Iie-Kyo said:
Yeah, I'm with Magus on this. Whoever is using the fallacious excuse that "it's offensive" should realize it creates a precedent that we shouldn't be using certain tags unless it's politically correct to do so, which I feel would lead to a slippery slope that we don't want to deal with.
There are many words in the English language that were originally deemed offensive but has become a normal part of everyday life. I will not list examples here as they're very easy to Google. I strongly suggest aliasing otoko no ko to trap to please those who want to avoid using the non-offensive "offensive" term, not the other way around.
Most fandom who are not familiar with the intricacies of the Japanese language will end up getting confused, and despite how it's used here, it's not going to change the way most anime fans and people familiar with this kind of stuff will use the term. For the sake of clarity for most visitors, I ask that you reconsider the tag mapping and to alias it so it's the other way around.
The reason people say 'it's offensive' about the term is not just about political correctness. Translating 男の娘 as 'trap' is actually throwing meaning away in some (not all, certainly) cases, and in some cases is adding meaning that wasn't there originally. It's not a case of saying 'use this word instead of that word, they mean the same thing but this one's polite'. 男の娘 doesn't have a single direct analogue in English.
Even if many people are genre-savvy enough to know that 'trap' in this context doesn't mean what you'd expect based on the meaning of the *actual english word*, and doesn't mean what it means when used colloquially to describe a real person, that doesn't eliminate those problems.
The original term 男の娘 has a somewhat vague and broad meaning that just makes it unwise to translate to a word that has so much baggage and is a poor semantic fit. Trap implies deceitfulness and suggests that the 'trap' is luring in people who would otherwise not be interested or will regret the interaction. When you're using the word to actually *describe* that, it's at least an appropriate fit, even if it's still an insulting term - but a good portion of the content on this site tagged as 'trap' is not that at all in any fashion. It's just androgyny, sometimes mixed with crossdressing. Sometimes it's characters that are most-likely (or explicitly) trans.
I have skin in the game on this subject, and I'll say that the use of 'trap' for this tag never particularly upset me, but I think the new tag is much better at preserving meaning. There are a lot of cases where translators (lazily, in my opinion) use 'trap' as a blanket translation for 男の娘 when other english words would be more accurate, and it's a disappointing way of destroying the meaning of source material. You can compare FFF's fansubs for Himegoto with most other groups for one example of how you can avoid blanket use of the word; Hachimitsu Scans does a very thorough job of this in their scanlations as another example.
I'd consider it reasonable if 'trap' were a separate tag used for content that very clearly embodies the english meaning of the trope, but I think people would confuse that with 'otoko no ko' in terms of meaning too easily, and there's not a considerable excess of that specific type of content (at least as far as I can tell), though it certainly exists.
Arguments that 'otoko no ko' is a poor choice are a little shallow considering how many romanized japanese terms are used to describe things - moe, tsundere, ahoge, etc.
