Seriously, when it comes to romantic fantasy / fantasy romance / romantasy, it's like LGBTQIA+ writers and cishet writers are working in completely different genres and worlds. Notice how CL Polk calls these unnamed characters women and not feeeeemales.
Because people who are people, no matter what those kinds of people are, can invent gender even if they're not human. Sentient, sapient, thinking people who have cultures and civilisations of their own should invent gender, instead of running around like Ferengi calling everyone "males" and "females" instead of "men" and "women."
I literally do not care how many authors did it first, how popular the books are that do this in romantic fantasy and fantasy romance and romantasy and monster romance. It gives the impression the cishets are not okay. It gives the impression that you're bioessentialist (and therefore, a buncha terves).
I literally do not care of "well, everyone's been doing this since the 90s and look at all these really popular books that do it!" Like, seriously, if SJM jumped off a cliff...? Grow a backbone and stop sounding like a bunch of terves. I'm afraid, as a queer person in this space, I must assume terf and therefore unsafe every time you resort to biological sex instead of gender.
(And none of that is even getting into the weeds of the fact that in books like Daughter of the Blood, this sharp divide into "male" and "female" was indicative of the rot and corruption of power in that world.)
(and none of that gets into the fact that when you run around using "male(s)" and "female(s)" as nouns it sounds like you're talking about a bunch of lions or hyenas instead of people, and you throw a human into that mix who's fucking that creature and we get into some real curious consent issues if what she's fucking is not a person but an animal. because I know one of the excuses for using biological sex instead of gender is that it's more primal. gross, babes. gross.)