Terminology for a Female Teen

So among the sort of GPA "bourgeois" (see [1] for some of my related thoughts on this), it's come up a couple times whether "female" should be an acceptable term for a female (in the gender sense) teen. Personally, I think that "female" should become an accepted term, but I do think there is a possible middle path to resolution. Note that I use female and male in the context of gender, not sex.

The obvious point of contention is "female" just sounding wrong to say in casual conversation. It is a pretty scientific term, and can be mixed up with female in the sex sense, which isn't very inclusive. It also sounds more dehumanizing as "female" is just quite a bit in the context of animals, so there is a connotation there. To address the former, I think that change has to begin with someone, so if it sounds weird because of the way culture has deemed language connotations, it would be worth it to use it differently to fix it. For the second point, I agree. Female is a very confusing term, but I think that it is easier to differentiate by just determining the context it is in. If it is scientific or medical, it probably is sex. If it isn't, it probably is gender (unless you know you're talking to a non-ally). The last point can be addressed by the cultural connotation solution of point 1, but also suggests that humans aren't animals. Ultimately, humans are still animals, just clearly unique ones. For instance, it is very easy to motivate the existence of most people by simply pointing to the possible creative value they have. However, there is less obvious or no value in animals. Granted, they help "humanity" through ecological principles, but beyond that, there doesn't seem to be all that much. Animals are quite diverse, so it'd be impossible to create some value function that can map every animal to value. So while I don't think that humans are exactly the same as animals (as "we" have complex things like advanced technology and science), we still are animals by the principles of evolution. So I think that the dehumanizing to animals argument implies too much that we aren't animals.

There is no good term to refer to a girl teen, as "girl" sounds like a very young female while woman implies more maturity and legality. Woman is also a very general term considering its massive age range, so I don't think that adding in more, very-varying ages will help the term. In a way, this is even more extreme for "girl". If we accept the use of "girl", which is what is pretty typical, then we are grouping together female toddlers all the way up to 19 year old females. Considering the biological and cognitive changes, this is a very large group, so using "girl" to cover it is very vague. Not to mention the fact that using "girl" in an implied romantic context makes one sound like a pedophile. Consider "there were a lot of girls at the game" in the perspective of a straight male. The only reason to note the gender as a male would be to express a certain romantic aspect to the females at the game, which is reasonable as a high school game would have high school female teenagers. However, this not-explicit romantic aspect to it makes it sound like one is attracted to the girls, which could include children. Some candidates for terms include chick (which is blatantly dehumanizing and sounds quite bad), madam, miss, ladies (too formal), lass (too informal and sounds condescending [like an authority figure talking down]), etc. To be fair, one could use these terms to normalize them, but I think they already have valid use cases that would be compromised through normalization. In contrast, female as a scientific term wouldn't be invalidated just because normal people use it.

Context might provide a solution though. In the example above, the implication of romance without explicit interest in the girls made it sound pretty weird, as if one had some secret interest in children. Suppose instead one explicitly adds a romantic aspect to it. For instance, "there's a hot girl" doesn't sound predatory because "hot" explicitly implies romance, and explicitly calling a young girl "hot" would be publicly admitting to pedophilia, so we can assume that the person wouldn't be saying pedophilic statements in public. Hence we infer that it isn't pedophilia. Also, "girlfriend" obviously explicitly has romance, but it is a very normal term. Although, I quite dislike this term because it is so easy to confuse with friends who happen to be female. I still think female should be used because I dislike the idea of just accepting bad language (female's denotation is ok). Feel free to leave counter-arguments in my guestbook, I'll publish them (unless explicitly asked not to) and try to address them in edits. In the case I change my mind, I'll just add a disclaimer of my new position at the top of this post and keep the rest.

[1] https://listed.to/@vt/33841/school-development-and-real-life