Right now, we have the secondary sexual characteristics trait, which designates the gender appearance for your entire body. (That isn't entirely clear on account of it picking out just beards and breasts, which is another matter, but that's what it is right now.)
Sex on the other hand just describes your genitals. In day to day life for most people, though, sex is synonymous with your bits and the previous thing I just said: what your entire body looks like. This is not a clear and unambiguous situation which helps people understand what the heck they're meant to do with these traits.
So, let's just call sex what it really is: instead of asking if you're male or female or both(?) or neither, let's just ask people if they have a penis or vagina or both or neither, and rename those categories accordingly: Penis, Vagina, Hermaphrodite and Neither. A name change to "genital type" might be appropriate, more on that in comments.
meta info
endorsement points: 65
created: 08 November 15 at 05:19 AM (build: 10/1/2015 4:20 PM beta)
closed: 19 February 16 at 03:56 AM (build: 10/1/2015 4:20 PM beta)
Part of the motivation for this change is based on awareness of how the 'male' and 'female' terms are loaded when it comes to transgender individuals or characters. Saying you have a penis is OK, saying you have male bits is... more overloaded with unpleasantness than we might like to have someone say. Having someone suggest they're effectively male in some fashion is uncomfortable. (Sure, the penis is a male bit that males get given, but we can give people more comfort in letting them just say they've got a penis.)
We already have a trait called genital type that describes what your noodly bits look like, how they're decorated, and so on. It has that name because originally it was intended to be gender agnostic, but with categories like 'knotted' and 'spined' it isn't really. So, our options around this might be:
Keep Sex named as-is, but just change its categories.
Rename Sex -> Genital Type, rename Genital Type -> Genital Decoration or some other appropriate name.
Rename Sex -> Genital Type, rename Genital Type -> Penis Type, introduce a Vagina Type trait if/when we need to. That'd be helpful for the hermaphrodites, too.
Probably any changes to Genital Type should take place by deleting & recreating the trait and notifying people, 'cause otherwise a whole lotta female profiles will suddenly have a thing saying what kind of penis they have.
Also, let's be really really clear, especially given some overflow from main channel conversations: there's no contention here regarding that trans-ness of asking people what bits they have. Everyone's happy to say and advertise that fact so their partner knows what they can go down on or play around with. The contention is whether you have to identify as male or female in expressing that, when it might be in contrast with how you identify with a person, which is what might make someone uncomfortable dealing with this trait.
It should also go on the record that if you'd rather not say about a character and keep it a surprise, there's the option of leaving it completely blank!
I support the change to sex and genital type, and the addition of a Penis/Vagina Details, rather than decoration, since that makes me think of glitter or piercings. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
Sex for me is just too loaded, especially because for so many things, in everyday use and forms, it's the term that lumps everyone together and it's very much a concept that only applies to cis people.
Traits should be obvious at a glance and non-offensive. Changing the trait from Sex to Genital Type makes the intent clear without requiring a user to mouse over the text.
Something to keep in mind when we talk about category names, they are meant to be searched.
So, if this suggestion were to be implemented:
find penis profiles
find profiles who like penis
find profiles with genital type of penis or find profiles with sex of penis
We must also keep in mind that whatever name is chosen for these should be recognizable enough to non-trans folk and people who don't give one little iota about these things. Genital type I feel is veeeeery close to the edge of "not recognizable" as a synonym for "sex", particularly since we are already using it to describe something entirely different.
Genital type I feel is veeeeery close to the edge of "not recognizable" as a synonym for "sex", particularly since we are already using it to describe something entirely different.
I don't understand this point. We're not trying to make a synonym for sex, we're disambiguating it. I don't know what the "entirely different" thing is, we'er using it to describe genital type.
If someone wants to find male profiles they can still do that and get them. If they want to find male profiles with genital type of vagina they can get that too.
This seems like an improvement over the current situation, when you can search find feminine, male profiles and get some pretty confusing results. Not to mention that when you search feminine male profiles, the general expectation is that you're looking for crossdressers that identify as male, not women who identify as female but have a penis.
Per the discussion here, this should also suggest to change sex to genitals.
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