You can’t get away that easy. 
A four year old person was visiting my office one day when a friend of mine came in dressed in her police officer’s uniform. He looked at her for a minute and asked “Are you a lady police?”
Also, “fireman” already has the purpose of indicating a specific job on a locomotive. A fireman keeps fires going, while a firefighter puts fires out.
My dad is (or was before he stopped working) a nurse. He also benches several hundred pounds and has a pad of muscle on his gut the size of my physics textbook.
I know, I just find “fire fighter” to be much more difficult to articulate. FTR, I’m functioning here on the same logic that allows a woman to be an actor, and a female superior officer to be addressed as “Sir,” (don’t know if anyone does that outside Star Trek: The Movie, but it seems sensible to me), not out of a belief that a penis is vital to the role of fire fighting. But, maybe I’m wrong, and I just need to do some exercises to make “firefighter” roll off my tongue trippingly.
Well, anyway, just for fun, and because I’m watching Hot Fuzz (paraphrased):
Danny: And Doris here’s our resident police woman.
Nicholas Angel: She’s not a police woman.
Danny: Yes, she is - I’ve seen her bra.
Nicholas Angel: She’s a police officer. Being a woman has nothing to do with it.
I’m with you on the whole male nurse thing but what really gets my goat (heh) is the term co-ed (short for co-educational) for a female college student. The term harks back to the time when most didn’t accept women students. The few that got in needed a special term to identify them. Women now make up 50% of all college students. So quit using co-ed to refer to them!
I’ve always been tempted to refer to myself as a female nurse–just to see what would happen…
I’ve worked with any number of “male nurses”, but most of them are nurses who happen to be male. (and damned good nurses for the most part).
When I was younger, I used to get asked if I became a nurse in order to marry a doctor. I always replied yes, but unfortunately I never managed to snare one. The looks I would get!
I almost look forward to the annual fires in California and Colorado, because we get a laugh out of them with the American accents of the reporters: “Teams of far farters have been working around the clock…” 
Yeah, OK it’s childish.
No. Nevertheless, it is good for our utterances to have occasional redundancies. In fact, our language itself has built in redundant features.
How about “male prostitute”? I’m betting you would want “male” tacked onto that before calling the phone number.
Words such as doctress and dozens others like it are documented in the Oxford English Dictionary, ranging over the course of the past four centuries.
Yeah, but it is amusing.
Firefighters fight fire. Most are men. Not all are. Whatever.
Speaking of them, a bunch (as in close to a couple of thousand) managed to save the town I live in from a wildfire a few weeks ago. This weekend the town is essentially throwing a giant party to celebrate. The head of the entire operation is a woman, and I can’t begin to describe the ways she and everybody who worked under her kicks ass. I hope I see her tomorrow night so I can hug her or buy her a beer (she’d better not take as many people up on that one as will want to give) or something.
There was a NYTimes article over the summer about librarians, in which the term “guybrarian” was used. Not a one of my librarian friends who happens to be a man would refer to him self as a guybrarian. Or a male librarian for that matter.
Sounds like an Aussie trying to say “gay librarian.”
Pfft. “guybrarian?!” Heh! My dad, who just retired after a lifelong career of distinguished librarianing, would look at anyone uttering crap like that with his patented librarian withergaze.
Back when I was a shoe salesman, a guy came into the store looking for a pair of comfortable white shoes. “I’m a male nurse,” he explained.
Um, we could plainly see he was male …
The best example of this point from the male point of view are the verbs “to father” and “to mother.” The first means to use your sperm to create an embryo, the second one means to do everything necessary to get the child ready for the real world. How much of a disparity is that?
Back in the 1970’s, when people realized that men could take care of their own children (what a concept) some wise person came up with the verb “to parent.” But there is still no verb to describe how a woman conceives a child, goes through nine months of pregnancy and gives birth. I guess it’s a holdover from the old sexist days–Men had children, women took care of their men’s children.
Personally I don’t have a problem with the term ‘male nurse’ because it reflects the reality that women so vastly outnumber men in the nursing field. At least that’s been my experience. It’s a simple, obvious trait that let’s you easily distinguish who you’re talking about. If I see a man in scrubs, I’m going to assume he’s a doctor, lab technician, or a stock boy before I think he’s a nurse.
Come to think of, I haven’t had any female doctors in the last three years. And I’ve seen about a dozen different doctors in that time. Probably not a big enough sample size, but if I was told I was going to see a Dr. So-and-so, I’d assume it was another man unless told otherwise.
Oh, and the only male nurse I know personally is gay.
I remember reading someone who pointed out that, technically, the male students at coeducational universities are also co-eds.
The one that bothers me is when a father is taking care of his child, and someone else (who knows perfectly well that he is the father) says, “Oh, are you baby-sitting today?”
…No. I’m parenting.