Politically correct substitutes for (fe)male and (wo)man

You are looking for a practical answer, not a theoretical one: politically correct terms that are acceptable in practice. So I looked for competing terms that are actually being adopted in the wild.

According to the Google Books Ngram Viewer, the proposed replacement for woman that shows evidence of adoption in literature is womyn. It is now used about one time in five thousand in place of woman.

The proposed replacement for the plural form women that shows evidence of adoption is wimmin. It is now used about one time in ten thousand in place of women.

These frequencies are very small, but have been trending upward since around 1975. They are evidence that these are the primary competing terms, but not evidence of widespread acceptance in literature.

Unlike womyn/wimmen, there is not yet a competing term for female. The term *fele has been proposed satirically, but no effort has been made to promote its actual use and there is no evidence in literature that it is gaining acceptance.


"Female" comes via French from Latin femella, the diminutive of femina "woman". It does not come from "male" and there is no reason for any feminist to want to ban it.

"Woman" does come from "man", but for some reason no one seems to object to it.