Female Monks

I received a long and appreciative letter the other day and it happened to refer to the former Chatsumarn Kabilsingh, now ordained as Bhikkhuni Dhammananda, as 'a female monk'. Now I don’t think I am particularly fussy about words or word usage but this term and its ugly sister 'female priest' annoys and baffles me. I can well understand why Christians use the term female priest; the proper usage 'priestess' sounds just a little too pagan. But why do we Buddhists refer to nuns as 'female monks' when the correct, universally understood, still not dated, without negative connotations and seven-letters-shorter word 'nun' is available? We readily refer to someone being an actresses, a princess, a seamstresses or an heiress, so what's wrong with calling someone a priestess, or if they are a woman ordained in the Buddhist tradition, a nun?
I suspect that that insidious American disease political correctness is at work here and indeed it is mainly in American Buddhist publications that I see these terms. But if it is political correctness then it is a poorly considered expression of it. 'Female monk' clearly still tips the balance towards the masculine gender; you are merely a female version of the male. If you genuinely wanted to redress the gender prejudice and add a bit of affirmative action language as well, you should actually start calling priests male priestesses and monks male nuns.

The picture shows a female bull. I wanted to add some pictures of a male hen, a female ram and an anatomically complete eunuch but I thought I had already made my point.