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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.
You know you're too stupid to even be a racist?
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.
But for some reason people get offended when we call them "it".
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'm no expert on irony, but I'm pretty sure calling a troll stupid is ironic.
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
No, "they/their" is plural. Using it as gender neutral for a single person is just stupid and bad grammar.
You should try to get in the habit of looking things up, just to be sure, before engaging in ad hominem. From dictionary.com's entry for "They":
Usage note
Long before the use of generic he was condemned as sexist, the pronouns they, their, and them were used in educated speech and in all but the most formal writing to refer to indefinite pronouns and to singular nouns of general personal reference, probably because such nouns are often not felt to be exclusively singular: If anyone calls, tell them I'll be back at six. Everyone began looking for their books at once. Such use is not a recent development, nor is it a mark of ignorance.
....overcompleifabulocation it.
"Singular they" has been a standard part of English for a long, long time.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
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.
"It" is used exclusively to refer to nonhuman objects, and has a long history in writing as a way of emphasising that something ostensibly or previously human is not. If you can't see the reason for offense, you either don't read much or don't encounter human beings very often.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
It used to be perfectly acceptable as a gender-neutral singular, but that usage got phased out around the same time "thou" did (thus why modern English lacks a T-V distinction). English now lacks a gender-neutral pronoun, which is a pain in the ass, so this is how people fill it in. Personally, I think writing he/she and his/her makes for much worse reading than using they/their.
The day the English language becomes the master of our interactions and not a tool of them, is the day that Orwell's nightmares come true. (It is telling that Orwell was a grammatical prescriptivist.)
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
It was still perfectly standard usage when I was born, and suffice to say I am not old enough to have used "thou".
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
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?
Can't be that long. It was considered wrong when I was in school and that wasn't that long ago.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
"I saw someone running into the street; they didn't stop and now their guts are all over the road."
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
But some ambiguity comes in because we refer to many non-human things (pets in particular) as he/she when, grammatically, they should be called "it".
Makes me think. Did plural reference for royalty start with female queens of England?
It is entirely possible they did not want to be refereed to as a woman when ruling.
Personally, there is no way I would ever use plural for non-royalty.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
It's always used on non-humans, but it's not used on all non-humans.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
"... 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.
I think he was referring to your spelling mistake. How is the White Race going to win the racial holy war if some of them think that they are fighting the 'sionists' and others think that the 'zionists' and the Z.O.G. are the enemy? Military acronyms are enough of a clusterfuck as it is...
What your school taught you and what is actually true about the English language are very different things. Infinitives can be easily split, for example.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Let me guess, you are under the age of 30, yes? Probably under the age of 25?
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
Keep guessing.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
This isn't the case of a nonspecific hypothetical person, though: this is for the specific case.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
English (like most languages) has three third person singular pronouns: 'he', 'she', and 'it'. Other languages even have gender identifying second person pronouns and gender identifying plural pronouns. English seems to have gotten jipped on the supply of pronouns. If you do not understand our array of available pronouns and their correct usage, then you obviously do not use language much.
We often apply 'he' and 'she' to non human objects, however we balk at apply 'it' to people. In fact, in most other languages each object has actually been assigned a de facto gender. English is perhaps the most gender neutral language currently in use.
We get all uppity about people referring to themselves as 'we' because it makes them sound elitist due to the historic habit of royalty using 'we', so why should we let people incorrectly use 'they'? 'They' implies that there is more than one of you. The misuse of 'they' as a gender neutral person is a terrible abuse of the language.
The fact that our literature and fiction place so much emphasis on the usage of 'it' to refer to a dehumanized creature is telling about how much importance our culture places on gender. If it is now culturally acceptable to not have a gender, then it should be acceptable to call you 'it' since the removal of the gender is no longer offensive as gender is no longer a required trait of being human.
If you have no gender and don't want to be called a 'he' or 'she', well we have to call you something so 'it' is the correct choice (unless there is more than one of you). You can't both be offended at me applying a gender to you and then offended when I don't.
This attempt (it's a small portion of a larger effort) to force the general public to accept pronouns deemed correct by a minority is what's Orwellian about this.
"It" is used exclusively to refer to nonhuman objects
"It's not you, it's me."
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
"Not your fucking business"
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
You're a Chinese nerf herder.
Can't be that long. It was considered wrong when I was in school and that wasn't that long ago.
Shakesphere used "their" as a singular. What you learned in school was revisionism.
I was responding to the A/C comment, you should probably try reading it.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
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
Or you're a Finn. We don't have separate words for "he" or "she", there's only "hän". But in spoken Finnish it is always "se" ("it"), and there's nothing offensive about it. "Hän" would be overly formal.
"It" is used exclusively to refer to nonhuman objects,
And unborn babies. When people smugly make a point of not saying what the baby is, I refer to it as an "it". This is sometimes met with frowns, but it serves the purpose well. And the secondary purpose of annoying the parents.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
You're seriously claiming that the ability of a group of people to determine how they prefer to be referred to is Orwellian? Do you even know what "Orwellian" means? I mean, do you even know the plot outline of 1984?
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
I did, I assumed you were bringing the conversation back around rather than expanding on his branch. My mistake.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Funnily enough that's a recent thing. Shakespeare used "Their"/"They" to mean "His/her" without any problems. Even used it when the gender was known, and a specific person was refered to. See here for a discussion.
Given the lack of situations where it's likely to be misleading to use "The{y/ir}" instead of "His/her", and given it's not making it more difficult to express a concept (unlike, say, recent redefinitions of "literally" or "decimate"), and especially given this was the original definition of the word before some proto-grammar-nazi redefined it, I have no objection to they/their becoming valid for both single and plural references.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
transexual Nazi Eskimos are frowned upon.
Let me guess, you are under the age of 30, yes? Probably under the age of 25?
This is location-dependent, not age-dependent. Singular "they" is perfectly OK in Britain, and I think it's something that Americans could find useful too, once they get over their grammar doubts.
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.
I thought he was just being pretentious. Like spelling fetus with an 'o', or saying "maths" when you're an American.
sig: sauer
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.
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
Calling someone 'it' just because you can't easily classify their gender is somewhat insulting. If someone has a complicated gender, then you're better off referring to them by name and thus acknowledging that they are a person. By trying to shoehorn everyone into two narrow gender categories, it implies that someone's gender is more important than their humanity.
You're a temporary arrangement of matter sliding towards oblivion in a cold, uncaring universe
Then look it up. "They" has been used in the singular sense for as long as "you" has. "You" is also a plural pronoun. That your teachers proclaimed "they" to be only plural does not make it so.
I called my unborn babies it until they got assigned a gender and so did the doctors. No one was offended. We didn't know so used 'it'.
Then lets just get rid of pronouns entirely because they shoehorn all of us into categories. We can always use everyone' s name! We can then have a very precise, long winded, and repetitive language. Seriously... we have pronouns for a reason.
Unless we are going to make up new pronouns for every single gender deviation...
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".)
Then how do you explain all those languages with male-female-neuter nouns with little rhyme or reason to them? In German, "river" is male, while "mountain" is female. You'd think these would both be obvious candidates for neuter gender, but no. And that's the case for the vast majority of nouns.
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Sounds like you'd have a much harder time describing a mixed-gender conversation without constantly using names.
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You're confusing "gender" and "sex".
Actually, Olignoicella isn't too far from it, since one of the main item in 1984 is the redefinition of words to subvert the languages, and by extension the masses. This here pretty much is exactly what it's all about.
"The hallmark of humanity is the ability to move beyond sensory inputs" - Mary Helen Immordino-Yang
Did you know that "you" is also supposed to be plural, and "thou" the singular? That's why we use "you *are* a silly person" - because language changes.
Also, you can quote Shakespeare, Chaucer, Austen, and the KJV for uses of singular their.
Do the new options include Neither/Drone/NA ???
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
Other languages even have gender identifying second person pronouns and gender identifying plural pronouns.
English is perhaps the most gender neutral language currently in use.
It looks like somebody who knows a little bit about a few European languages is over-generalizing. There's no grammatical gender in Japanese or Chinese. IIRC Japanese didn't even have gender-specific pronouns until kanojo was invented as a way to translate "she" from European languages. Mandarin has three pronouns for he, she and it, but they're pronounced the same way and only differ in writing.
Use of the words "good", "bad" or "evil" is almost invariably the result of oversimplification.
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 think you've misunderstood. The vast majority of time, you can relatively accurately use male or female pronouns. When male or female isn't appropriate, you can use the person's name. There's hardly a need for lots of pronouns.
You're a temporary arrangement of matter sliding towards oblivion in a cold, uncaring universe
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...
I cannot tell you how ignorant that sounds to me. Of the four languages I know to various degrees (English, French, Turkish, Mandarin), two of them are far less gendered than English. In both Turkish and Chinese, there is no "he/she" distinction -- there is a single pronoun which can be used for any person. Additionally, in the base for "person" and for "child" is ungendered, and to specify "man/woman" or "boy/girl" you have to add a gender tag. Chinese: rén = person, nánrén = man, nrén = woman. háizi = child, nánháizi = boy, nháizi = girl. (Turkish was too long ago for me to remember the actual words.) Turkish is the same for brother/sister. (Chinese have cutesy reduplicatives for sibling relationships -- gge, dìdi, mèimei, jijie -- so the "add a gender" thing wouldn't fit.) I never got to actor/actress, waiter/waitress, &c in Turkish, but in Chinese they're all ungendered as well. (And nouns are genderless in both languages too.)
Seriously dude -- if you don't know Chinese or Turkish, that's fine; but then don't make a claim about all languages "currently in use".
TCP: Why the Internet is full of SYN.
Regarding "they", English speakers have been using "they" as an ungendered third person singular for hundreds of years.
Language is defined by its speakers, not by some committee somewhere; each of us gets a vote. In some cases I persistently vote against change if I think it's a bad idea (for example, I will make fun of people who use the word "literally" when speaking figuratively as long as I can get away with it); but in this case, I think it's a perfectly reasonable thing to do, and I have purposely chosen to use "they" in this way.
TCP: Why the Internet is full of SYN.
Hmm, Slashdot seems to have eaten the characters it wasn't familiar with. That should be nuren and nuhaizi (tone 3).
TCP: Why the Internet is full of SYN.
"It" here still isn't (or shouldn't be) referring to a human. Normally it means, "The problem in our relationship isn't you; the problem is me."
TCP: Why the Internet is full of SYN.
or perhaps a contraction ?
How about sh'it ?
--kjh
We were not amused that the option "We/Us" was not included.
We're royalty, you insensitive clod!
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.
English is not the most gender neutral language in use. It is far from it. You literally can't talk about a person without referring to their gender unless you decided to talk in a very awkward manner. and yes, I count using "it" as talking in an awkward manner.
My first language does not have any gender specific pronouns at all. Zero. Zilch. None. It has pronouns that are only used for humans though, and they are all gender neutral. You can't get more gender neutral than not having any gender specific pronouns. It means you can talk about a man as you would about a woman, and if someone joined a conversation about a person midway, and the people in the conversation didn't talk about anything gender specific, you wouldn't know if they were talking about a man or a woman.
No, Facebook will ban you if you LIE about your gender identity. It is now their policy to "out" their user base. They need this information to sell to third party advertisers and the NSA. And yet there is still no plural option for marital status.
actually, Iwould say that the people pushing for the change are the ones that feel their gender is more important than their humanity, not those of us trying to figure out what the fuck to call someone without offending them
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
I seem to remember the main idea in 1984 to be the reduction of language in order to limit possible thought. While there appears to be some original parent posts I'm not seeing, it seems what we are talking about in this case is increasing the language in order to spur further thought.
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?
"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
The idea of Newspeak is predicated upon the idea that language is a rigid set of rules handed down by an outside authority (Orwell was a grammatical prescriptivist); if language is pliant and subject to change and reconsideration - as is happening with terms for gender - then that possible form of thought control is worn away. Look at the "euphemism treadmill": politically-correct terms for things become pejoratives within a generation, and the converse.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
...and?
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Well obviously this doesn't apply to languages with different grammars, given that it's a grammatical issue of English.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
I was demonstrating that noun genders in some languages are not nearly so cut-and-dried as you so dismissively make them out to be.
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Case in point, das Maedchen is the German word for girl, and is neuter.
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