@DFP said in I wish there was a term for exclusively male giants:
The problem isn’t that women are special. It’s more that women are the exception. So, we come up with words like “giant” to designate large people, but then we start to show female giants, and we need a way to designate them, so we create the term “giantess”. The problem isn’t the language. It’s the way people use it. Because people are too lazy to type 4 extra letters “giant” gets used for big folks regardless of gender. Then we begin to label people that do correctly say “giantess” as sexist and insult them for speaking properly. It’s somewhat amazing to me because I’d get the same label if I started writing “men” regardless of gender so I could avoid typing 2 more letters. It’s not exceptionalism so much as laziness and political correctness run amok.
I’d suggest that within this community if nowhere else, the word “giant” be used exclusively to refer to males of size and “giantess” be used to refer to females of size. Also, any time someone doesn’t use the correct terms they be politely corrected.
Women being the exception actually better describes how I feel about the term giantess. I guess the term “giantess” upsets me because it reminds me how much our language is rooted in patriarchy, with people thinking the default gender is male.
About using the word “giant” to exclusively refer to males of size. What would people use to describe people of size outside of the traditional gender binary? Xgiant or something like that?
