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Male, female or custom? Facebook adds options for users to self-identify
- regleo 13y agoReg: But you can't have babies. Stan: Don't you oppress me. Reg: Where's the fetus going to gestate? You going to keep it in a box? Francis: It is symbolic of our struggle against oppression. Reg: It's symbolic of his struggle against reality. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0079470/quotes http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0079470/quotes
- cookiecaper 13y agoThe sad thing is most people don't understand how frighteningly representative this is of much of today's social activism.
- abraininavat 13y agoDo you mean to say it's representative of social activism in favor of transgender rights and respect? You're right, most people don't understand that, because it's simply not true. But please do illuminate us.
- chc 13y agoThe weird thing is that I haven't seen all that many examples of reality-rejecting social activism, despite your claim that there is "much" of it. Are you sure you haven't just failed to understand what the people are actually saying?
- wonderzombie 13y agoIt's not sad because "frighteningly representative" is purely subjective. I don't even know where to start disagreeing with you because you've failed to say anything about how. If you believe in the right of self-determination, what's the fucking difference how someone self-identifies?
- arrrg 13y agoWhat do babies have to do with any of this? Women who are infertile are still women.
- supergauntlet 13y agoNothing at all, but how else can you be an asshole to trans people? Oh right, by claiming they're not really male or female for reasons x, y, and z.
- Trufa 13y ago> Those petitioning for the change insist that there are an infinite number of genders, but just saying it doesn't make it so. Funny that HE says that, since disregarding your moral stand point on a non cisgender person, the reality, observational and scientific, is that sex is much more complicated than male and female. What we do with that may be up for discussion, but I find ironic how he's trying to deny this reality, basically, by just saying so.
- Domenic_S 13y agoMaybe gender is more complicated, but sex?
- nfoz 13y agohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermaphrodite#Humans http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermaphrodite#Humans This is a thing, there are people. Human sex is non-binary.
- Domenic_S 13y agoEducational but probably NSFW image on that wiki page.
- devindotcom 13y agoThere's definitely a whole rabbit hole this way - lot of gender theory and stuff. If you're really curious, check it out, there are some interesting arguments (though few satisfying conclusions).
- scott_karana 13y agoSex can be complicated too. Look up XXY, XYY, and the SRY protein. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersex http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersex http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klinefelter_syndrome http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klinefelter_syndrome http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XYY_syndrome http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XYY_syndrome http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SRY http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SRY
- paulnechifor 13y agoDamn, this doesn't work for me yet. I wanted to identify as a "just this nice uber trans-trans-awesome-guy".
- ItendToDisagree 13y agoIt's progress at least. Maybe someday there will be a setting for 'sexless elder god' so Cthulhu and the rest of the gang don't feel left out.
- jaimebuelta 13y agoAs I have a lot of friends in Facebook that I assume do not share the same language preferences than me (they are from around the world), this feature had made think about how hard internationalisation can be... I'm pretty sure than translating all the possible options, plus pronouns, etc, will be an interesting problem ;-) PD: I've checked and the option is only available so far to users using US English interface, so not a problem currently. I can imagine it will be at some point.
- brandonbloom 13y agoProper internationalization [1] is really hard. Seems like Facebook has done a great job though. The documentation [2] for this feature points out that if you choose "custom" gender, you need to choose your preference for male, female, or neutral pronouns. [1]: Heh, I'm so used to typing i18n, that was weird to type out. [2]: https://www.facebook.com/help/276177272409629 https://www.facebook.com/help/276177272409629
- daturkel 13y agoUnexpected but long overdue. It's a feature which means a lot to those that want it and has zero effect on those who don't. Glad to see the change.
- Beliavsky 13y agoThis change does not affect me, but I don't want to be pressured into referring to a male as female if he really is a male. Part of the transgender agenda is forcing others to accept such "gender identities". I don't want to endorse other people's illusions.
- daturkel 13y agoIt may be worth considering how much discomfort you feel when referring to a trans person by the gender identity they prefer, versus the discomfort they feel being referred to by the gender you prefer for them. I can just about guarantee you that the latter trumps the former by a long shot.
- falcolas 13y agoI think the problem is that your definition of male and female do not match someone else's definitions. The presence of lack of dangly bits has remarkably little to do with what gender someone associates with (not even counting the fact that a person can have both sets of genitalia or neither). For example, what gender would you assign to someone who was born with both sets of genitalia, and had the choice made by their parents to remove the vagina? She may choose to identify as female because that's how her brain (and possibly breasts) evolved, regardless of the choice her parents made for her as a baby.
- ewoodrich 13y ago>>Part of the transgender agenda is forcing others to accept such "gender identities". I don't want to endorse other people's illusions. The transgender "agenda" isn't forcing anyone to do anything, it's about having basic respect for the identity of those you interact with. You're free to reject "other people's illusions", but there's a good chance you'll just come across as insensitive and a bit of a jerk.
- wpietri 13y agoSweet. Like they say in the article, this won't matter for a lot of people, but for those who use it, it matters a great deal. I have one friend who changed gender and it really opened my eyes to how poorly a societally mandated absolute gender binary serves some people. And the extent to which that gender binary is actively enforced by society. I just never noticed before, because I fit reasonably well into one of the available boxes.
- 27182818284 13y ago>Sweet. Like they say in the article, this won't matter for a lot of people, but for those who use it, it matters a great deal. That is one of the most elegant ways of putting it I've ever read. Nicely done.
- cllns 13y agoThis option on facebook (and the news of it right now) will also be great for gender awareness. Most people don't know there's a difference between sex and gender.
- hfsktr 13y agoI am one of those that didn't know there was a difference. I was hoping you had a short explanation as I am pretty sure searching with some of those keywords will cause an issue at work but if not this will serve as a reminder for me to look it up when I get home.
- wpietri 13y agoHere's a good link: http://www.med.monash.edu.au/gendermed/sexandgender.html http://www.med.monash.edu.au/gendermed/sexandgender.html And for you and other people whose URLs might get audited, here's the content: What is the difference between sex and gender? Sex = male and female Gender = masculine and feminine So in essence: Sex refers to biological differences; chromosomes, hormonal profiles, internal and external sex organs. Gender describes the characteristics that a society or culture delineates as masculine or feminine. So while your sex as male or female is a biological fact that is the same in any culture, what that sex means in terms of your gender role as a 'man' or a 'woman' in society can be quite different cross culturally. These 'gender roles' have an impact on the health of the individual. In sociological terms 'gender role' refers to the characteristics and behaviours that different cultures attribute to the sexes. What it means to be a 'real man' in any culture requires male sex plus what our various cultures define as masculine characteristics and behaviours, likewise a 'real woman' needs female sex and feminine characteristics. To summarise: 'man' = male sex+ masculine social role (a 'real man', 'masculine' or 'manly') 'woman' = female sex + feminine social role (a 'real woman', 'feminine' or 'womanly')
- qeorge 13y agoWay to go, Facebook.
- angersock 13y agoNow it's even easier to mine graphs for deviancy and persecution!
- k-mcgrady 13y agoGood to see them do this but I'd have preferred if they'd come up with 3-5 different ways to describe gender that we could use across the web. Have 50 different customisable options is a pain to implement for everyone. Maybe I'm wrong though - can someone with more knowledge on this tell me whether that many options is really necessary?
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- ihaveajob 13y agoOn the other hand, it's a great way to have their audience choose first and then institutionalize the popular options.
- wpietri 13y agoAs a comparison, look at the spectrum of race. How we look at it keeps changing. Could we get by with a binary? Sure, we could have "white" and "non-white". Could we do 3-5? Sure, that's what Brazil's government does. They have white, brown, black, yellow, and indigenous; you can pick one. [1] But people in Brazil don't really like that. It may serve the governmental need to have a simple system. But for the individuals expressing their racial identity, it doesn't really fit their self-perceptions, and they don't like having somebody else's categories imposed upon them. If you are looking for a simple way to solve this problem, just drop gender from your system. If you really need to use pronouns, just use singular they [2] for everybody. I think the second-simplest thing would be to not ask about gender, but to ask about what pronoun to use. Facebook's going with he/she/they, which isn't what every activist would want, but it's way better than a simple binary. If you really need gender, then I'd probably follow the Facebook model; the alternative is to basically repeat Facebook's process of talking to a lot of people and finding some other workable solution. [1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_ethnicity_in_Brazil#IBGE.E2.80.99s_racial_categories http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_ethnicity_in_Brazil#IB...
- nfoz 13y agoI'd rather they just remove the box altogether. But I'd also rather we just do away with the concept of gender. Sex is a thing, and is also non-binary. But "concept of gender" is something strange altogether.
- danellis 13y agoPresumably the only reason for having it at all is that advertisers assume they need that information. In which case, 'Male', 'Female' and 'Other' would suffice. It's a pretty safe bet that if you don't identify as simply male or female, advertisers aren't going to bother caring about how to advertise to you.
- sliverstorm 13y agoI'm sure it serves other purposes too, even if they are as simple as displaying your sibling as "brother" vs. "sister", or your brother's children as "nephew" vs. "niece".
- cinquemb 13y agoI wonder if they will expose it on the public graph api? This will make it really interesting to better infer parts of some peoples personalities with the rest of the data people want to share on facebook, and serving ads to demographics who are going to want to click on your ads because it conforms to their views. Well played from a data-mining perspective.
- devindotcom 13y agoHere's the announcement on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=567587973337709&set=a.196865713743272.42938.105225179573993&type=1&stream_ref=10 https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=567587973337709&set=... Solid step in the right direction. Also, this is an area of sexual politics that is generally not well understood by the majority of people — being that the majority are not gay, trans, or otherwise off the traditional dipolar gender and sexual attration axis. I don't know about you, but I prefer not to comment on things I don't understand so as not to put my foot in my mouth or inadvertently cause real offense.
- vezzy-fnord 13y agoSincere question: Why would a transgendered person specifically want to identify as a "trans ___" as demonstrated in the screenshot? Wouldn't they simply want to identify as their preferred gender (male, female, neutral, etc.)? I'd understand the importance of explicitly using trans as a distinction when, for example, speaking to a medical professional or discussing a social issue, but on a public profile?
- wpietri 13y agoI can guess at several reasons, but hopefully somebody with more direct knowledge can answer. However, I have definitely talked with people who identify as, e.g., a transman, and you can see people identifying publicly that way: http://transguys.com/ http://transguys.com/ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/12/04/mr-transman-2013_n_4379660.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/12/04/mr-transman-2013_n_... Living in San Francisco, I've met many people who just don't feel particularly obliged to fit into the classic gender binary.
- audreyt 13y agoWell, for some, trans* is their preferred gender. That is, the experience of transition forms part of their identity. Compare, say, people who self-identify as "German-American" instead of simply "American".
- wonderzombie 13y agoWith respect, I think the disconnect for you is that you're trying to generalize across a rather diverse group. There's nothing inherent to the definition of not-gender-binary that suggests "and prefers not to identify publicly" in principle. If you imagine that gender's not a binary, then you could imagine how "trans$foo" is itself a gender. From there, some people prefer to keep it a secret. Some people prefer to make it public. A lot of times it's a matter of personal safety or privacy, but some people prefer to make their presence known. Consider it as the cousin to coming out as gay if you like. If more folks realize that they know LGBTQ folks, eventually it's no big deal. This is well underway for LGB but not TQ.
- waterlesscloud 13y agoPutting on the mercenary hat for a moment, I wonder how this affects advertising targeting...
- devindotcom 13y agoI wondered this too, but to be honest I imagine it's not a problem. LGBT is a small, fairly tightly defined group (compared to, say, men age 18-25) that skews in known directions (liberal, urban, etc).
- MrZongle2 13y agoLGBT is a small, fairly tightly defined group Odd; most online and conventional media outlets are saying something completely different.
- jonchang 13y agoSays that advertising targeting will be based on their preferred pronoun.
- sukuriant 13y agoIt probably does. I don't see what you're trying to say here.
- mdisraeli 13y agoThis is what the queer activists I know have been saying in response - that this change was done to improve the product (the information they hold on people), with doing the right thing being a nice added extra....
- cllns 13y agoThis is awesome! Diaspora did this a few years ago too (more or less) http://www.sarahmei.com/blog/2010/11/26/disalienation/ http://www.sarahmei.com/blog/2010/11/26/disalienation/
- megaframe 13y agoI wanted to put "Meat Popsicle" but they have pre-defined "custom" tags
- izzydata 13y agoI've been trying to enter "Alien Robot", but I keep getting an error. How do I even add a custom gender? Everything I put in gives an error.
- Havoc 13y agoCustom...jedi. Your move FB.
- chimeracoder 13y ago> "It's impossible to deny the biological reality that humanity is divided into two halves - male and female" Actually, it's pretty easy. Even on a biological/genetic level, the lines can get rather blurry. There are people with male genitalia who have two X chromosomes, people with female genitalia who have a Y chromosome, and a bunch of other variations[0][1][2][3]. [0]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersex http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersex [1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klinefelter_syndrome http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klinefelter_syndrome [2]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XYY_syndrome http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XYY_syndrome [3]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SRY http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SRY (EDIT: added citations, which scott_karana linked to in another comment thread)
- asolove 13y agoI have long wanted to see a completely straightforward, all-in-one-place explanation of these topics. It could start with the question: "Aren't we divided into men and women?" Then it would briefly describe the levels on which this duality is thought to occur: genetics, development, anatomy, sexuality, and psychology. Then it would describe the non-dual aspects of each level (XYY for genetics) and the way in which each level can "mis-match" with the others. On the 'bottom' levels like genetics and anatomy, most people are willing to believe the non-theoretical and purely evidence-based science about 'unusual' arrangements. Once these things have been established as perfectly understandable, it becomes easier to believe that someone might self-identify as a different gender than their genetics or anatomy indicates. Or that the psychological identities might not be strictly divided into male and female. Does something like this exist? The "but we're all men and women" argument is so common, and the knowledge about each individual way in which someone can differ from this norm is so scattered, it would be great to have it all in one place.
- sliverstorm 13y agoIt's quite accurate as an approximation though, is it not? Genetic abnormalities are just that, abnormalities. I fully support equality, but... if I said "Humans have five fingers on each hand", would you disagree and declare "clearly humans have no defined number of fingers on each hand, as every now and again a human is born with four or six fingers on a hand"? I don't personally care how many fingers you have, but it seems pretty clear to me that is a biological accident, and does not refute the notion that "Humans have five fingers".
- chiph 13y agoWhen I worked at Peopleclick (HR applicant tracking software), we didn't go quite this far, but we had 7 gender options: Male, Female, M-F Trans, F-M Trans, Neuter, Other, and Declined To Identify. Which was pretty progressive for 14+ years ago.
- snaky 13y ago>50 different terms people can use to identify their gender wow
- hermannj314 13y agoEveryone seems proud of themselves for realizing that both sex and gender do not divide into two nice halves. I guess I have just taken it as a given that is how the world is. Nevertheless, Facebook is still predicated on the the worst false dichotomy of all time: someone is either my friend or they are not my friend. Do we need an entire generation of friendism movement to raise awareness the world is full of colleagues, acquaintances, etc. I know this doesn't matter for a lot of people, but for those of us with nonconforming relationships, being forced to choose a binary option as friend or not friend is disheartening. It is the reason I quit Facebook.
- jerf 13y agoHmmm... I think trying to link binary friend to binary gender weakens an argument that is perfectly capable of standing on its own. (It's pretty obvious there's a huge range of "friend"ships in the real world.)
- HarveyW26 13y agoInteresting story, but the F-heads at FBook don't show the list from which to choose from ! Idiots ! I tried "In favor of it !" and they said it wasn't on the list, but where is the drop down for the freakin' list ! Tards !
- yetanotherphd 13y agoThis is great, but we can take this a lot further. Submit pull requests to fix gender-binary assumptions in open source software. If an engineer refuses to accept your PR, they are an insensitive asshole, and deserve the public criticism and dismissal from their job that will inevitably follow.
- ossreality 13y agoTry harder to tie unrelated things together so that you can find something to pathetically whine about.
- milesokeefe 13y ago>dismissal from their job that will inevitably follow That's a bit unrealistic.
- farginay 13y agoDoes anyone have a list of the 50+ options? No article seems to show them.
- nbm 13y agoFrom http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2014/02/13/male-female-or-custom-facebook-announces-major-expansion-terms-to-identify/ http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2014/02/13/male-female-or-custom... Agender Androgyne Androgynous Bigender Cis Cis Female Cis Male Cis Man Cis Woman Cisgender Cisgender Female Cisgender Male Cisgender Man Cisgender Woman Female to Male FTM Gender Fluid Gender Nonconforming Gender Questioning Gender Variant Genderqueer Intersex Male to Female MTF Neither Neutrois Non-binary Other Pangender Trans Trans Female Trans Male Trans Man Trans Person Trans*Female Trans*Male Trans*Man Trans*Person Trans*Woman Transexual Transexual Female Transexual Male Transexual Man Transexual Person Transexual Woman Transgender Female Transgender Person Transmasculine Two-spirit