Female is a great adjective but an inappropriate noun.

It's so weird how they flip both of those words around. Like, they'll say "females" instead of women, but then, they'll say "a woman doctor."

I hope that you can extend some grace to people born in different eras. When I hear something like "woman employee," I hear my Greatest Generation grandparents, and believe me, neither "woman doctor" or "woman driver," nor any similar construction was complimentary.

I think it was the Boomers who started to use "female" as an adjective, because it sounded clinical, descriptive, and non-judgemental. So "female employee" sounds much better to my ear. (But, FWIW, the use of "female" as a noun is total cringe.)

Yeah, inceldom has coopted the word, and now I hear that "woman doctor" is preferred, but it's not always easy to remember that on the fly when you grew up with the opposite connotation.

This one has bitten me in the ass. Male and female are incredibly common terms in the medical community, but I try to limit my use of female to work only, if at all. On the plus side, I've learned I rarely need to use it at work. It literally only matters if we're doing a deep dive into what's potentially going on and need to branch out to figure it out

it helps if you read females like tamales.

Every time I see the word used outside of a biological context, I imagine the person looks like this:

Although with the distinction between gender and sex continually becoming more prevalent in the zeitgeist, I find myself using the terms "male" and "female" more often than I used to.

Non-native speakers in shambles. On the other hand, even males are not safe from us

So the authors of these books?

• The female
• Females
• Single Black female
• Females and Harry Potter
• Fierce females on television: a cultural history
• Warriors, witches, women: mythology's fiercest females
• How Can They Tell If I Am Male Or Female? Gender Stereotypes in Disney Movies
• Mistress, mother, muse: an exploration of the female in modern and contemporary Mediterranean literature
• Gender and identity in Franz Grillparzer's classical dramas: figuring the female
• Livy's women: crisis, resolution, and the female in Rome's foundation history
• A heritage of her own?: Allusion and tradition in female-authored poetry of the Hellenistic age
• African American females: addressing challenges and nurturing the future
• Gender, supernatural beings, and the liminality of death: monstrous males/fatal females
• Women who fly: goddesses, witches, mystics, and other airborne females
• A house full of females: plural marriage and women's rights in early Mormonism, 1835-1870

Or of various feminist book titles featuring the noun?

Or the vast amount of people who use the noun self-referentially in dating communities (eg, “F4F/M”), classifieds (eg, “need a roommate […] females only”), or natural communication? In conventional language, it's an acceptable word.

Maybe you have this wrong, and instead it's those who in effect (which may defy intent) stigmatize an entire gender by claiming their noun is wrong instead of embracing it as a word of pride.