I am not a native English speaker and I have sometimes referred to people as male and female (as that is what I have been taught) but I have received some backlash in some cases, especially for the word “female”, is there some negative thought in the word which I am unaware of?
I don’t know if this is the best place to ask, if it’s not appropriate I have no problem to delete it ^^
I know it’s playing the syntactic role of a noun, that’s what I said. But it’s playing the semantic role of a descriptor. The “thing” being described here is a suspect, one that is white and also male, as opposed to a male who is white and also suspected.
Syntactically, the word male was a noun. But semantically, it’s still just describing the suspect, rather than identifying the thing to be described.