I said female ones in a era thread and some dude came at me talking about using the word female will catch me heat even though I meant no harm.
Which brings me to my point people look for stuff to just get mad or complains about or just looking deeper than it actually is.
Here's the thing about the term "female": culturally, in English speaking countries at least, the word is used in a dehumanizing manner. There have been threads about this on Era with multiple examples of people within communities (communities that are directly causing the major issues that we need to tackle) referring to men as men but women as females in a context that is clearly treating women as not worthy of being consider individual persons.
That's not "looking for something to get mad about". That's pointing out that you're using terminology that is regularly used to marginalize a group of people.
I can understand that there are some who might see someone use the word and immediately assume that person is one of the folks in the communities I mentioned. That does happen on occasion. But it's also important to understand that your intentions are only half of the equation. You can do something with the best of intentions but it can still hurt people due to experiences others have had that you have not. If that weren't the case then helicopter parents and tiger moms wouldn't be considered a problem.
And especially on a site like this where we're mostly strangers to each other, where a lot of people here have already been dehumanized by the use of that specific term in their daily lives, people aren't going to know your intentions. It's the respectful thing to do (and also a good habit to not allow your language to influence your thoughts) to avoid using the term. When the response is simply "Well you're just overreacting" with no indication that there was any consideration of the other person's feelings or lived experiences (as is often the case), especially after we've had at least one thread here discussing all of this that is regularly linked, how do you expect people to respond?