Facebook To Allow For More Gender Options

Change being rolled out today

You don't just have to be male or female on Facebook anymore.

The social media giant is adding a customizable option with about 50 different terms people can use to identify their gender as well as three preferred pronoun choices: him, her or them.

Comments

[AlgerHiss]

Can one be multi-gendered? Tri-gendered?

How about bi-specied? Perhaps someone would be octa-gendered and quadra-specied?

With the sickness of leftism, the possibilities are endless.

[NL_]

Not sure why it's a sickness if people see themselves a certain way and then ask that their friends and family respect that. Why is it meaningfully different from adopting a nickname or religious conversion?

[NL_]

People can claim heritage and connection to multiple ethnicities or cultures, representing both of them to some extent. There's no good reason the same principle could not be extended to gender.

Almost nobody is going through a social network looking for genetic markers or sex at birth. They want to have some idea of how to interact with other people and gender is often considered an important part of that. The way people define themselves is far more relevant to that purpose.

[Carnival]

This is awesome. As a neutrois individual and a libertarian, I think that everyone who supports liberty should be in favor of allowing people to define who they are. If you're not willing to allow that simple thing, you really have no business calling yourself a friend of freedom.

[AlgerHiss]

Oh, I agree!

Should you refer to yourself as a transgendered billy goat, I am in full support, and do not wish for anyone to interfere with you doing so, especially government.

[NL_]

I also endorse their embrace of "them" as a neutral pronoun. People already informally use it this way, so it makes sense to accept that.

Though I admit I still tend to write around the problem rather than using "they" - and sometimes I do use the neutral "he" in a fit of minimalism.