A few of us have been discussing changing the current "Gender" option to a "Preferred Pronoun" list. In addition, I've got the word from Welder that it wouldn't be too hard to add Gender/Preferred Pronouns to the little user information sidebar on the forums.

The Preferred Pronouns list would look something like this:

• he/him/his/his/himself
• she/her/her/hers/herself
• zie/zin/zir/zirs/zirself
• fae/faen/faer/faers/faerself

&c.&c. I'm just grabbing the pronoun sets that are most familiar to me.

The advantage of this is that unlike the current options where an identity like "genderqueer" leaves it ambiguous as to what pronouns should be used, this makes it clear.

The disadvantage is that it makes it harder for someone to openly identify as trans or genderqueer-with-a-binary-pronoun-set.

I think the advantages outweigh the disadvantages but I'm biased due to my own identity.

Either way, though, I think there's a major advantage to adding this information to profiles since, I don't know about the rest of you folks, but I never, ever look at people's profiles to check their gender. Ever. Misgenderings galore.

So, thoughts, community? What's the best option here?

I would just have five options:

• Male
• Female
• Trans Male
• Trans Female
• Non-binary

It's important to me for the Internet to know that I'm trans, so simply having female pronouns doesn't quite cover it in my opinion.

just as a visual thing, I think a full list would be really long and look weird. if you just put the base pronoun, I think people can figure the rest out. like, he, she, they, it (not trying to be dehumanizing, I honestly know people who prefer "it"), zie (is this different from zhe?), fae, and so on. some of the less common ones, like fae (I've never heard that one before.) may not be easy to conjugate, so maybe have them be links to a page with all the forms? that way it's more similarly sized with the rest of the sidebar information, but still provides the necessary info for those who need it.

we could have both, couldn't we?

We'd have to ask Welder whether it's possible to have both. It'd be NICE to have both, but I don't know if it's an option.

I'm sort of on the other side of things where I feel like just identifying as nonbinary (as I do--not that anyone noticed probably because again no one actually looks at the profiles for that probably ) is just half the battle, since that doesn't necessarily keep people from just referring to you as "he" out of simple lack of knowledge of what your preferred pronouns are. (This is all ignoring the fact that I'm still not totally sure how I want people to refer to me... >_<)

I can definitely see the importance of asserting a non-Cis identity though, and I wouldn't want to erase that.

Yep, we can keep gender and add "preferred pronoun." The two options aren't mutually exclusive.

...Well that's easy then. o_o

It's so nice when things are easy.

And, to continue the trend... changing the values available under the "Gender" field is also easy. So if there's general consensus for switching "male-to-female" to "trans-female" and so on, that's very simple, too.

Not that my opinion counts for much, myself being a cis hetero white male (AKA "skinny white boy from rural Texas"), but I thought I'd add a little to the discussion.

First, though I'm sure I've had numerous slips which I account to all my meatspace friends being male (a situation brought about from the fact of like-aged individuals in my area being 90% male [and that I don't really consider my classmates "friends" {it probably bears mentioning that I never attended public school until college}]), I try whenever I can to refer to people as "they" or by their username, because this topic has been brought to my attention since first entering into this corner of cyberspace. I'd like to say Keeper was instrumental in this, and in helping me becoming more mature since I joined as a teenager.


*raises hand sheepishly*
I don't think I was even aware that there was a gender selection option in the profile page. I only just now looked at Keeper's profile to see that, yes, in fact, there is, and, yes, in fact, he doesn't identify as male or female. I don't think it would be beyond credibility to assume that 90% of our userbase hasn't checked anyone else's profile for that purpose, either. I would be all in favor of adding a gender as well as preferred pronoun options to the user sidebar. I would assume it would remain blank unless users altered it.

I hope it wouldn't be too difficult to add options to it later; if it is very easy it would be nice to have this up and running as soon as possible and make little tweaks later like adding words or gender identities down the line.

Personally, I hate the 'male to female'/'female to male' terminology (I also just prefer 'man' and 'woman' over 'male' and 'female'). I also dislike the idea of having a 'trans man/woman' option with a 'man/woman' option, allowing cis people to be the unnamed default, but I also see the value of having an unspecified man/woman option for people who don't want to identify themselves explicitly as cis or trans, like if a trans person was uncomfortable naming that transness but didn't want to call themselves cis either.

This post added nothing.

I was thinking this as well. I was thinking of suggesting adding "cis male" and "cis female" options and also leaving in the generic forms for people who didn't care to differentiate, but I'm not sure if that's actually a good idea or not.

I'd like robot added or AI just for the silly factor or *looks at avatar * Otter

EDIT: also would it be an issue to have it display by all the other info like under our join date?

I can appreciate the site having options so that everyone can be what they "label themselves" but I'm still gonna sit over there in the "I prefer not to say" group cause I dont really feel gender is relevant when I'm trying to DM a PBP D&D game.

If it's possible to make the Gender field an open-ended text field, why not do that?

I think the biggest issue with this system will be getting people to actually notice it. Nobody is going to look on people's profiles to check their preferred pronoun. How about putting little colored boxes under people's avatars to let other people know what their preferred pronoun is? Pink for female gendered, blue for male gendered, split pink/blue for people who are somewhere in the middle, and grey for people who don't want to be identified by their gender.*

DISCLAIMER: I am a white heterosexual man. I may or may not be horribly, horribly wrong about this.

A decent idea, though I can see the jokes that would be put there already.

If we're going to have it on the side bar under avatars, can there be an option to not have it listed at all? For instance, if you have nothing in the location field nothing shows up for you, like with mine. However if you plug something in , then it shows up, like with CKY's.

does it need attention drawn to it?

More or less the same thing as my post above. ((We posted at the same time)) Rather than having a "I dont want to say" option, or a neutral option, I'd much rather just have nothing there.

The "None Yo Business" on profiles is cheeky and all but I'd almost prefer a passive 'abstain' option rather than an active 'I'm not telling you' option.

Elaborate?

in response to Cato