Update @ 4:15pm.

Upon further discussions with the participants in this Journal, we've decided there's no reason not to add "Other" to the Male/Gender drop down during sign-up now dubbed "Sex."

In addition, I will also be exploring a "Gender" setting in the "About Me" section of each profile that can be set by any member and it may contain transgender and other sexual and gender preferences in order to better welcome the diverse member base of deviantART and enable better community interactions in the future so that members may find each other based on gender preference so long as that information is public.

This topic today has been entirely welcomed as far as I'm concerned, as I think it really brings about a healthy conversation for all of us to have and it raises awareness on under-represented matters that people in our world face.

deviantART is a platform for free expression and exploration and discussion of all things, so please know that none of these errors on our part were made with any malice towards the transgender community or otherwise.

Keep the comments coming! I look forward to reading what you have to say on this topic! If you continue to have concerns regarding the term "Other" then please air them here I'm happy to look at them.

(Changes discussed/proposed to take effect within an hour or so. More modifications possible as needed.)

  



---
I woke up this morning to some angered members regarding our sign-up process and it's misunderstanding of the term "Gender."

I looked in to it, and we clearly made a mistake when we changed our sign up process a few months back. We used to permit members to sign up and specify a gender of either:

"Male"
"Female"
"Unspecified"

And in our new version, we only permit "Male" or "Female."

When we made this change, we intended the definition of the term SEX and not GENDER, but we used GENDER to define the form field. Here's what I've learned today, and I'd like to share it in order to spread the good word and expand understanding regarding gender issues and inequalities out there in the world.

But first, we will be updating our sign-up forms to refer to "SEX" rather than "GENDER." In hindsight, "Unspecified" is offensive, and Male or Female as the only options was downright ignorant when referring to Gender.

I highly recommend you read wikipedia's entry on Gender if you haven't done so already or aren't completely clear on the subject and its importance to the transgender community. Here's the first paragraph to get you started...

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genders:

Gender is a set of characteristics that are seen to distinguish between male and female. Depending on the context, the discriminating characteristics vary from sex to social role to gender identity. In 1955, sexologist John Money introduced the terminology distinction between biological sex and gender as a role; before his work, it was uncommon to use gender to refer to anything but grammatical categories.

However, Money's meaning of the word did not become widespread until the 1970s, when feminist theory embraced the distinction between biological sex and the social construct of gender. Today, the distinction is strictly followed in some contexts, like feminist literature, and in documents written by organizations such as the World Health Organization (WHO), but in most contexts, even in social sciences, the meaning of gender has expanded to include sex or even to replace the latter word. Although this gradual change in the meaning of gender can be traced to the 1980s, a small acceleration of the process in the scientific literature was observed when Food and Drug Administration started to use gender instead of sex in 1993. Gender is now commonly used even to refer to the physiology of nonhuman animals, without any implication of social gender roles.

In the English literature, the trichotomy between biological sex, psychological gender, and social sex role first appeared in a feminist paper on transsexualism in 1978. Some cultures have specific gender-related social roles that can be considered distinct from male and female, such as the hijra of India and Pakistan.

While the social sciences sometimes approach gender as a social construct, and gender studies particularly do, the natural sciences, regard biological and behavioral differences in males and females as influencing the development of gender in humans; both inform debate about how far biological differences influence gender identity formation.

... read more on Wikipedia!