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I get the likely reason why you don’t find it offensive, but I also get why plenty people do.
Note how the complains are usually towards the usage of “female” as a noun, not as an adjective. That’s because of a small quirk of English, that marks adjective nominalisation rather heavily. To show it with a non-offensive example:
I got two cats. *The young is a tabby, and *the old is *a bicolour.
That likely sounds fine in the other language[s] that you speak (as it would do in my L1 and L2), but it sounds weird for English speakers - they’d expect “young”, “old” and “bicolour” to be followed by nouns, not to be treated as nouns.
As a result, when you “promote” an adjective to a noun, people usually take it as creating a category aside from whatever category the relevant entities were formerly assigned to. And if the former category was “human beings”, the nominalisation becomes dehumanising.
Another example [now offensive] to highlight this would be:
“Alice is gay” - most people wouldn’t raise an eyebrow to that
“Alice is a gay” - since the usage of article forces reading “gay” as a noun, it suddenly sounds dehumanising.
The same process actually does apply to “male”; the main difference is that men aren’t seen as a disfavoured group by society, and people often take that into account when judging the offensiveness of an utterance.
I get the likely reason why you don’t find it offensive, but I also get why plenty people do.
Note how the complains are usually towards the usage of “female” as a noun, not as an adjective. That’s because of a small quirk of English, that marks adjective nominalisation rather heavily. To show it with a non-offensive example:
That likely sounds fine in the other language[s] that you speak (as it would do in my L1 and L2), but it sounds weird for English speakers - they’d expect “young”, “old” and “bicolour” to be followed by nouns, not to be treated as nouns.
As a result, when you “promote” an adjective to a noun, people usually take it as creating a category aside from whatever category the relevant entities were formerly assigned to. And if the former category was “human beings”, the nominalisation becomes dehumanising.
Another example [now offensive] to highlight this would be:
The same process actually does apply to “male”; the main difference is that men aren’t seen as a disfavoured group by society, and people often take that into account when judging the offensiveness of an utterance.