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Facebook Debuts New Gender Options, Pronoun Choices
beaverdownunder writes "Facebook has recognized it's a gender-diverse world — at least in the U.S. In addition to Male or Female, Facebook now lets U.S. users choose among some 50 additional options such as 'transgender,' 'cisgender,' 'gender fluid,' 'intersex' and 'neither.' 'Users also now have the ability to choose the pronoun they would like to be referred to publicly: he/his, she/her, or the gender-neutral they/their.' A post on Facebook's Diversity page said, 'When you come to Facebook to connect with the people, causes, and organizations you care about, we want you to feel comfortable being your true, authentic self. An important part of this is the expression of gender, especially when it extends beyond the definitions of just "male" or "female." ...We also have added the ability for people to control the audience with whom they want to share their custom gender. We recognize that some people face challenges sharing their true gender identity with others, and this setting gives people the ability to express themselves in an authentic way.'"
Honestly, what is the difference between "Trans Person, Gender Variant, Gender Questioning, Bigender, Androgynous, Pangender and Transsexual."?
Some people die at 25 and aren't buried until 75. -Benjamin Franklin
If you allow others to "define" who you are simply by a label no matter how diverse they have already won.
But still does not allow you to be in two relationships at a time.
Facebook = owned by Jews.
Google = owned by Jews.
Google + Facebook + others = New World Order.
New World Order = Jews.
Jews, or rather sionists (not all Jews are sionists) = evil and sick.
Hope its not only a Beta Function. F*** beta.
No, "they/their" is plural. Using it as gender neutral for a single person is just stupid and bad grammar.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
Transgender vs. Transsexual generally refer to someone who hasn't had surgery, and someone who has, respectively.
An androgynous person doesn't present as one gender or another.
Gender questioning is pretty obvious, with the individual in the process of working out inner feelings and unsure how they're presenting.
Bigender, I'm not sure of. Maybe someone who is comfortable switching gender roles in a culture with 2 or more genders. (Some cultures have several)
Pangender sounds like a lot of work.
If you are going to make 50 options to say gay, and transgender, and 2 for normal, why not have it be a text box so you can enter what you want.
I've used these for a long time. It's almost natural to use the neutral plural as a neutral singular: when you say "he or she", you're implicitly referring to two possible states of gender, so using "they" to stand for the superposition of the two makes sense.
Koans and fables for the software engineer
Well, there are open minded when it comes to gender but don't you dare to upload a picture of a mother who is breast-feeding her child.
Beheading, on the other hand are OK.
And now Facebook can sell targeted ads to these self identified minority groups...
If you can make it this easy for people to share who they share their gender preferences with, why can't you let me customize which advertisers and apps can and can't see what portions of my data, my friends list, and can post on my behalf? I guess I will continue to not like anything on Facebook and not use apps.
I wonder how they are storing the gender in the database. Most databases allocate a single character for gender -- M or F in most cases. I had joked that a company could easily offer Neuter and Transgender and still use the single character space. How are they storing 50 different choices in a single character? Either that, or create another linked table for the multitude of choices, and use X in gender to indicate a lookup in the auxiliary gender table. Would some countries limit what choices their citizens could have?
Either that, or let each individual FB-er choose a unique description for themselves - in their own language.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
....overcompleifabulocation it.
Male, Female, Other and "Prefer not to say" would adequately cover everything. If someone desperately wants the world to know they chose Other because their genitalia are part human and part mallard duck or that they derive sexual gratification from dolphins they can say so in their profile.
Wouldn't the gender neutral personal pronoun be 'it/its' rather than 'they/their'. Otherwise you're switching between singular and plural mid sentence... and that's just poor grammar.
There will always be someone claiming to not fit into any of the classifications you supply, and now they can claim you are specifically hurting them.
These new genders are for hipsters, as soon as they become mainstream they will switch to something new and yell foul that you are not accommodating them.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
So Animals/plants/things in general besides people can be now treated equally too? With the right "it" pronoun?
Yepee.
Disclaimer: This is NOT some ironic comment directed at LGBT individuals
In any case, props to Facebook. More than a reality check, it's good to see persistent stigmata, even for the social web, being treated with the moral worthlessness they deserve. Social web is no place for restriction or judgement. Next step: internationally distributed servers so you can avoid government scrutiny, including privacy violation, censorship, among other idiotic policies that do not support net neutrality, in ways that go beyond bandwidth shaping.
The ultimate politically correct pronoun is a melding of she he it. Of course the filter won't permit me to my favorite gender non-specific pronoun. It is however for those who are a tad dense, a synonym for waste products from the alimentary tract and that are voided via the ventral orifice.
A lot of this comes down to sex vs gender.
Sex is your biological status: what organs and hormone levels do you have, and how have they developed? Sounds straight-forward, at least at first.
Gender might be defined as a social role and group identity you take on which is influenced most significantly in most people by their sex. So most people pick from one of the two massively dominant genders, wind up pretty content about it, and have organs matching everyone else in their camp.
But what if you have testes and breasts? And hormone levels pretty much in between the standard man and the standard woman? You might end up legally forced to adopt an 'official' sex based on your chromosome data or what went on your birth certificate, perhaps, but does that help you pick a gender? Does that actually reflect your sex? Probably not. Do you identify more with another sex? What about another gender? If you want to change over, how much will you do and what changes are possible?
The organs you have, the hormone levels you have, and how you feel about them all affect what sex you become and what gender you select. People who aren't comfortable being a traditional man or woman and sleeping with the opposite are simply trying to work out all the permutations and nomenclature now that they're somewhat more free to do so.
If a given person is polite about it and doesn't expect you to memorize a bunch of fluid terms to use for them or coddle their sexuality more than you would anyone else, just let it be and don't worry about the variety of possibilities. They'll work themselves out and they aren't likely to affect you. If they're a dick or an irrational activist about it, and there's plenty of those also, just ignore them and/or fight to keep them from defining your life any more than you're allowed to define theirs.
You can look into the definitions in any Women's or Gender Studies website; or you can ignore it for now and simply be a decent human being to the people you meet, ignoring their chosen combination unless they step on your own rights.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G...
I'm a woman trapped in a mans body, but I just happen to be a lesbian... so it's worked out all these years. Is there gender label for me?
What about prosessive pronouns (his/her)?
"... we want you to feel comfortable being your true, authentic self."
I wonder if they include things like Futa, Loli and Trap with their many gender-obfuscating references...
It just seems to me that many will abuse the whole Net-Annonimity thing, and post their Fantasy selves, as opposed to their "true, authentic" self-image.
What's to keep people from having alts, anyway? There's plenty of those already.
Well, Good Luck with all that, FaceBook! I hope you can last long enough to make a Graceful exit when the Next Big Thing gets here.
You can decide to be male, female, or whatever the hell you want but you can't make up a name or self identify as a fictitious person or we will ban you. Welcome to Facebook.
See Thailand, India.
"Not your fucking business"
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Why not just limit the pronouns to "they" and "their"? The more specific pronouns they provide, the more people will feel excluded because their pronoun is not an option. And, for those people there's always the genderswap plugin for Chrome.
no, I don't have a sig
If you're going to pretend gender is distinct from sex or arbitrary, I suggest a text area, so one can write that one is a pear if one wants to. I reserve my right *not* to call him/her "thy fruityness".
There are only two possible states of gender:
Penis or Vagina. Or if that's sexist, Vagina or Penis.
He or she works just fine, for fuck's sake.
{
DNA sex: <XX|XY|XXX|XXY|XXXY>,
penis: (<Y|N>, <artificial|natural>),
vagina: (<Y|N>, <artificial|natural>),
has love/sexual interest in people with: {
DNA sex: [<XX|XY|XXX|XXY|XXXY>...],
penis: (<Y|N>, <artificial|natural|either>),
vagina: (<Y|N>, <artificial|natural|either>),
both kinds of genitals simultaneously: <Y|N>
},
preferred sexual activities: {
penis into vagina: <Y|N>,
penis into anus (active): <Y|N>,
penis into anus (passive): <Y|N>,
penis into mouth (active): <Y|N>,
penis into mouth (passive): <Y|N>,
mouth on anus (active): <Y|N>,
mouth on anus (passive): <Y|N>
}
}
The above model still has some issues (like how do you combine the interest with the activities in a way that makes sense), but you get the point.
We are the Borg. Facebook is irrelevant.
You're Facebook will adapt. To service us.
Yes, it's "wanker"
transexual Nazi Eskimos are frowned upon.
I want them to refer to me as 'it'. Is there an option for that?
It works in the sense that Newtonian celestial mechanics work. They're good enough to land someone on the Moon, but when you need GPS satellites to be accurate, you need Relativity, and to do the extra math. So let's say that 99% of the time gender is accurately represented by a bit value. The rest of the time you need, say, a byte. In 2014, would you set up a server or a database that failed 1% of the time to save 7 bits per record?
Liberty - Security - Laziness - Pick any two.
Just like everyone else...
Seems that being confused about gender identity is fulfilling same niche as being vocal about not having TV 30 years ago (or never reading Harry Potter book few years ago, or not having Facebook account until recently). Nobody really cares, but you still have to push it into everybody face.
It would be easier (at least for geeks) to comprehend the concept if they had just said that gender is a multidimensional matrix. ... ?
1. biological sex (xx, xy, whatever)
2. how the person identifies self.
3. whom the person is attracted to
4.
Gotta say I'm a bit tempted to rejoin Facebook just to explore the options, since I might be aware of 4 or 5, tops...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Fuck Facebook.
In 2014, would you set up a server or a database that failed 1% of the time to save 7 bits per record?,
I think it should be stored as an integer, juuuust in case we need to do arithmetic on it some day.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
The English language isn't as strongly gendered as most Romance languages (not that English has more than a kissing-barbarian relationship to Romance languages) - but What About The Pronouns?
Our third-person pronouns are Male (singular), Female (Singular), Neuter (singular), and indeterminate (plural.)
I've thought for some time that we need additional pronouns for gender-unknown and gender-indeterminate (a sort of an equivalent to Pollster's "don't know" and "don't care".)
You're confusing "gender" and "sex".
Any way you see this, the least information you give about yourself on Facebook the better so no one can fill out forms knowing your gender, mail, city, phone number or whatever might be asked for credential information on banking or other sensitive site.
Now, it's not idiot proof since a huge proportion of people do put these information willingly without realizing that it gives Tools to potential identity theft
Talk about PC....
Look, you can have all the operations in the world. If you're a man - you're still a man and vice versa.
Yep.. You're still special, just like everyone else.
Do the new options include Neither/Drone/NA ???
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
If you can't decide wether you should stand up or sit down when you pee, you've really got bigger issues to resolve than the pronoun used on your "Facebook status".
The Swedes already have "hen" as a gender neutral pronoun for small folk. We can just rename "lady chickens" something else to free that up. Maybe another like hen-an or hen-do for older and younger hens.
The real proem is that this doesn't address non-human beings. Dolphins, gorillas, and others need to be equal on the Internet too.
That still doesn't address non-caporal entities like Internet chat bots, Tachicomas, giant floating heads, or beings of pure energy and different temporal existence characteristics. Those beings need equality even though we haven't met them yet.
We should really fix all these issues at once.
At some point wouldn't it just be easier to remove the classification altogether?
I'm not condemning Facebook for offering these options, but remember that gender is one of the things that Facebook's targeted advertising leans on pretty heavily. Well, now they have a *lot* more ability to target certain audiences. Sure, the genderqueer (to use the closest thing to a catch-all term that I'm aware of) community is small compared to the overall population, but that also means that it's probably largely unreached by traditional targeted advertising.
Never forget: you may be Facebook's users, but you are not their customers. You[r eyes] are the content they sell to their real customers, the advertisers. The more info the advertisers have for targeted advertising, the more their ad impressions are worth. To Facebook, that's surely worth adding a few extra terms for gender identity...
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
What about shklim or shkler? Shkli want to be able to identify myshkelf in the way Shkli see fit.
So in other words Facebook wants to "out" its user base and share this data with third-party advertisers and the NSA. I think FBs terms of use makes it a violation to use anything other than real, actual details, so the need for every possible term one would apply to oneself.
People are trying to grab attention on facebook? Say it isn't so
Since there is no option for "Ginormous", I ended-up picking "Neither."
So why even offer the choice? input type="text"
How much time and energy was expended in an effort to achieve this perfect enlightenment?
How is this even remotely considered as news? How in gods green Earth is a feature on some random website news worthy? Please do tell me.
"If you can make it this easy for people to share more information about themselves, why can't you let me decide to share less information about myself?"
Because that's their business. Yeah, this is progress on the gender acceptance front, but the biggest reason Facebook does it is so they can get more detailed and more accurate information about their users' identities.
Yep, that probably follows from Cantor's diagonal argument.
Trans women are women, we're not trying to trick you. :)
I was designated male at birth, but realized eventually (once I had the words to describe it) that I was a woman, despite the "It's a boy!" the doctors said.
oh I didnt mean they were trying to trick me, Just, and no offense, but to me, biology is what counts, not what one feels. More power to you im glad you are happy
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Used to be that a doc would just do a little nip and tuck at birth and then start hormones...only to tell the kid later on that they may LOOK like a dude but were really born a girl...etc. NOW the trend is to leave the kids body alone until THEY can be part of a decision and more and more kids are like, hey cool...this is fine. Guys...we are just a few hormones shy of being a gal and things in utero can go too slow or too fast, resulting in these birth differences.
Get real...you may one day be a parent of a kid born with this not so unusual condition or may have a friend or relative...just educate yourself.
Bi-gender
My eyes have been tricky this day and I have been reading Big ender and it has been playing tricks on my mind as to what that was all about.
So much easier to stick with being a mere heterosexual male.
You gotta love anybody with the user "beaverdownunder" no matter what the story is about !!!!!
I misread bigender and assumed it was someone who though that 0x0100 was 256
Just leave us in the normal world alone please. I'm sure Mr. Putin agrees with me. Most of us just want to be people, kind of like Adama and Eve remember without cyborg labels plastered all over us...
Do not pour into car engine.