Often in science fiction when someone refers to a male or female member of some other species, they use terms like "the klingon female". This also happens between members of that species, so if a Klingon was to refer to a female of their own species, they would refer to her as a "klingon female". For me as a native German speaker, this sounds rather weird as in German this kind of wording would only be used when referring to animals (e.g. female dog) and it sounds rather derogatory. When referring to humans, in German you would always use the equivalent words for "woman" or "man". I have also (rarely) seen that usage in English language non-science fiction movies used on humans.
So my question is, in English is the use of "female" or "male" to describe a person of either the same or an equal species derogatory or not? Are there any connotations to that that I don't get? Is this usage fine among humans (in the real world)?
Best Answer
Police regularly use male and female as nouns or adjectives, a convention often imitated by news outlets:
Medical literature essentially follows the same convention:
What the language of police and physicians have in common is that they use male and female purely as physical descriptives. While this usage may seem impersonal and antiseptic, it is not insulting or demeaning.
This is not to say that the two words cannot be used in such a way:
In social contexts, reducing a man or woman to either gender or the purely physical can be demeaning, but not always so:
Curiously enough, while addressing a male as “man,” in either slang or more formal English, is neutral without further context, addressing a woman simply as “woman” is always patronizing and insulting:
Klingons
Klingons have the distinction of being the only Star Trek humanoids adequately represented in a Google N-Gram, but even here, Klingon man does not appear, which means the term returns less than 40 hits. Klingon woman, however, is by far the most represented:
This suggests that for writers in the Star Trek universe, Klingons are by default male; females have to be specified:
Though the Romulans have a fairly egalitarian — though fascist — culture, Romulan woman is the only term that shows up in an NGram, suggesting the same male default.
Klingon female appears in the purely descriptive sense, as half of a male-female behavioral pair, or simply as a synonym:
The first two examples are drawn from non-narrative works where the use of male and female give the passages the air of cultural anthropology, as if the Klingons were some jungle tribe “discovered” in the 19th c. While this usage, then and now, may betray cultural bias, it is free of affect, which, of course, makes it all the more insidious when applied to real people rather than inhabitants of a fictive sci-fi universe.