[quote]
I mean I can get behind female being a bit weird, in an awkward nerd kind of way, but I still can't understand how it is offensive.
Aside from that I agree with the first point, at least in esports you don't have men only tournaments, so labeling them the men and women tourneys would be factually wrong. But either way the idea that 'female tournament' as opposed to 'women's tournament' is a cause of outrage is just ridiculous. If we said tournament for hoes and bitches, then yeah, sure, fight us on that, but female isn't offensive, no more than male would be. I agree it's not offensive or some big outrage, just a bit cold in the context of a community/hobby group since we're used to seeing male and female in data, or nature documentaries, or medical and police reports, and impersonal contexts like that. This may be explicitly a US issue then. We always referred to male and female students when I was in the UK and there didn't seem to be any baggage attached to the word "female". Is that the whole thing GH's argument hinges on? I think it is about the incel-style somewhat dehumanizing usage of "females" as a noun to describe women and girls. But i agree that i don't think this extends to female as an adjective. That after pages one has to ‘think’ what GH’s point is actually based on probably speaks poorly on him as a communicator. I would agree 100% that the incel sphere use ‘female’ in a generally dehumanising manner. Equally I don’t think it invalidates its use as a descriptor at all, there’s just some unfortunate associations. I thought the incel one was "femoid" or something like that. If they indeed just use "Female" now then my stance on that would be firmly "we can't let these clowns dictate out language". Its a normal word, already in everyday use, and overall this would just be the alt right dogwhistle bullshit all over again. They use an either ridiculous or normal term for their heinous shit, the normies catch up on it with a bit of a delay, have overreaction to it, alt right moves on, picks another term and points fingers at the rest making a fuzz over a word that is now harmless again. You can't win that by letting them dictate language, you need actions that show "this is not what we mean when saying female", not a different word. In general that is what seems to always be missing in the first place, actions that speak louder than the big nono words. I'm just catching up on the discussion now - I've been away for most of the day - and I'd like to share my understanding of the issue. I think everyone has brought up different ways where the word "female" (or similar words) may or may not be perceived as microaggressions... or at least awkward. One more related example: changing an adjective to a noun - like "the females" or "the gays" or "the Blacks" - is also no longer used by most people because it defines someone as that (and only that) trait. If you say "gay people" or "the Black community" or "women" (i.e., "female people"), then you're still humanizing those individuals and just using the adjective for additional context. Some of this is semantics and I'm sure a lot of this doesn't translate well or matter to everyone, but marginalized communities have historically been reduced to a single aspect of their identity, and an argument could be made that calling them the noun version of that trait perpetuates that prejudice. Now, that's only the first part of this two-part thought process: changing the adjective to a noun is one thing, but what's wrong with the adjective itself? Can't we use "female" as an appropriate and accurate adjective without it being seen as offensive? My answer is: usually yes, but there are some unique situations where the wording is adjacent enough to the first part that it's been poisoned even as an adjective. We say our pets are male or female, and that's fine because not everyone uses a collective term that indicates "male dogs" or "female cats" (and in fact, we even humanize them by saying they're a good boy or a good girl), and we can use "assigned male or female at birth" when talking about a person's sexual identity. However, even with good intentions, saying "Female League" or "Female Team" or "Female Sport Association" doesn't quite work the same way. "The men's team" is said almost universally, yet there are still conversations about whether we need to match that wording with "The women's team" - which I think is still said most of the time, thankfully - or whether we can also say "The female team". The men's team refers to "a team of men". The women's team refers to "a team of women". And even though "female" is used as an adjective in "the female team", it is reasonably adjacent to "a team of females", which is a problematic use of a noun as per part one. It's essentially been tainted by association. We also have Women's Tennis Association, Women's National Basketball Association, National Women's Soccer League, Professional Women's Hockey League, and more. They use "Women", not "Female", and if that's their preferred name, then I'm going to respect it and use it, even if I didn't think it was a big deal. Now with all this being said, GH first brought up this issue when he criticized you for writing "I can tell you what I have done, I build up and coached some female cs teams." But your sentence right before that one is "Lets purity check on this, what have you done to further say women in gaming?" So it's not like you were refusing to use the ideal term of "women", and you were clearly making a good-faith effort to contribute over the past few pages. This was a missed opportunity for an interesting academic conversation about sociological nuance, and I think it was mostly because GH started off by demonizing everyone, hyper-focusing on a single word instead of the overall posts, and not elaborating on his concern when he was prompted to do so. I understand the nuances on how and why normal seeming words can be seen as bad, I just don't feel like this here in a meaningful way. Ofc I am not a native english speaker and not from the US, so maybe I am missing a whole lot of nuance and context, but to me this really seems like looking for an issue rather than there being an issue. I quipped at it earlier that I could just as much come up with reasons why "women" would be a bad term. I understand now how "female" could be seen as a bad word to use there - but it just isn't. Not by any women that I asked about it, and others have shared how their spouses feel about it. Like you said, whatever they prefer overall I am happy to use, the problem is that in the last decades, science discovered that women are in fact not a hive mind, they display a shocking amount of individualism and independent characters. Some may indeed not be happy with the term "female tournament" or "female league", and once I encounter them I am happy to temporarily accommodate that. But if the vast majority is fine with it, then I really don't see any point in making a general change there, and the only time where objecting to to the term seemed reasonable to me would be when someone who I know objects to the term "female" is present, and then you would do it in a diplomatic "quickly take the person speaking aside and tell them that someone would prefer if they'd say "women" instead. Language is fuzzy and imperfect, I am happy to work on mine if necessary, but if the issue seems so fringe and also feels a bit retroactively justified, then I am out sorry. A different example would be gender neutral language. It is something I struggle quite a bit with since my native language is heavily gendered, and referring to someone in a gender neutral way often reminds me of rhetoric that is aimed at denying someone their humanity or personhood. But I also understand that this is not the case in english, that there is a much higher chance someone I interact with in the online community is trans/nonbinary, that there is a very real issue of dipshits deliberately misgendering trans/nonbinary people. And it is not just the full blown dipshits, its also people who I would see as general more normal, just not as tolerant as I would like, and non trans- /binary people would also often take offence with being addressed by the wrong pronoun. So that is a pretty clear cut example of "yep, gotta work on changing that" because the harm is very clearly to see, the bad intentions of some of the people using wrong pronouns is clear to see, it is an issue that comes up commonly enough, it is extremely easy to find an affected person who is hurt by it. The female/Female issue here just doesn't seem to have any of that. It strikes me as a online leftist issue, created in one of their bubbles, not because its an actual issue, but mainly because they need an issue. To see the harm you have to do bring out a longer explanation and basically create a case for it, it is only used in bad faith by a small group of massive dipshits, it seems very difficult to find someone who would themselves be affected by this and who are genuinely offended by it. Like a counter example to the women's soccer league would be that in cs there are a bunch of womens teams who carry "female" in the name, or an abbreviation of it - and its usually the og roster that picks or at least has a strong influence on the name. So I'll be happy to start caring about that issue once there is more of a consensus among the people affected by it, until then I firmly stick to "yeah fuck the incels, I am not playing their game" and "sorry I was not aware you object to that term, I will try remembering it in the future in your presence. feel free to remind me when I slip up". I think those are all reasonable points, and I think you're totally fine with how you're handling language. No judgment from me To repeat the most important point that we all already know: we can always just ask the individual or the team if they have a preference for what labels to use or not use (women, ladies, females, girls, gals, guys, everyone, you all, preferred pronouns like she/her, etc.). + Show Spoiler + Communication and transparency are great ways to show respect and thoughtfulness, and then after the ideal language is quickly established - if they even care - everyone can focus on the actual tasks and training and competing! So what's the opinion of TL's women's teams? Have you asked? no ofcourse you haven't because you don't actually give a fuck.
|
On July 05 2026 22:41 Gorsameth wrote:Show nested quote +On July 05 2026 22:26 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 05 2026 20:20 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On July 05 2026 18:26 Artesimo wrote:On July 05 2026 10:17 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On July 05 2026 06:55 Artesimo wrote:On July 05 2026 06:47 WombaT wrote:On July 05 2026 06:39 Simberto wrote:On July 05 2026 06:36 EnDeR_ wrote:On July 05 2026 06:20 Dan HH wrote:
[quote]
[quote]
I agree it's not offensive or some big outrage, just a bit cold in the context of a community/hobby group since we're used to seeing male and female in data, or nature documentaries, or medical and police reports, and impersonal contexts like that.
This may be explicitly a US issue then. We always referred to male and female students when I was in the UK and there didn't seem to be any baggage attached to the word "female". Is that the whole thing GH's argument hinges on? I think it is about the incel-style somewhat dehumanizing usage of "females" as a noun to describe women and girls. But i agree that i don't think this extends to female as an adjective. That after pages one has to ‘think’ what GH’s point is actually based on probably speaks poorly on him as a communicator. I would agree 100% that the incel sphere use ‘female’ in a generally dehumanising manner. Equally I don’t think it invalidates its use as a descriptor at all, there’s just some unfortunate associations. I thought the incel one was "femoid" or something like that. If they indeed just use "Female" now then my stance on that would be firmly "we can't let these clowns dictate out language". Its a normal word, already in everyday use, and overall this would just be the alt right dogwhistle bullshit all over again. They use an either ridiculous or normal term for their heinous shit, the normies catch up on it with a bit of a delay, have overreaction to it, alt right moves on, picks another term and points fingers at the rest making a fuzz over a word that is now harmless again. You can't win that by letting them dictate language, you need actions that show "this is not what we mean when saying female", not a different word. In general that is what seems to always be missing in the first place, actions that speak louder than the big nono words. I'm just catching up on the discussion now - I've been away for most of the day - and I'd like to share my understanding of the issue. I think everyone has brought up different ways where the word "female" (or similar words) may or may not be perceived as microaggressions... or at least awkward. One more related example: changing an adjective to a noun - like "the females" or "the gays" or "the Blacks" - is also no longer used by most people because it defines someone as that (and only that) trait. If you say "gay people" or "the Black community" or "women" (i.e., "female people"), then you're still humanizing those individuals and just using the adjective for additional context. Some of this is semantics and I'm sure a lot of this doesn't translate well or matter to everyone, but marginalized communities have historically been reduced to a single aspect of their identity, and an argument could be made that calling them the noun version of that trait perpetuates that prejudice. Now, that's only the first part of this two-part thought process: changing the adjective to a noun is one thing, but what's wrong with the adjective itself? Can't we use "female" as an appropriate and accurate adjective without it being seen as offensive? My answer is: usually yes, but there are some unique situations where the wording is adjacent enough to the first part that it's been poisoned even as an adjective. We say our pets are male or female, and that's fine because not everyone uses a collective term that indicates "male dogs" or "female cats" (and in fact, we even humanize them by saying they're a good boy or a good girl), and we can use "assigned male or female at birth" when talking about a person's sexual identity. However, even with good intentions, saying "Female League" or "Female Team" or "Female Sport Association" doesn't quite work the same way. "The men's team" is said almost universally, yet there are still conversations about whether we need to match that wording with "The women's team" - which I think is still said most of the time, thankfully - or whether we can also say "The female team". The men's team refers to "a team of men". The women's team refers to "a team of women". And even though "female" is used as an adjective in "the female team", it is reasonably adjacent to "a team of females", which is a problematic use of a noun as per part one. It's essentially been tainted by association. We also have Women's Tennis Association, Women's National Basketball Association, National Women's Soccer League, Professional Women's Hockey League, and more. They use "Women", not "Female", and if that's their preferred name, then I'm going to respect it and use it, even if I didn't think it was a big deal. Now with all this being said, GH first brought up this issue when he criticized you for writing "I can tell you what I have done, I build up and coached some female cs teams." But your sentence right before that one is "Lets purity check on this, what have you done to further say women in gaming?" So it's not like you were refusing to use the ideal term of "women", and you were clearly making a good-faith effort to contribute over the past few pages. This was a missed opportunity for an interesting academic conversation about sociological nuance, and I think it was mostly because GH started off by demonizing everyone, hyper-focusing on a single word instead of the overall posts, and not elaborating on his concern when he was prompted to do so. I understand the nuances on how and why normal seeming words can be seen as bad, I just don't feel like this here in a meaningful way. Ofc I am not a native english speaker and not from the US, so maybe I am missing a whole lot of nuance and context, but to me this really seems like looking for an issue rather than there being an issue. I quipped at it earlier that I could just as much come up with reasons why "women" would be a bad term. I understand now how "female" could be seen as a bad word to use there - but it just isn't. Not by any women that I asked about it, and others have shared how their spouses feel about it. Like you said, whatever they prefer overall I am happy to use, the problem is that in the last decades, science discovered that women are in fact not a hive mind, they display a shocking amount of individualism and independent characters. Some may indeed not be happy with the term "female tournament" or "female league", and once I encounter them I am happy to temporarily accommodate that. But if the vast majority is fine with it, then I really don't see any point in making a general change there, and the only time where objecting to to the term seemed reasonable to me would be when someone who I know objects to the term "female" is present, and then you would do it in a diplomatic "quickly take the person speaking aside and tell them that someone would prefer if they'd say "women" instead. Language is fuzzy and imperfect, I am happy to work on mine if necessary, but if the issue seems so fringe and also feels a bit retroactively justified, then I am out sorry. A different example would be gender neutral language. It is something I struggle quite a bit with since my native language is heavily gendered, and referring to someone in a gender neutral way often reminds me of rhetoric that is aimed at denying someone their humanity or personhood. But I also understand that this is not the case in english, that there is a much higher chance someone I interact with in the online community is trans/nonbinary, that there is a very real issue of dipshits deliberately misgendering trans/nonbinary people. And it is not just the full blown dipshits, its also people who I would see as general more normal, just not as tolerant as I would like, and non trans- /binary people would also often take offence with being addressed by the wrong pronoun. So that is a pretty clear cut example of "yep, gotta work on changing that" because the harm is very clearly to see, the bad intentions of some of the people using wrong pronouns is clear to see, it is an issue that comes up commonly enough, it is extremely easy to find an affected person who is hurt by it. The female/Female issue here just doesn't seem to have any of that. It strikes me as a online leftist issue, created in one of their bubbles, not because its an actual issue, but mainly because they need an issue. To see the harm you have to do bring out a longer explanation and basically create a case for it, it is only used in bad faith by a small group of massive dipshits, it seems very difficult to find someone who would themselves be affected by this and who are genuinely offended by it. Like a counter example to the women's soccer league would be that in cs there are a bunch of womens teams who carry "female" in the name, or an abbreviation of it - and its usually the og roster that picks or at least has a strong influence on the name. So I'll be happy to start caring about that issue once there is more of a consensus among the people affected by it, until then I firmly stick to "yeah fuck the incels, I am not playing their game" and "sorry I was not aware you object to that term, I will try remembering it in the future in your presence. feel free to remind me when I slip up". I think those are all reasonable points, and I think you're totally fine with how you're handling language. No judgment from me To repeat the most important point that we all already know: we can always just ask the individual or the team if they have a preference for what labels to use or not use (women, ladies, females, girls, gals, guys, everyone, you all, preferred pronouns like she/her, etc.). + Show Spoiler + Communication and transparency are great ways to show respect and thoughtfulness, and then after the ideal language is quickly established - if they even care - everyone can focus on the actual tasks and training and competing! So what's the opinion of TL's women's teams? Have you asked? + Show Spoiler +no ofcourse you haven't because you don't actually give a fuck.
I'm literally asking.
On July 05 2026 22:42 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:Show nested quote +On July 05 2026 22:26 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 05 2026 20:20 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On July 05 2026 18:26 Artesimo wrote:On July 05 2026 10:17 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On July 05 2026 06:55 Artesimo wrote:On July 05 2026 06:47 WombaT wrote:On July 05 2026 06:39 Simberto wrote:On July 05 2026 06:36 EnDeR_ wrote:On July 05 2026 06:20 Dan HH wrote:
[quote]
[quote]
I agree it's not offensive or some big outrage, just a bit cold in the context of a community/hobby group since we're used to seeing male and female in data, or nature documentaries, or medical and police reports, and impersonal contexts like that.
This may be explicitly a US issue then. We always referred to male and female students when I was in the UK and there didn't seem to be any baggage attached to the word "female". Is that the whole thing GH's argument hinges on? I think it is about the incel-style somewhat dehumanizing usage of "females" as a noun to describe women and girls. But i agree that i don't think this extends to female as an adjective. That after pages one has to ‘think’ what GH’s point is actually based on probably speaks poorly on him as a communicator. I would agree 100% that the incel sphere use ‘female’ in a generally dehumanising manner. Equally I don’t think it invalidates its use as a descriptor at all, there’s just some unfortunate associations. I thought the incel one was "femoid" or something like that. If they indeed just use "Female" now then my stance on that would be firmly "we can't let these clowns dictate out language". Its a normal word, already in everyday use, and overall this would just be the alt right dogwhistle bullshit all over again. They use an either ridiculous or normal term for their heinous shit, the normies catch up on it with a bit of a delay, have overreaction to it, alt right moves on, picks another term and points fingers at the rest making a fuzz over a word that is now harmless again. You can't win that by letting them dictate language, you need actions that show "this is not what we mean when saying female", not a different word. In general that is what seems to always be missing in the first place, actions that speak louder than the big nono words. I'm just catching up on the discussion now - I've been away for most of the day - and I'd like to share my understanding of the issue. I think everyone has brought up different ways where the word "female" (or similar words) may or may not be perceived as microaggressions... or at least awkward. One more related example: changing an adjective to a noun - like "the females" or "the gays" or "the Blacks" - is also no longer used by most people because it defines someone as that (and only that) trait. If you say "gay people" or "the Black community" or "women" (i.e., "female people"), then you're still humanizing those individuals and just using the adjective for additional context. Some of this is semantics and I'm sure a lot of this doesn't translate well or matter to everyone, but marginalized communities have historically been reduced to a single aspect of their identity, and an argument could be made that calling them the noun version of that trait perpetuates that prejudice. Now, that's only the first part of this two-part thought process: changing the adjective to a noun is one thing, but what's wrong with the adjective itself? Can't we use "female" as an appropriate and accurate adjective without it being seen as offensive? My answer is: usually yes, but there are some unique situations where the wording is adjacent enough to the first part that it's been poisoned even as an adjective. We say our pets are male or female, and that's fine because not everyone uses a collective term that indicates "male dogs" or "female cats" (and in fact, we even humanize them by saying they're a good boy or a good girl), and we can use "assigned male or female at birth" when talking about a person's sexual identity. However, even with good intentions, saying "Female League" or "Female Team" or "Female Sport Association" doesn't quite work the same way. "The men's team" is said almost universally, yet there are still conversations about whether we need to match that wording with "The women's team" - which I think is still said most of the time, thankfully - or whether we can also say "The female team". The men's team refers to "a team of men". The women's team refers to "a team of women". And even though "female" is used as an adjective in "the female team", it is reasonably adjacent to "a team of females", which is a problematic use of a noun as per part one. It's essentially been tainted by association. We also have Women's Tennis Association, Women's National Basketball Association, National Women's Soccer League, Professional Women's Hockey League, and more. They use "Women", not "Female", and if that's their preferred name, then I'm going to respect it and use it, even if I didn't think it was a big deal. Now with all this being said, GH first brought up this issue when he criticized you for writing "I can tell you what I have done, I build up and coached some female cs teams." But your sentence right before that one is "Lets purity check on this, what have you done to further say women in gaming?" So it's not like you were refusing to use the ideal term of "women", and you were clearly making a good-faith effort to contribute over the past few pages. This was a missed opportunity for an interesting academic conversation about sociological nuance, and I think it was mostly because GH started off by demonizing everyone, hyper-focusing on a single word instead of the overall posts, and not elaborating on his concern when he was prompted to do so. I understand the nuances on how and why normal seeming words can be seen as bad, I just don't feel like this here in a meaningful way. Ofc I am not a native english speaker and not from the US, so maybe I am missing a whole lot of nuance and context, but to me this really seems like looking for an issue rather than there being an issue. I quipped at it earlier that I could just as much come up with reasons why "women" would be a bad term. I understand now how "female" could be seen as a bad word to use there - but it just isn't. Not by any women that I asked about it, and others have shared how their spouses feel about it. Like you said, whatever they prefer overall I am happy to use, the problem is that in the last decades, science discovered that women are in fact not a hive mind, they display a shocking amount of individualism and independent characters. Some may indeed not be happy with the term "female tournament" or "female league", and once I encounter them I am happy to temporarily accommodate that. But if the vast majority is fine with it, then I really don't see any point in making a general change there, and the only time where objecting to to the term seemed reasonable to me would be when someone who I know objects to the term "female" is present, and then you would do it in a diplomatic "quickly take the person speaking aside and tell them that someone would prefer if they'd say "women" instead. Language is fuzzy and imperfect, I am happy to work on mine if necessary, but if the issue seems so fringe and also feels a bit retroactively justified, then I am out sorry. A different example would be gender neutral language. It is something I struggle quite a bit with since my native language is heavily gendered, and referring to someone in a gender neutral way often reminds me of rhetoric that is aimed at denying someone their humanity or personhood. But I also understand that this is not the case in english, that there is a much higher chance someone I interact with in the online community is trans/nonbinary, that there is a very real issue of dipshits deliberately misgendering trans/nonbinary people. And it is not just the full blown dipshits, its also people who I would see as general more normal, just not as tolerant as I would like, and non trans- /binary people would also often take offence with being addressed by the wrong pronoun. So that is a pretty clear cut example of "yep, gotta work on changing that" because the harm is very clearly to see, the bad intentions of some of the people using wrong pronouns is clear to see, it is an issue that comes up commonly enough, it is extremely easy to find an affected person who is hurt by it. The female/Female issue here just doesn't seem to have any of that. It strikes me as a online leftist issue, created in one of their bubbles, not because its an actual issue, but mainly because they need an issue. To see the harm you have to do bring out a longer explanation and basically create a case for it, it is only used in bad faith by a small group of massive dipshits, it seems very difficult to find someone who would themselves be affected by this and who are genuinely offended by it. Like a counter example to the women's soccer league would be that in cs there are a bunch of womens teams who carry "female" in the name, or an abbreviation of it - and its usually the og roster that picks or at least has a strong influence on the name. So I'll be happy to start caring about that issue once there is more of a consensus among the people affected by it, until then I firmly stick to "yeah fuck the incels, I am not playing their game" and "sorry I was not aware you object to that term, I will try remembering it in the future in your presence. feel free to remind me when I slip up". I think those are all reasonable points, and I think you're totally fine with how you're handling language. No judgment from me To repeat the most important point that we all already know: we can always just ask the individual or the team if they have a preference for what labels to use or not use (women, ladies, females, girls, gals, guys, everyone, you all, preferred pronouns like she/her, etc.). + Show Spoiler + Communication and transparency are great ways to show respect and thoughtfulness, and then after the ideal language is quickly established - if they even care - everyone can focus on the actual tasks and training and competing! So what's the opinion of TL's women's teams? I don't know. Ask them. yeah so...
|
On July 05 2026 22:26 GreenHorizons wrote:Show nested quote +On July 05 2026 20:20 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On July 05 2026 18:26 Artesimo wrote:On July 05 2026 10:17 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On July 05 2026 06:55 Artesimo wrote:On July 05 2026 06:47 WombaT wrote:On July 05 2026 06:39 Simberto wrote:On July 05 2026 06:36 EnDeR_ wrote:On July 05 2026 06:20 Dan HH wrote:On July 05 2026 05:56 Billyboy wrote:
[quote]
Sure but anyone getting mad at it is just looking for a reason to be mad, and if not this something else.
It would be especially questionable if the person mad about it constantly complains that the thread is not talking about the hard hitting issues.
On July 05 2026 06:00 Liquid`Drone wrote:
[quote]
I mean I can get behind female being a bit weird, in an awkward nerd kind of way, but I still can't understand how it is offensive.
Aside from that I agree with the first point, at least in esports you don't have men only tournaments, so labeling them the men and women tourneys would be factually wrong. But either way the idea that 'female tournament' as opposed to 'women's tournament' is a cause of outrage is just ridiculous. If we said tournament for hoes and bitches, then yeah, sure, fight us on that, but female isn't offensive, no more than male would be. I agree it's not offensive or some big outrage, just a bit cold in the context of a community/hobby group since we're used to seeing male and female in data, or nature documentaries, or medical and police reports, and impersonal contexts like that. This may be explicitly a US issue then. We always referred to male and female students when I was in the UK and there didn't seem to be any baggage attached to the word "female". Is that the whole thing GH's argument hinges on? I think it is about the incel-style somewhat dehumanizing usage of "females" as a noun to describe women and girls. But i agree that i don't think this extends to female as an adjective. That after pages one has to ‘think’ what GH’s point is actually based on probably speaks poorly on him as a communicator. I would agree 100% that the incel sphere use ‘female’ in a generally dehumanising manner. Equally I don’t think it invalidates its use as a descriptor at all, there’s just some unfortunate associations. I thought the incel one was "femoid" or something like that. If they indeed just use "Female" now then my stance on that would be firmly "we can't let these clowns dictate out language". Its a normal word, already in everyday use, and overall this would just be the alt right dogwhistle bullshit all over again. They use an either ridiculous or normal term for their heinous shit, the normies catch up on it with a bit of a delay, have overreaction to it, alt right moves on, picks another term and points fingers at the rest making a fuzz over a word that is now harmless again. You can't win that by letting them dictate language, you need actions that show "this is not what we mean when saying female", not a different word. In general that is what seems to always be missing in the first place, actions that speak louder than the big nono words. I'm just catching up on the discussion now - I've been away for most of the day - and I'd like to share my understanding of the issue. I think everyone has brought up different ways where the word "female" (or similar words) may or may not be perceived as microaggressions... or at least awkward. One more related example: changing an adjective to a noun - like "the females" or "the gays" or "the Blacks" - is also no longer used by most people because it defines someone as that (and only that) trait. If you say "gay people" or "the Black community" or "women" (i.e., "female people"), then you're still humanizing those individuals and just using the adjective for additional context. Some of this is semantics and I'm sure a lot of this doesn't translate well or matter to everyone, but marginalized communities have historically been reduced to a single aspect of their identity, and an argument could be made that calling them the noun version of that trait perpetuates that prejudice. Now, that's only the first part of this two-part thought process: changing the adjective to a noun is one thing, but what's wrong with the adjective itself? Can't we use "female" as an appropriate and accurate adjective without it being seen as offensive? My answer is: usually yes, but there are some unique situations where the wording is adjacent enough to the first part that it's been poisoned even as an adjective. We say our pets are male or female, and that's fine because not everyone uses a collective term that indicates "male dogs" or "female cats" (and in fact, we even humanize them by saying they're a good boy or a good girl), and we can use "assigned male or female at birth" when talking about a person's sexual identity. However, even with good intentions, saying "Female League" or "Female Team" or "Female Sport Association" doesn't quite work the same way. "The men's team" is said almost universally, yet there are still conversations about whether we need to match that wording with "The women's team" - which I think is still said most of the time, thankfully - or whether we can also say "The female team". The men's team refers to "a team of men". The women's team refers to "a team of women". And even though "female" is used as an adjective in "the female team", it is reasonably adjacent to "a team of females", which is a problematic use of a noun as per part one. It's essentially been tainted by association. We also have Women's Tennis Association, Women's National Basketball Association, National Women's Soccer League, Professional Women's Hockey League, and more. They use "Women", not "Female", and if that's their preferred name, then I'm going to respect it and use it, even if I didn't think it was a big deal. Now with all this being said, GH first brought up this issue when he criticized you for writing "I can tell you what I have done, I build up and coached some female cs teams." But your sentence right before that one is "Lets purity check on this, what have you done to further say women in gaming?" So it's not like you were refusing to use the ideal term of "women", and you were clearly making a good-faith effort to contribute over the past few pages. This was a missed opportunity for an interesting academic conversation about sociological nuance, and I think it was mostly because GH started off by demonizing everyone, hyper-focusing on a single word instead of the overall posts, and not elaborating on his concern when he was prompted to do so. I understand the nuances on how and why normal seeming words can be seen as bad, I just don't feel like this here in a meaningful way. Ofc I am not a native english speaker and not from the US, so maybe I am missing a whole lot of nuance and context, but to me this really seems like looking for an issue rather than there being an issue. I quipped at it earlier that I could just as much come up with reasons why "women" would be a bad term. I understand now how "female" could be seen as a bad word to use there - but it just isn't. Not by any women that I asked about it, and others have shared how their spouses feel about it. Like you said, whatever they prefer overall I am happy to use, the problem is that in the last decades, science discovered that women are in fact not a hive mind, they display a shocking amount of individualism and independent characters. Some may indeed not be happy with the term "female tournament" or "female league", and once I encounter them I am happy to temporarily accommodate that. But if the vast majority is fine with it, then I really don't see any point in making a general change there, and the only time where objecting to to the term seemed reasonable to me would be when someone who I know objects to the term "female" is present, and then you would do it in a diplomatic "quickly take the person speaking aside and tell them that someone would prefer if they'd say "women" instead. Language is fuzzy and imperfect, I am happy to work on mine if necessary, but if the issue seems so fringe and also feels a bit retroactively justified, then I am out sorry. A different example would be gender neutral language. It is something I struggle quite a bit with since my native language is heavily gendered, and referring to someone in a gender neutral way often reminds me of rhetoric that is aimed at denying someone their humanity or personhood. But I also understand that this is not the case in english, that there is a much higher chance someone I interact with in the online community is trans/nonbinary, that there is a very real issue of dipshits deliberately misgendering trans/nonbinary people. And it is not just the full blown dipshits, its also people who I would see as general more normal, just not as tolerant as I would like, and non trans- /binary people would also often take offence with being addressed by the wrong pronoun. So that is a pretty clear cut example of "yep, gotta work on changing that" because the harm is very clearly to see, the bad intentions of some of the people using wrong pronouns is clear to see, it is an issue that comes up commonly enough, it is extremely easy to find an affected person who is hurt by it. The female/Female issue here just doesn't seem to have any of that. It strikes me as a online leftist issue, created in one of their bubbles, not because its an actual issue, but mainly because they need an issue. To see the harm you have to do bring out a longer explanation and basically create a case for it, it is only used in bad faith by a small group of massive dipshits, it seems very difficult to find someone who would themselves be affected by this and who are genuinely offended by it. Like a counter example to the women's soccer league would be that in cs there are a bunch of womens teams who carry "female" in the name, or an abbreviation of it - and its usually the og roster that picks or at least has a strong influence on the name. So I'll be happy to start caring about that issue once there is more of a consensus among the people affected by it, until then I firmly stick to "yeah fuck the incels, I am not playing their game" and "sorry I was not aware you object to that term, I will try remembering it in the future in your presence. feel free to remind me when I slip up". I think those are all reasonable points, and I think you're totally fine with how you're handling language. No judgment from me To repeat the most important point that we all already know: we can always just ask the individual or the team if they have a preference for what labels to use or not use (women, ladies, females, girls, gals, guys, everyone, you all, preferred pronouns like she/her, etc.). + Show Spoiler + Communication and transparency are great ways to show respect and thoughtfulness, and then after the ideal language is quickly established - if they even care - everyone can focus on the actual tasks and training and competing! So what's the opinion of TL's women's teams?
I don't know. Ask them.
|
On July 05 2026 22:42 GreenHorizons wrote:Show nested quote +On July 05 2026 22:41 Gorsameth wrote:On July 05 2026 22:26 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 05 2026 20:20 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On July 05 2026 18:26 Artesimo wrote:On July 05 2026 10:17 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On July 05 2026 06:55 Artesimo wrote:On July 05 2026 06:47 WombaT wrote:On July 05 2026 06:39 Simberto wrote:On July 05 2026 06:36 EnDeR_ wrote:
[quote]
This may be explicitly a US issue then. We always referred to male and female students when I was in the UK and there didn't seem to be any baggage attached to the word "female".
Is that the whole thing GH's argument hinges on?
I think it is about the incel-style somewhat dehumanizing usage of "females" as a noun to describe women and girls. But i agree that i don't think this extends to female as an adjective. That after pages one has to ‘think’ what GH’s point is actually based on probably speaks poorly on him as a communicator. I would agree 100% that the incel sphere use ‘female’ in a generally dehumanising manner. Equally I don’t think it invalidates its use as a descriptor at all, there’s just some unfortunate associations. I thought the incel one was "femoid" or something like that. If they indeed just use "Female" now then my stance on that would be firmly "we can't let these clowns dictate out language". Its a normal word, already in everyday use, and overall this would just be the alt right dogwhistle bullshit all over again. They use an either ridiculous or normal term for their heinous shit, the normies catch up on it with a bit of a delay, have overreaction to it, alt right moves on, picks another term and points fingers at the rest making a fuzz over a word that is now harmless again. You can't win that by letting them dictate language, you need actions that show "this is not what we mean when saying female", not a different word. In general that is what seems to always be missing in the first place, actions that speak louder than the big nono words. I'm just catching up on the discussion now - I've been away for most of the day - and I'd like to share my understanding of the issue. I think everyone has brought up different ways where the word "female" (or similar words) may or may not be perceived as microaggressions... or at least awkward. One more related example: changing an adjective to a noun - like "the females" or "the gays" or "the Blacks" - is also no longer used by most people because it defines someone as that (and only that) trait. If you say "gay people" or "the Black community" or "women" (i.e., "female people"), then you're still humanizing those individuals and just using the adjective for additional context. Some of this is semantics and I'm sure a lot of this doesn't translate well or matter to everyone, but marginalized communities have historically been reduced to a single aspect of their identity, and an argument could be made that calling them the noun version of that trait perpetuates that prejudice. Now, that's only the first part of this two-part thought process: changing the adjective to a noun is one thing, but what's wrong with the adjective itself? Can't we use "female" as an appropriate and accurate adjective without it being seen as offensive? My answer is: usually yes, but there are some unique situations where the wording is adjacent enough to the first part that it's been poisoned even as an adjective. We say our pets are male or female, and that's fine because not everyone uses a collective term that indicates "male dogs" or "female cats" (and in fact, we even humanize them by saying they're a good boy or a good girl), and we can use "assigned male or female at birth" when talking about a person's sexual identity. However, even with good intentions, saying "Female League" or "Female Team" or "Female Sport Association" doesn't quite work the same way. "The men's team" is said almost universally, yet there are still conversations about whether we need to match that wording with "The women's team" - which I think is still said most of the time, thankfully - or whether we can also say "The female team". The men's team refers to "a team of men". The women's team refers to "a team of women". And even though "female" is used as an adjective in "the female team", it is reasonably adjacent to "a team of females", which is a problematic use of a noun as per part one. It's essentially been tainted by association. We also have Women's Tennis Association, Women's National Basketball Association, National Women's Soccer League, Professional Women's Hockey League, and more. They use "Women", not "Female", and if that's their preferred name, then I'm going to respect it and use it, even if I didn't think it was a big deal. Now with all this being said, GH first brought up this issue when he criticized you for writing "I can tell you what I have done, I build up and coached some female cs teams." But your sentence right before that one is "Lets purity check on this, what have you done to further say women in gaming?" So it's not like you were refusing to use the ideal term of "women", and you were clearly making a good-faith effort to contribute over the past few pages. This was a missed opportunity for an interesting academic conversation about sociological nuance, and I think it was mostly because GH started off by demonizing everyone, hyper-focusing on a single word instead of the overall posts, and not elaborating on his concern when he was prompted to do so. I understand the nuances on how and why normal seeming words can be seen as bad, I just don't feel like this here in a meaningful way. Ofc I am not a native english speaker and not from the US, so maybe I am missing a whole lot of nuance and context, but to me this really seems like looking for an issue rather than there being an issue. I quipped at it earlier that I could just as much come up with reasons why "women" would be a bad term. I understand now how "female" could be seen as a bad word to use there - but it just isn't. Not by any women that I asked about it, and others have shared how their spouses feel about it. Like you said, whatever they prefer overall I am happy to use, the problem is that in the last decades, science discovered that women are in fact not a hive mind, they display a shocking amount of individualism and independent characters. Some may indeed not be happy with the term "female tournament" or "female league", and once I encounter them I am happy to temporarily accommodate that. But if the vast majority is fine with it, then I really don't see any point in making a general change there, and the only time where objecting to to the term seemed reasonable to me would be when someone who I know objects to the term "female" is present, and then you would do it in a diplomatic "quickly take the person speaking aside and tell them that someone would prefer if they'd say "women" instead. Language is fuzzy and imperfect, I am happy to work on mine if necessary, but if the issue seems so fringe and also feels a bit retroactively justified, then I am out sorry. A different example would be gender neutral language. It is something I struggle quite a bit with since my native language is heavily gendered, and referring to someone in a gender neutral way often reminds me of rhetoric that is aimed at denying someone their humanity or personhood. But I also understand that this is not the case in english, that there is a much higher chance someone I interact with in the online community is trans/nonbinary, that there is a very real issue of dipshits deliberately misgendering trans/nonbinary people. And it is not just the full blown dipshits, its also people who I would see as general more normal, just not as tolerant as I would like, and non trans- /binary people would also often take offence with being addressed by the wrong pronoun. So that is a pretty clear cut example of "yep, gotta work on changing that" because the harm is very clearly to see, the bad intentions of some of the people using wrong pronouns is clear to see, it is an issue that comes up commonly enough, it is extremely easy to find an affected person who is hurt by it. The female/Female issue here just doesn't seem to have any of that. It strikes me as a online leftist issue, created in one of their bubbles, not because its an actual issue, but mainly because they need an issue. To see the harm you have to do bring out a longer explanation and basically create a case for it, it is only used in bad faith by a small group of massive dipshits, it seems very difficult to find someone who would themselves be affected by this and who are genuinely offended by it. Like a counter example to the women's soccer league would be that in cs there are a bunch of womens teams who carry "female" in the name, or an abbreviation of it - and its usually the og roster that picks or at least has a strong influence on the name. So I'll be happy to start caring about that issue once there is more of a consensus among the people affected by it, until then I firmly stick to "yeah fuck the incels, I am not playing their game" and "sorry I was not aware you object to that term, I will try remembering it in the future in your presence. feel free to remind me when I slip up". I think those are all reasonable points, and I think you're totally fine with how you're handling language. No judgment from me To repeat the most important point that we all already know: we can always just ask the individual or the team if they have a preference for what labels to use or not use (women, ladies, females, girls, gals, guys, everyone, you all, preferred pronouns like she/her, etc.). + Show Spoiler + Communication and transparency are great ways to show respect and thoughtfulness, and then after the ideal language is quickly established - if they even care - everyone can focus on the actual tasks and training and competing! So what's the opinion of TL's women's teams? Have you asked? + Show Spoiler +no ofcourse you haven't because you don't actually give a fuck. I'm literally asking. Show nested quote +On July 05 2026 22:42 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On July 05 2026 22:26 GreenHorizons wrote:On July 05 2026 20:20 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On July 05 2026 18:26 Artesimo wrote:On July 05 2026 10:17 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On July 05 2026 06:55 Artesimo wrote:On July 05 2026 06:47 WombaT wrote:On July 05 2026 06:39 Simberto wrote:On July 05 2026 06:36 EnDeR_ wrote:
[quote]
This may be explicitly a US issue then. We always referred to male and female students when I was in the UK and there didn't seem to be any baggage attached to the word "female".
Is that the whole thing GH's argument hinges on?
I think it is about the incel-style somewhat dehumanizing usage of "females" as a noun to describe women and girls. But i agree that i don't think this extends to female as an adjective. That after pages one has to ‘think’ what GH’s point is actually based on probably speaks poorly on him as a communicator. I would agree 100% that the incel sphere use ‘female’ in a generally dehumanising manner. Equally I don’t think it invalidates its use as a descriptor at all, there’s just some unfortunate associations. I thought the incel one was "femoid" or something like that. If they indeed just use "Female" now then my stance on that would be firmly "we can't let these clowns dictate out language". Its a normal word, already in everyday use, and overall this would just be the alt right dogwhistle bullshit all over again. They use an either ridiculous or normal term for their heinous shit, the normies catch up on it with a bit of a delay, have overreaction to it, alt right moves on, picks another term and points fingers at the rest making a fuzz over a word that is now harmless again. You can't win that by letting them dictate language, you need actions that show "this is not what we mean when saying female", not a different word. In general that is what seems to always be missing in the first place, actions that speak louder than the big nono words. I'm just catching up on the discussion now - I've been away for most of the day - and I'd like to share my understanding of the issue. I think everyone has brought up different ways where the word "female" (or similar words) may or may not be perceived as microaggressions... or at least awkward. One more related example: changing an adjective to a noun - like "the females" or "the gays" or "the Blacks" - is also no longer used by most people because it defines someone as that (and only that) trait. If you say "gay people" or "the Black community" or "women" (i.e., "female people"), then you're still humanizing those individuals and just using the adjective for additional context. Some of this is semantics and I'm sure a lot of this doesn't translate well or matter to everyone, but marginalized communities have historically been reduced to a single aspect of their identity, and an argument could be made that calling them the noun version of that trait perpetuates that prejudice. Now, that's only the first part of this two-part thought process: changing the adjective to a noun is one thing, but what's wrong with the adjective itself? Can't we use "female" as an appropriate and accurate adjective without it being seen as offensive? My answer is: usually yes, but there are some unique situations where the wording is adjacent enough to the first part that it's been poisoned even as an adjective. We say our pets are male or female, and that's fine because not everyone uses a collective term that indicates "male dogs" or "female cats" (and in fact, we even humanize them by saying they're a good boy or a good girl), and we can use "assigned male or female at birth" when talking about a person's sexual identity. However, even with good intentions, saying "Female League" or "Female Team" or "Female Sport Association" doesn't quite work the same way. "The men's team" is said almost universally, yet there are still conversations about whether we need to match that wording with "The women's team" - which I think is still said most of the time, thankfully - or whether we can also say "The female team". The men's team refers to "a team of men". The women's team refers to "a team of women". And even though "female" is used as an adjective in "the female team", it is reasonably adjacent to "a team of females", which is a problematic use of a noun as per part one. It's essentially been tainted by association. We also have Women's Tennis Association, Women's National Basketball Association, National Women's Soccer League, Professional Women's Hockey League, and more. They use "Women", not "Female", and if that's their preferred name, then I'm going to respect it and use it, even if I didn't think it was a big deal. Now with all this being said, GH first brought up this issue when he criticized you for writing "I can tell you what I have done, I build up and coached some female cs teams." But your sentence right before that one is "Lets purity check on this, what have you done to further say women in gaming?" So it's not like you were refusing to use the ideal term of "women", and you were clearly making a good-faith effort to contribute over the past few pages. This was a missed opportunity for an interesting academic conversation about sociological nuance, and I think it was mostly because GH started off by demonizing everyone, hyper-focusing on a single word instead of the overall posts, and not elaborating on his concern when he was prompted to do so. I understand the nuances on how and why normal seeming words can be seen as bad, I just don't feel like this here in a meaningful way. Ofc I am not a native english speaker and not from the US, so maybe I am missing a whole lot of nuance and context, but to me this really seems like looking for an issue rather than there being an issue. I quipped at it earlier that I could just as much come up with reasons why "women" would be a bad term. I understand now how "female" could be seen as a bad word to use there - but it just isn't. Not by any women that I asked about it, and others have shared how their spouses feel about it. Like you said, whatever they prefer overall I am happy to use, the problem is that in the last decades, science discovered that women are in fact not a hive mind, they display a shocking amount of individualism and independent characters. Some may indeed not be happy with the term "female tournament" or "female league", and once I encounter them I am happy to temporarily accommodate that. But if the vast majority is fine with it, then I really don't see any point in making a general change there, and the only time where objecting to to the term seemed reasonable to me would be when someone who I know objects to the term "female" is present, and then you would do it in a diplomatic "quickly take the person speaking aside and tell them that someone would prefer if they'd say "women" instead. Language is fuzzy and imperfect, I am happy to work on mine if necessary, but if the issue seems so fringe and also feels a bit retroactively justified, then I am out sorry. A different example would be gender neutral language. It is something I struggle quite a bit with since my native language is heavily gendered, and referring to someone in a gender neutral way often reminds me of rhetoric that is aimed at denying someone their humanity or personhood. But I also understand that this is not the case in english, that there is a much higher chance someone I interact with in the online community is trans/nonbinary, that there is a very real issue of dipshits deliberately misgendering trans/nonbinary people. And it is not just the full blown dipshits, its also people who I would see as general more normal, just not as tolerant as I would like, and non trans- /binary people would also often take offence with being addressed by the wrong pronoun. So that is a pretty clear cut example of "yep, gotta work on changing that" because the harm is very clearly to see, the bad intentions of some of the people using wrong pronouns is clear to see, it is an issue that comes up commonly enough, it is extremely easy to find an affected person who is hurt by it. The female/Female issue here just doesn't seem to have any of that. It strikes me as a online leftist issue, created in one of their bubbles, not because its an actual issue, but mainly because they need an issue. To see the harm you have to do bring out a longer explanation and basically create a case for it, it is only used in bad faith by a small group of massive dipshits, it seems very difficult to find someone who would themselves be affected by this and who are genuinely offended by it. Like a counter example to the women's soccer league would be that in cs there are a bunch of womens teams who carry "female" in the name, or an abbreviation of it - and its usually the og roster that picks or at least has a strong influence on the name. So I'll be happy to start caring about that issue once there is more of a consensus among the people affected by it, until then I firmly stick to "yeah fuck the incels, I am not playing their game" and "sorry I was not aware you object to that term, I will try remembering it in the future in your presence. feel free to remind me when I slip up". I think those are all reasonable points, and I think you're totally fine with how you're handling language. No judgment from me To repeat the most important point that we all already know: we can always just ask the individual or the team if they have a preference for what labels to use or not use (women, ladies, females, girls, gals, guys, everyone, you all, preferred pronouns like she/her, etc.). + Show Spoiler + Communication and transparency are great ways to show respect and thoughtfulness, and then after the ideal language is quickly established - if they even care - everyone can focus on the actual tasks and training and competing! So what's the opinion of TL's women's teams? I don't know. Ask them. yeah so...
I'm not part of any women's teams. I'm also not a woman.
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Northern Ireland27272 Posts
On July 05 2026 17:45 EnDeR_ wrote:Show nested quote +On July 05 2026 11:59 WombaT wrote:On July 05 2026 10:17 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On July 05 2026 06:55 Artesimo wrote:On July 05 2026 06:47 WombaT wrote:On July 05 2026 06:39 Simberto wrote:On July 05 2026 06:36 EnDeR_ wrote:On July 05 2026 06:20 Dan HH wrote:On July 05 2026 05:56 Billyboy wrote:On July 05 2026 05:22 Dan HH wrote:
[quote]
'The tournament' doesn't have a male requirement, women can and sometimes do participate. It makes sense to only label the restrictive type. That said I do find the word 'female' a bit weird and gamery, would rather use 'women's tournaments' like most other sports/competitions do. Sure but anyone getting mad at it is just looking for a reason to be mad, and if not this something else. It would be especially questionable if the person mad about it constantly complains that the thread is not talking about the hard hitting issues. On July 05 2026 06:00 Liquid`Drone wrote:On July 05 2026 05:22 Dan HH wrote:
[quote]
'The tournament' doesn't have a male requirement, women can and sometimes do participate. It makes sense to only label the restrictive type. That said I do find the word 'female' a bit weird and gamery, would rather use 'women's tournaments' like most other sports/competitions do. I mean I can get behind female being a bit weird, in an awkward nerd kind of way, but I still can't understand how it is offensive. Aside from that I agree with the first point, at least in esports you don't have men only tournaments, so labeling them the men and women tourneys would be factually wrong. But either way the idea that 'female tournament' as opposed to 'women's tournament' is a cause of outrage is just ridiculous. If we said tournament for hoes and bitches, then yeah, sure, fight us on that, but female isn't offensive, no more than male would be. I agree it's not offensive or some big outrage, just a bit cold in the context of a community/hobby group since we're used to seeing male and female in data, or nature documentaries, or medical and police reports, and impersonal contexts like that. This may be explicitly a US issue then. We always referred to male and female students when I was in the UK and there didn't seem to be any baggage attached to the word "female". Is that the whole thing GH's argument hinges on? I think it is about the incel-style somewhat dehumanizing usage of "females" as a noun to describe women and girls. But i agree that i don't think this extends to female as an adjective. That after pages one has to ‘think’ what GH’s point is actually based on probably speaks poorly on him as a communicator. I would agree 100% that the incel sphere use ‘female’ in a generally dehumanising manner. Equally I don’t think it invalidates its use as a descriptor at all, there’s just some unfortunate associations. I thought the incel one was "femoid" or something like that. If they indeed just use "Female" now then my stance on that would be firmly "we can't let these clowns dictate out language". Its a normal word, already in everyday use, and overall this would just be the alt right dogwhistle bullshit all over again. They use an either ridiculous or normal term for their heinous shit, the normies catch up on it with a bit of a delay, have overreaction to it, alt right moves on, picks another term and points fingers at the rest making a fuzz over a word that is now harmless again. You can't win that by letting them dictate language, you need actions that show "this is not what we mean when saying female", not a different word. In general that is what seems to always be missing in the first place, actions that speak louder than the big nono words. I'm just catching up on the discussion now - I've been away for most of the day - and I'd like to share my understanding of the issue. I think everyone has brought up different ways where the word "female" (or similar words) may or may not be perceived as microaggressions... or at least awkward. One more related example: changing an adjective to a noun - like "the females" or "the gays" or "the Blacks" - is also no longer used by most people because it defines someone as that (and only that) trait. If you say "gay people" or "the Black community" or "women" (i.e., "female people"), then you're still humanizing those individuals and just using the adjective for additional context. Some of this is semantics and I'm sure a lot of this doesn't translate well or matter to everyone, but marginalized communities have historically been reduced to a single aspect of their identity, and an argument could be made that calling them the noun version of that trait perpetuates that prejudice. Now, that's only the first part of this two-part thought process: changing the adjective to a noun is one thing, but what's wrong with the adjective itself? Can't we use "female" as an appropriate and accurate adjective without it being seen as offensive? My answer is: usually yes, but there are some unique situations where the wording is adjacent enough to the first part that it's been poisoned even as an adjective. We say our pets are male or female, and that's fine because not everyone uses a collective term that indicates "male dogs" or "female cats" (and in fact, we even humanize them by saying they're a good boy or a good girl), and we can use "assigned male or female at birth" when talking about a person's sexual identity. However, even with good intentions, saying "Female League" or "Female Team" or "Female Sport Association" doesn't quite work the same way. "The men's team" is said almost universally, yet there are still conversations about whether we need to match that wording with "The women's team" - which I think is still said most of the time, thankfully - or whether we can also say "The female team". The men's team refers to "a team of men". The women's team refers to "a team of women". And even though "female" is used as an adjective in "the female team", it is reasonably adjacent to "a team of females", which is a problematic use of a noun as per part one. It's essentially been tainted by association. We also have Women's Tennis Association, Women's National Basketball Association, National Women's Soccer League, Professional Women's Hockey League, and more. They use "Women", not "Female", and if that's their preferred name, then I'm going to respect it and use it, even if I didn't think it was a big deal. Now all this being said, GH first brought up this issue when critiquing Artesimo for writing "I can tell you what I have done, I build up and coached some female cs teams." But Artesimo's sentence right before that one is "Lets purity check on this, what have you done to further say women in gaming?" So it's not like Artesimo is refusing to use the ideal term of "women", and Artesimo was clearly making a good-faith effort to contribute over the past few pages. This was a missed opportunity for an interesting academic conversation about sociological nuance, and I think it was mostly because GH started off by demonizing everyone, hyper-focusing on a single word instead of the overall posts, and not elaborating on his concern when he was prompted to do so. It’s almost like GH is chatting absolute shite, to use some of my local vernacular. Coulda been an interesting discussion. Wasn’t. Hey I tried, Artemiso tried. It’s an area that interests me. Completely fucking pointless. I look forward to the next GH lecture about how our collective discourse is fruitless having witnessed him completely derailing a thread and being unable to answer simple questions about his positions at absolutely every juncture imaginable. A simple "some women find it dehumanising when you refer to them as female or from the female team" would've been enough. I hope both of you don't get turned off by this and continue doing things for the community. I stopped coaching when I moved and I don't think I have the energy to start again, it's so much effort.
Since when was actually answering a question an option? Someone shoulda told me!
I’ll defo keep up doing stuff, it’s difficult to keep running SC LANs as we haven’t had much new blood in years. You’ve married fathers with demanding careers now etc, and just general burnout so big skill gaps have opened up. I’ll probably swap to doing something else at ye olde convention for next year, which I can’t really speak highly enough of, it’s a tight ship in organisation and ethical considerations. And, entirely run by volunteers and non-profit to boot, but still manages to be the biggest in Ireland. The commercial efforts tend to suck. If I had one regret it was being too busy for the 4 years John Romero showed up with his wife for a ‘challenge John Romero at Doom’ area, although I did get to meet the lad. Apparently lives in Waterford these days
Doesn’t put me off at all, indeed I got plenty of criticism back in the day for a casting style that was about 50% StarCraft, 50% bad Bill Hicks impression. Some of which was entirely justified, and we worked to be less caustic because it was making some folks feel unwelcome, especially folks who weren’t white cis dudes. Also a dude who just didn’t like us, chose to volunteer in our area and made more content complaints for us specifically than had been made in the convention at large for two decades. Said white knight got banned from volunteering again for these frivolous reports, and quelle surprise got banned from attending for sexual harassment later.
I’ve no issue in a wider discussion on how we can collectively do better. It isn’t a discussion with GH he just makes wild sweeping statements and follows it up with a maddening lack of any kind of specificity
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