SO glad I don’t have to worry about this issue…I adore every one of these replies. Who says iNatters don’t have great senses of humor? Thanks for setting my mind at ease…I’ll assume it’s a personal choice thing. 
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The term “man-of-war” is an old word for a warship. Much like merchant ships of the same era were called merchantmen. Or, if they belonged to the Dutch East India Company, East Indiamen. So the organism is named after a ship, not after a person – just like the frigate bird is sometimes called by the synonym man-o’-war bird (a frigate being one class of warship).
Wasn’t there some animated movie about a male ladybug?
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Which is odd, when you consider that ships are always referred to as “she.” There is some serious gender confusion going on there.
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Stole my thunder! :-S
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From Wikipedia:
" Man-of-war. “A phrase applied to a line of battle ship, contrary to the usual rule in the English language by which all ships are feminine. It probably arose in the following manner: ‘Men of war’ were heavily armed soldiers. A ship full of them would be called a ‘man-of-war ship.’ In process of time the word ‘ship’ was discarded as unnecessary and there remained the phrase ‘a man-of-war.’”
— Talbot in Henry Fredrick Reddall Fact, fancy, and fable, 1892, p. 340"
Interesting!
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People, people, people! A Ladybug is not a bug! It’s a Beetle. So ladybeetle is the preferred nomenclature.
Seriously though, I don’t think we need to be concerned about common names (or even binomial ones). It does raise an interesting question though. I can’t see an insect ‘struggling’ with gender identity, so is this a concept that is perhaps restricted to vertebrate life? If so, at what ‘level’ does gender become separated from sex? I don’t expect answers, and am not looking to start an argument (as @astra_the_dragon says, I support gender equality) - it’s just an interesting question.
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Never knew that was their actual name, Ive always known them as daddy long legs or papa long legs. If it were a female Id call it Mommy long legs or Mama long legs
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This is a much debated question, but not relevant to this particular topic, nor does it have much to do with nature, so I don’t think it really fits in the Forum.
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Ok, fine with me. I was just kind of thinking aloud.
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I think it’s a scientific and appropriate question, but it’s so little studied* even in humans that anyone claiming to have proof of other animals’ conception of gender or lack thereof can only be guessing. It is also, of course, a sore topic for many. While there is clear scientific evidence for the existence and validity of humans whose gender and sex assigned at birth are not the same, all of us here know that some people in the world prefer to ignore scientific evidence.
*mostly due to discrimination and lack of funding, I might add
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To clarify, I was only mentioning the human question; the issue of gender identity in an invertebrate is extremely complex, like you said.
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That’s kind of what I thought. To be clear, I have no issues about gender identity of any sort, and did not bring this up as part of an ‘agenda’. It just occurred to me as I was typing my original response.
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Curiosity is good! I didn’t read any sort of hostile or malicious intent. A lot of people don’t know much on the topic, so it’s good to ask questions out of a genuine wish to learn.
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Do they really call the USS Ronald Reagan she?
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Where have you seen this, and what was the argument for it? First time I’ve come across it. Unless there’s a compelling reason I don’t see the need to change the name because it’s gendered. Is “harvestman” even a term used for anything else these days?
I’ve always found “harvestmen” a weird name, but apparently (at least according to Wikipedia) it stems from “harvest spiders” or “shepherd” (which is what opilio means in Latin).
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I’ve seen it on Instagram - in captions on photos. No reasons given…simply the captions describing the image. I’ve seen a lot of herbalists use male and female pronouns to speak about plants but I’ve always understood that a bit – plants have been written about for centuries in terms of being male and female.
The masculine herbs are those which are possessed of strong, fiery vibrations…the feminine herbs are plants which are quieter, softer, subtler softer in their effects. -Cunningham’s Encyclopedia of Magical Herbs (Scott Cunningham)
I used to follow a number of herbalists on Instagram and almost every one spoke of plants in this way.
Until the harvestperson caption and (can’t think of where I’ve seen daddy/mommy-long-legs but I did - maybe the same user?), I hadn’t imagined anyone was actively trying to gender neutralize daddy long legs.
It reminded me of this thread and that is why I posed the question.
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Plants as male and female? That makes much less sense than assigning a gender to a species of animal which at least does have distinct sexes… there’s no real sense when it comes to common names, just whatever people found meaningful or memorable. No reason to change them if the meaning is inaccurate but harmless – it’s honestly a distraction from the common names that do need changing.
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Instagram is weird
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What about mankind and human? Personkind and huperson!
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Actually, I originally learned that ladybird beetle was the correct term.
I have seen the word humyn – presumably on the same logic as womyn, i.e. to remove the masculine reference to man from a word that is not masculine.
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