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

I am surprised. Nobody has coined the term (and I know my dark humor will get the best of me one day as I even make fun of thing I hold sacred and myself)

50 shades of gay

I'm still laughing at what this would do to the A/S/Lers out there.

Hi, 18/non-binary/Cali here. Wanna chat?
 
The French might have a good pronoun: on
 
Re: Male, female or 'custom'? Facebook announces 50 ways to define gender

No it doesn't. "It" refers to an inanimate or at least non-human object. Use it in a sentence and tell me with a straight face it doesn't sound clumsy. And that's the problem with the English language: we don't have a word that doesn't sound wrong as a gender neutral singular pronoun.

That's because, back in the day, people knew that it was one or the other. Nobody was trying to buck the system.
 
Re: Male, female or 'custom'? Facebook announces 50 ways to define gender

That's because, back in the day, people knew that it was one or the other. Nobody was trying to buck the system.

According to Cracked writer C. Coville this was actually successfully (if temporarily) addressed:

The irony is that this was actually solved as far back as the 14th century by using our now-incorrect "they" to mean "he or she." Chaucer and Shakespeare both used it, and it was only in the 18th century that a grammarian named Anne "**** Shakespeare" Fisher kicked off the anti-they trend and declared it improper.

5 Ways You Didn't Realize the English Language Is Defective | Cracked.com

It's funny how we can add words to the English language every day (and we do), but come up with a gender neutral singular pronoun? Nope! That's totally beyond our capabilities!
 
Re: Male, female or 'custom'? Facebook announces 50 ways to define gender

Look at your birth certificate. Does it say M or F? 2 genders, 2 options. This is nothing but hyper-wordy pandering. It's Facebook, Facebook is private and hardly some kind of serious thing, but it's just stupid to have 50+ "gender" choices.
 
Re: Male, female or 'custom'? Facebook announces 50 ways to define gender

already pondering when the left wing will begin targeting/ostracizing anyone who defines gender as "man and woman ONLY." What name will they come up with....wait.........GENDERPHOBES!!! I love it. You all have my permission to use it when the time comes. your welcome
 
Re: Male, female or 'custom'? Facebook announces 50 ways to define gender

already pondering when the left wing will begin targeting/ostracizing anyone who defines gender as "man and woman ONLY." What name will they come up with....wait.........GENDERPHOBES!!! I love it. You all have my permission to use it when the time comes. your welcome

Sorry, but you didn't invent the word. Google it.
 
Re: Male, female or 'custom'? Facebook announces 50 ways to define gender

This at least sheds some light. But honestly, this is really confusing. I like boobs.

I thought #18 meant shape-shifter. ;)
 
Re: Male, female or 'custom'? Facebook announces 50 ways to define gender

already pondering when the left wing will begin targeting/ostracizing anyone who defines gender as "man and woman ONLY." What name will they come up with....wait.........GENDERPHOBES!!! I love it. You all have my permission to use it when the time comes. your welcome


According to the Left, Conservatives are either racists, bigots or both. That pretty much covers everything. ;)
 
Re: Male, female or 'custom'? Facebook announces 50 ways to define gender

Why should anyone care? It's none of your business. Maybe it's silly, hell a lot of it seems silly to me. But those who are really obviously bothered by this are only exposing the fact that they are on the losing side of a culture war. It may be weird to you but this is part of the future.
 
Re: Male, female or 'custom'? Facebook announces 50 ways to define gender

It must be nice that life has become so easy that so many people have so much time to waste on things like this.
 
There's more freedom to the user if they can just type in their gender term. It's really not hard.

Not hard but places extra strain on databases and computing power.
 
It must be nice that life has become so easy that so many people have so much time to waste on things like this.

People at facebook are paid to do things like this. Facebook doesnt call it a waste, they call it business. Im sorry that Facebooks business bothers you.
 
Look at your birth certificate. Does it say M or F? 2 genders, 2 options. This is nothing but hyper-wordy pandering. It's Facebook, Facebook is private and hardly some kind of serious thing, but it's just stupid to have 50+ "gender" choices.

The people at facebook laugh at your lack of business sense.
 
Gender is a social construct and there have been more than two genders in many cultures in the world. How gender is defined is a moving target as well. Sex is a male or female. Gender is about your social expression of how you express that sex. Masculine and Feminine are defined by the culture you are in as well as having them linked to physical sex in many cases. But for some cultures a third way of being that crosses lines or blends more of the two to create something new. Ancient Rome, Native American and Indian Hindu cultures all have a third gender or more. This is not new at all.
 
This is my generation. We're so f***ing special we needed to invent 50 gender types to identify ourselves.

And the saddest part is to read the OP's declaration that this doesn't pigeon-hole us into separate groups. That's exactly what it does.
 
Re: Male, female or 'custom'? Facebook announces 50 ways to define gender

*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?

Because it brings more press for Facebook, of course.
 
Re: Male, female or 'custom'? Facebook announces 50 ways to define gender

Doesn't really effect me either way so not really that bothered by it. No skin off my nose.
 
Re: Male, female or 'custom'? Facebook announces 50 ways to define gender

Why should anyone care? It's none of your business. Maybe it's silly, hell a lot of it seems silly to me. But those who are really obviously bothered by this are only exposing the fact that they are on the losing side of a culture war. It may be weird to you but this is part of the future.
I HIGHLY doubt that 58 gender choices is the wave of the future. But, if it is, then I'll happily buck the system and continue, until the day I die, to use male/he/him/his and female/she/her/hers.
 
This is my generation. We're so f***ing special we needed to invent 50 gender types to identify ourselves.

And the saddest part is to read the OP's declaration that this doesn't pigeon-hole us into separate groups. That's exactly what it does.
Exactly! I think a big part of this is the "but, I'm special" mentality of so many in the younger generations (generations, for the record, that I am a part of). It has gotten to the point where so many demand to be treated differently (such as making up genders for themselves), but still get pissed when you actually TREAT them differently. "I'm different, I'm special, but dammit don't treat me like I am different!" :roll:
 
Re: Male, female or 'custom'? Facebook announces 50 ways to define gender

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.

Split personalities or something.

Here you go

Singular they - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Also, Oxford Dictionary

them: definition of them in Oxford dictionary (American English) (US)

Sure it can mean:
1used as the object of a verb or preposition to refer to two or more people or things previously mentioned or easily identified: I bathed the kids and read them stories rows of doors, most of them locked

But it can also mean:
1.2 [singular] referring to a person of unspecified sex: how well do you have to know someone before you call them a friend?

No need to thank me for the correction.
 
Re: Male, female or 'custom'? Facebook announces 50 ways to define gender

We need two words to define the gender of 99.99999% of the worlds populations and we need 50 to define the remaining 0.0000001%? Why?

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

Then they set it on private.

So just so we're clear, there's a guy complaining that the English language has too many words and someone upset that people are making personal choices that have no impact on him whatsoever.
 
Re: Male, female or 'custom'? Facebook announces 50 ways to define gender

I HIGHLY doubt that 58 gender choices is the wave of the future. But, if it is, then I'll happily buck the system and continue, until the day I die, to use male/he/him/his and female/she/her/hers.

Well if you think about it, it probably is when you factor in dramatic advances in biotechnology and our ability to manipulate everything from gender to sensory and neural input. It not only isn't implausible it seems inevitable that artificial gender constructions would come about as a result of experimentation. This is of course over the coming century or two, but maybe sooner.

However I was more referring to societal sensitivity to self-declarations like this and generally speaking acceptance of it. This is in the scheme of a generally dramatically liberalized cultural attitude towards sex and it's associated issues as successive generations come to the fore.
 
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