Facebook offers more ways to express gender beyond 'male' and 'female'

Facebook, in a move that acknowledges the social issues around gender identity, updated its site to give its users more ways to express their gender.

The changes make available to users a list of roughly 50 different terms they can use to identify themselves. Among them: "Trans," "Trans Female," "Trans Male," "Genderqueer," "Gender Variant" and even "Androgynous," a term used for describing combined male and female characteristics. In addition, users can choose among three pronouns to be used in referring to them: "her," "him" or "them."

Facebook has incorporated privacy controls into the term selections. If users choose one or several of these new options, they can use Facebook's settings to control with whom their new classification is shared, such as "public" or "just friends.

The choice of pronoun, however, is always public. If a person chooses "neutral" for the pronoun, then instead of Facebook saying, "Wish her a happy birthday" on someone's special day, the site will say, "Wish them a happy birthday."

The new options can be accessed from a person's "About" page, by clicking on "Custom" in the drop-down menu for gender.

To make the changes and decide which terms to add, Facebook worked with a group of LGBT advocacy organizations, with the nonprofit Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders, or GLAD, leading the charge. Other groups involved in the effort included The Trevor Project, which provides crisis and suicide prevention services to LGBTQ youth (the "Q" stands for questioning), and the San Francisco-based Transgender Law Center.

Click to expand...

Gipper said:

Did Zuckerberg fail English class? "Them" is a plural pronoun. Unless you're two people, "them" is superfluous. A better distinction is "it". A trans can be properly described as "it", since there's a disconnect between what they are and what they want to be. Neutrality wins out.

Click to expand...

Van Basten said:

*Male
*Female
*Magical Third Gender

On a serious note, why waste time listing some fifty terms when they could just let the user fill it in?

Click to expand...

tacomancer said:

Facebook offers more ways to express gender beyond 'male' and 'female' - Computerworld



In my opinion, this is pretty cool. The ostracism that a lot of these folks feel for not fitting a mold leads to all sorts of issues, such as depression. This thing that Facebook is doing which harms nobody and perhaps helps others feel more comfortable in their own skin.

Click to expand...

WCH said:

To be inclusive, tolerant and allow everyone freedom of expression.

Then they set it on private.

Click to expand...

Van Basten said:

There's more freedom to the user if they can just type in their gender term. It's really not hard.

Click to expand...

Van Basten said:

*Male
*Female
*Magical Third Gender

On a serious note, why waste time listing some fifty terms when they could just let the user fill it in?

Click to expand...

WCH said:

Here’s a List of 58 Gender Options for Facebook Users - ABC News

58 choices.

Click to expand...

tacomancer said:

Facebook offers more ways to express gender beyond 'male' and 'female' - Computerworld



In my opinion, this is pretty cool. The ostracism that a lot of these folks feel for not fitting a mold leads to all sorts of issues, such as depression. This thing that Facebook is doing which harms nobody and perhaps helps others feel more comfortable in their own skin.

Click to expand...

Gipper said:

Did Zuckerberg fail English class? "Them" is a plural pronoun. Unless you're two people, "them" is superfluous. A better distinction is "it". A trans can be properly described as "it", since there's a disconnect between what they are and what they want to be. Neutrality wins out.

Click to expand...

1. Agender/Neutrois — These terms are used by people who don't identify with any gender at all — they tend to either feel they have no gender or a neutral gender. Some use surgery and/or hormones to make their bodies conform to this gender neutrality.

2. Androgyne/Androgynous — Androgynes have both male and female gender characteristics and identify as a separate, third gender.

3. Bigender — Someone who is bigender identifies as male and female at different times. Whereas an androgyne has a single gender blending male and female, a bigender switches between the two.

4. Cis/Cisgender — Cisgender is essentially the opposite of transgender (cis- being Latin for "on this side of" versus trans-, "on the other side"). People who identify as cisgender are males or females whose gender aligns with their birth sex.

5. Female to Male/FTM — Someone who is transitioning from female to male, either physically (transsexual) or in terms of gender identity.

6. Gender Fluid — Like bigender people, the gender-fluid feel free to express both masculine and feminine characteristics at different times.

7. Gender Nonconforming/Variant — This is a broad category for people who don't act or behave according to the societal expectation for their sex. It includes cross-dressers and tomboys as well as the transgender.

8. Gender Questioning — This category is for people who are still trying to figure out where they fit on the axes of sex and gender.

9. Genderqueer — This is an umbrella term for all nonconforming gender identities. Most of the other identities in this list fall into the genderqueer category.

10. Intersex — This term refers to a person who was born with sexual anatomy, organs, or chromosomes that aren't entirely male or female. Intersex has largely replaced the term "hermaphrodite" for humans.

11. Male to Female/MTF — Someone who is transitioning from male to female, either physically (transsexual) or in terms of gender identity.

12. Neither — You understand this one: "I don't feel like I'm fully male or fully female. 'Nuff said."

13. Non-binary — People who identify as non-binary disregard the idea of a male and female dichotomy, or even a male-to-female continuum with androgyny in the middle. For them, gender is a complex idea that might fit better on a three-dimensional chart, or a multidimensional web.

14. Other — Like "neither," this is pretty self-explanatory. It can cover everything from "I'd prefer not to specify how I don't fit in the gender dichotomy" to "My gender is none of your damn business, Facebook."

15. Pangender — Pangender is similar to androgyny, in that the person identifies as a third gender with some combination of both male and female aspects, but it's a little more fluid. It can also be used as an inclusive term to signify "all genders."

16. Trans/Transgender — Transgender is a broad category that encompasses people who feel their gender is different than the sex they were born — gender dysphoria. They may or may not choose to physically transition from their birth sex to their experienced gender.

17. Transsexual — Transsexual refers to transgender people who outwardly identify as their experienced gender rather than their birth sex. Many, but not all, transsexuals are transitioning (or have transitioned) from male to female or female to male through hormone therapy and/or gender reassignment surgery.

18. Two-spirit — This term refers to gender-variant Native Americans. In more than 150 Native American tribes, people with "two spirits" — a term coined in the 1990s to replace the term "berdache" — were part of a widely accepted, often respected, category of gender-ambiguous men and women.

Click to expand...

Cardinal said:

There's no singular neutral gender pronoun. We (and by we I mean English writers everywhere) have been struggling with this futilely forever. I've opted to go with "he" and if someone doesn't like it he's free to make the effort to introduce the word of his choosing to the English language.

Click to expand...

Gipper said:

"It" works.

Click to expand...