litphoria

Secondary sexual characteristics is meant to describe secondary sexual characteristics. I'm sorry if that sounds short, but it describes exactly that, and not "your entire body shape". Gender expression is for the whole package of "this character looks like a man" or "this character looks like a woman".

They are to contrast primary sexual characteristics, e.g penises and vaginas.

Now, it's a separate discussion as to whether or not this is useful, but it was intended to do exactly what it does right now.

Secondary sexual characteristics is meant to describe secondary sexual characteristics. I'm sorry if that sounds short, but it describes exactly that, and not "your entire body shape".

Yeah and what's that mean? If we define it as its title then we're not defining it at all.

No, Gender Expression is the whole package of "I'm wearing girl clothes and make-up" or "I'm wearing guy clothes" and masculine/feminine behaviour. It's the gender i present, which indicates it's not about my body but the parts of me I have a say in.

So we're left with these:

• Gender, which is your mind.
• Gender expression, which is your attire and behaviour.
• Sex, which is your genitals.

If sexual secondary characteristics doesn't describe your body and whether it appears to be a male/female one, then what is it?

We already have traits to indicate whether we have breasts, so that's not useful for it to cover.

And that just leaves us with body and facial hair, and it's clearly a bigger package than whether we have body and facial hair.

Well, I fucked up that post a bit on the gender expression thing. Here, let me correct that:

Gender expression is for the whole package of "this character looks like a man" or "this character looks like a woman".

No, Gender Expression is the whole package of "I'm wearing girl clothes and make-up" or "I'm wearing guy clothes" and masculine/feminine behaviour. It's the gender i present, which indicates it's not about my body but the parts of me I have a say in.

I'd go with renaming SSC to Apparent Gender.

So, the 4 traits would be

Mental Gender: The gender the character identifies with. Apparent Gender: The gender people would assume seeing the character in clothing that doesn't show off their junk. Gender Expression: The gender they wish to be referred to as. Genital Type: Penis, Vagina, neither, or both.

So, for instance, a character that was male but transformed into a female by a witch would have a female AG, GE, and GT but a male MG. A crossdresser could have a male MG, adrogynous AG and GE, and a male GT. Etc.

Apparent Gender works better than SSC because in the case of a crossdresser, even if they look completely female, it would still be unclear which trait to choose.

@Griz

Express and apparent have the same meaning in my mind. I think this would be dangerous territory to have two different things with such a similar name. Also, I am used to seeing the "identity" living with "mental gender", e.g someone with a "mental gender" of "female" prefers feminine pronouns to be used when referring to them.

A drag queen and a crossdresser both have a feminine gender expression, but neither is guaranteed to have a feminine apparent gender. Whatever 4 (or more?!) traits are settled on, they need to be able to easily and intuitively capture:

characters transformed into a different gender crossdressors androgynous folks trans people hermaphrodites those that are complete female aside from a horsecock feminine "cuntboys" (hate that name)

and every other niche case.

Well, from the wikipedia page for drag queen, one of the pictures used is this. None of the people in the picture would be mistaken for a female in most every situation, nor are they trying to get people to make that mistake.

Brazillian Drag Queen AG: Male GE: Female

Bridget AG: Female GE: Male

So is the general feeling that we just nuke this entirely?

My feeling is that we need a fourth thing, but if the fourth thing is just about beards and breasts it's not useful.

We have a thing that'll tell us what someone thinks on the inside. Then we have how they'll dress and behave, and what their dangly bits are.

But there's a whole... everything else that can be summarised as male or female. Do they look like a dude? Like a girl? Does neither apply?

So, if some people are thinking this field is entirely useless and some think it's still useful but needs to be repurposed, can we get a rundown of what an ideal set of gender traits would look like that properly encapsulates all of what we need it to? We may get stuck in a weird position here if we assume the others that aren't SSC to be constant.

A bit up there I put in my two cents for ideal gender traits.

Mental Gender: The gender a character considers their self to be.

Apparent Gender: The gender an outsider would assume if the character is wearing clothing.

Gender Expression: The gender the character presents to the world.

Genital Type: The sexual plumbing that a character comes equipped with.

Might be worth amending that description of gender expression with this to differentiate it:

Gender Expression: The gender the character presents to the world through attire and behaviour.

Sounds good.

What would be the problem of just having:

Mental Gender: The gender a character identifies with and considers their self to be.

Apparent Gender: The gender a character appears to be through attire and behavior.

Genitals: The set of genitals a character has.

I don't see the distinction between "apparent" and "expressed" to be that significant in the discussion here.

Hmm! There do exist some edge cases, but for the most part, those aren't going to be relevant in a roleplay context.

In the same way that a person won't create a fully adult character who pretends to be a child and will instead simply create a character that is a child, the vast majority of people will play characters who perfectly match the gender they aim for. It'd be hard for Arnold Schwarzenegger to pass as a woman even with the best of makeup and costume artists, but online, he can do it flawlessly.

That said, this dissonance might be something that's important to some players. I don't know.

Even if it is, is that something that needs to be covered as a trait? My understanding of cross dressing/drag is that it is more akin to an interest, e.g something that is done, and not represents their state of being otherwise.

When you put it that way, yeah.

Also, for Apparent Gender, I think it'd be good to rename the categories to "Male, Female, Adrogynous, Mixed, and None." Adrogynous for pretty elves and pretty boys who people just aren't sure of. Mixed for tall musclebound amazons with a V-shaped figure, and None for those that don't really fit into the spectrum, like a sentient car. A Car-person. Car-human? Car-man!

Cross dressing is something I'd definitely have as a core/mandatory interest if I were playing a drag queen or one of those effeminate males in anime that get mistaken for boys.

Griz: Androgynous sounds like mixed. I can appreciate the difference in those examples, but I'm not sure how I'd differentiate those reliably. From one perspective, I see androgynous as not enough of either to tell (elven pretty boys, Ed from Cowboy Bebop), and mixed as being plenty of both. But in the case of a male, isn't plenty of both... A male who looks confusingly effeminate, in other words, the elven pretty boys?

If I played a tall musclebound Amazon with a V-shaped figure, I'd still pick female for apparent gender.

So we're all on the same page when we're talking about "tall amazonians", I would consider these to have a female/feminine apparent gender. It would only became male/masculine to me if they were to do things like breast binding, wearing baggier clothes, shorter hair, etc.

I'm keen on the three traits you've suggested, Avent.

I was thinking more along the lines of Rebis's character designs. (extreeeeeeemely nsfw)

I'd call that female apparent gender with a penis. It's just a very, very built female, but that hearkens back to the idea of a muscular body shape category.

I think we need only three gender traits: Sex, Body and Mind. The problem with Gender-Expression is, that it is attached to the mental gender. Usually if I feel as a female I will dress and behave as a female. There can be reasons, not to do so, but these reasons are not part of my gender-identity. A woman who is wearing pants and short hair, because it's convenient, has the same gender as another woman who wears skirts because her parents expect it from her.

Usually, but there are several character types which intentionally buck that, and we even have words for some of them: tomboy, femboy. Traits are appropriate in capturing that since it's usually a consistent, day-to-day part of that character. This character feels appropriate when expressing their gender in a masculine way, or a feminine way. That kind of thing.

Should I be opening a new feedback thing about those or is it fine having that conversation here?

This one has a rich, but seemingly complete, discussion. If you open up more feedback with the take-aways we had here I can just close these and point to those, so that we can retain the context of how we arrived at those suggestions.

OK, and the feedback for sex is already covered: adjust the sex trait to just describe the genitals its what its about not use male female etc (litphoria.com)

So all the individual pieces of this are covered except for what the new descriptions might be and the changeover process. I could make a gender traits redux feedback suggesting what things should look like in the end?

We'd need in order to have the full thing:

• A feedback for adjusting the categories under sex (already exists)
• A feedback for deleting SSC (already exists)
• A feedback for changing the name/description of sex to genitals
• A feedback for changing the name/description of gender to mental gender
• A feedback for changing the name/description of gender expression to apparent gender

I am not sure how much these could be combined or not, since there is quite a lot of changes proposed.

A feedback for changing the name/description of gender to mental gender

It's already mental gender! Go have some coffee.

We also already have feedback about sex -> genitals but I can clarify it slightly.

Loki:

Just gender expression into apparent gender then? A straight addition still might be better, let people actually use the two side-by-side and see if they often/ever differ and are important to differentiate.

I suggest it might be more worthwhile having some time without gender expression, then seeing if anything is missing and if so, putting something back or creating something new.

It still has not been explained to me how gender expression would be different from apparent gender but I would not find it acceptable to have two traits with such a similar name after we already established that we feel the gender traits as a whole are too confusing and not effective enough.

Loki, it'd mean you're a regular male who behaves effeminately and probably dresses like a girl.

Because gender expression just defined behaviour and clothing, but secondary longname is about the body, it might be more appropriate to do this:

• Mental gender unchanged (male, female, bigender, agender)
• Secondary sexual characteristics -> Apparent gender (Male, female, both)
• Gender expression -> gone
• Sex -> Genitalia (penis, vagina, hermaphrodite)

Hm. So, we keep mental gender, rename and redescribe sex, delete the other two and introduce apparent gender as it has no exact equivalent.

Sounds good, though we'll lose a lot of information on past profiles until people update.

For executing this feedback, I have a suggestion different to anything we've done before, to handle that:

Put secondary sexual characteristics and gender expression "on ice" or mark them obsolete. Add the replacements. The obsolete traits cannot be added by new profiles. Existing profiles with them present will have a little (!) icon that says it's obsolete and can't be used anymore by new profiles when it's moused over. Current users are prompted to change these traits. Then we don't lose data, and we don't have to worry about the effects of all of them existing.

If we don't care about the loss of gender information on older profiles, we nuke these two traits though.

I'd go with nuking them, but also automatically marking AG with the corresponding option from SSC.

Also, be sure to include a None option for Apparent Gender and Genitalia, for more realistic feral characters and robots and tentacle monsters and the like.

The problem is that "Secondary sex characteristics" is a technical term and not everybody knows the exact meaning (at least I didn't). By the way, what if I am a Neko and my species is "Feline"? Breasts and beards are no secondary sexual characteristics of felines. :)

I think that "gender expression" and "mental gender" could be united since usually a char who feels like a woman will dress/act like a woman. There are chars like tomboys who dress like a man but feel like a woman, but I don't think this is important enough to distinguish transgender tomboys from normal tomboys to have 4 gender traits. Anyway a tomboy for me is not a woman dressing/acting like a man, that would be a cross-dresser, a tomboy is a woman partly dressing/acting like a man. More specific traits would here be more useful than having two traits: "Manly: Very strong male gender expression." "Boyish: Weak male gender expression." "Tomboy: Female but somewhat male gender expression."

More specific traits would here be more useful than having two traits: "Manly: Very strong male gender expression." "Boyish: Weak male gender expression." "Tomboy: Female but somewhat male gender expression."

Or, instead of complicating one of the gender traits with weird value terminology like "strong" and "weak", we can achieve the same result more clearly with "gender expression" and "mental gender".

I am not really sure what a "weak male gender expression" is anyway, or how on earth that would relate to a tomboy.

I am not really sure what a "weak male gender expression" is anyway, or how on earth that would relate to a tomboy.

Probably because it relates to "boyish" and not "tomboy".

OK, based on the discussion here, we're fine with this being closed in favor of just deleting it entirely? delete the secondary sexual characteristics trait (litphoria.com)

Axe it.