It's sort of an odd thing to ask, but has anyone considered making the gender radio buttons into checkboxes instead? Maybe I'm thinking about this in the wrong way but I find myself sort of caught in the middle sometimes.

I was born male, have been living female for some time now. I'm luckier than most in that I blend right in with the rest of society. Height, build, voice, sizes worn all within typical female parameters, born with no body hair and facial hair removed. It allows me to go about my day without drawing any attention to myself which is really all I want; life to just be normal.

Having to pick between gender options is where I run into trouble because in practice "Transgender" is an incredibly wide term. While correct by the definition, it also includes much larger subgroups of other populations which are very different. "Female" also doesn't quite fit because though I live as and hopefully appear as one, the whole Y chromosome thing and all that comes along with is a bit of a problem. That's why on another site I'm on I put MtF because it describes things perfectly.

I just chose to leave the field blank, but so far as truth in advertising goes, if for example I were to start putting up videos I assume the N/A button would be not available. If the selection buttons were checkboxes one could select both "Female" and "Trans" for MtF or "Male" and Trans" for FtM. Or maybe MtF and FtM could be radio button options that would show up under Female and Male respectively with some kind of annotation or flag present for the people who this would matter for?

This question is not that strange. It would be really desirable if you could see in the gender information whether, in addition to the previously possible information female or male, it is a trans woman or a trans man in the respective profile. The selection criteria would only have to be expanded to include these two terms. This would, for example, make inquiries in personal messages superfluous.
However, it is important, and that would be the same with the boxes, that the information provided by the profile owner is honest.

The issue that nobody seems to address is the difference between gender and biological / birth sex. The two concepts are always conflated, even here in our own settings, and that needs to eventually be corrected. As a society we need to respect people's gender while still acknowledging that on a media-driven adult site, people generally use filters and settings to categorize things based on physical body parts. If someone searches for female content and sees an erect dick because the profile was set to Female, then that's the conflict.

At some point I'll be updating the system to be binary and categorize all content as just biologically male or female for search and filtering purposes. But there needs to be a separate setting that can actually capture who you ARE inside, along with all its nuances. Sometime next year

I agree with what you said completely, you end up caught in an odd position between conflicting interests. For dating and relationships I'm attracted to biological women who appear as such, but for non-nude videos the biological part doesn't matter. It's the female form that I'm interested in and the male bits can't be seen anyway.

The next year idea sounds like it would take appearance into account as well as biology so everything works out. A friend I'm meeting up with soon wants to run video and it's a giant assumption that everything turns out good enough to do something with. But if it did, it would definitely be odd to wind up in the same search results as men!

The underlying problem is that "Trans" isn't a gender noun, it's a an adjective that describes a gender.

You wouldn't divide people into "Male", "Female", and "Asian", so likewise "Male", "Female", and "Trans" doesn't make sense either.

The three main genders that people identify as are "Male", "Female", and "Non-Binary".

People in the Male and Female catagories are then either "cis" (same as were assigned at birth) or "trans" (have transitioned to a different category than that assigned at birth). Technically anyone identifying as non-binary has also transitioned but not all use the terms so I wouldn't force it on them.

But on top of that as MM says, the overwhelming majority of people who come to a site like this expect anything visual to be categorised as how the people in it visually appear, which probably most closely relates to what trans people used to call "passing", i.e. being able to present as the gender they've transitioned to without anyone questioning or suspecring. And there will be some who only want to see "cis" examples of their personal preference, regardless of passing or presentation, so will want to exclude trans men or trans women from their searches.

As to the UMD gender classifications, I would suggest (and I know this may be a huge amount of work) the following:

Gender radio buttons should be "Male", "Female", and all-new "Other".
"Trans" should become a tick-box, not a radio button, and in the database should be a flag that relates to the gender setting, not be a gender setting.

In user preferences, as well as the existing "Strict" tickbox, there should be a new "Include Trans" setting, on by default (as that's more inclusive) but with new signups given the option to turn it off on the signup page (as that'll reduce compaints) plus the usual being able to change it via the profile settings.

So, when someone signs up, they can identify as Male, Female, or Other, and if they're trans and out about it they can also tick the Trans checkbox to indicate that they're Trans.

And users setting their "what I want to see" preferences can chose whether to include trans people in their results or not.

So, a cis woman signs up, sets her gender to "Female".
A trans woman signs up, sets her gender to "Female" and also ticks the "Trans" box.

A user who only wants to see cis women in results has their preferences set to "Female" and the "Include Trans" option turned off.
A user who is happy to see all women, cis or trans, sets their preference to "Female" and leaves the "Include Trans" option switched on.

This should also apply to model profiles, and again reflect back in what people see in their search results.

For existing users currently identified as Trans, default them to Other and message them inviting them to update their settings to use the new facilities.

This was generally the plan. We'll probably just have Male and Female for your sex, and use a different setting to express your actual gender. Not sure if we'll do radios or checkboxes, but leaning heavily toward radios for several reasons.


The existing "gender" setting will probably be renamed to "sex" so that it's clear we are speaking about the biological. Then a separate new "gender" setting will be added. The existing filter system will then be decisively about biological sex, but I will also add another filter to work with the new gender setting and handle Strict requests.... Might only be for user search though, and possibly model search as you said, as the rest of the content may only get the sex tagging, not gender. It can quickly get unwieldy.

Fair enough and understand about unwieldy. But the vital thing to understand, "Trans" is NOT a gender, it's an extra description of a gender.

Think of cars. A car can be a compact, or a pickup, or a sedan (among others). Any of those could also be blue. But if you were dividing cars in a dealership by type, you wouldn't have "Compacts, "Pickups", and "Blue Ones" at the same level in the DB. The car's colour would be a descriptor attached to the car (this car, which is a compact, is blue, that car, which is a pickup, is green), the colour would not be a "type of car".

So by all means have radio buttons for the sexes and genders, but "Trans" should be an extra descriptor via a tickbox. This is absolutely vital.

Logically, cis/trans should be their own pair, selectable by radio buttons, but then you'd get the anti-trans crusaders screaming they don't want to be classed as cis, so for the sake of peace and quiet, assume cis as the unspoken default, with trans as a tickbox that can be selected by those who wish to.

I think with the new layout, the term "trans" would become obsolete. We were using it in the sense of... lemme quote Dictionary.com... "gender identity differs from the sex the person had or was identified as having at birth." I think the usage of the term has served us well so far, but in the future we can just compare sex and gender and internally consider it "trans" when they differ. I never thought anyone would think of trans an actual gender.

I'm not sure that'll work, though it would probably need someone with deeper understanding of trans issues than mine - I'm an LGBT ally but cis and 90% straight - to properly explain.

One question would be how would you define "sex"? By what was assigned at birth? By what "bits" the person has now? By how they define themselves? And how (unless they post nudes) to enforce it anyway?

Honestly I think you should forget "sex" and stick with "Gender", but have three gender options, Male, Female, Non-Binary (or Other), and a "Trans" descriptor people can add if they wish. Note many countries including the US now recognise three gender options on official documents so this is definitely something that's coming, might as well get ahead of the curve and save extra work later on.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_recognition_of_non-binary_gender
https://www.newsweek.com/which-countries-recognize-third-gender-option-passports-1643167

I know it's inherently unfair to try to classify humans like we're doing anyway, and it would be nice if we could put a lot of buttons and checkboxes to tweak exactly who you are. But for the sake of practical coding and caching, integration with site-wide filters on millions of pieces of content, as well as ease of use and understanding for the user, we've got to draw the line somewhere. If we know your sex and your gender, there is useful information at the intersection of the two.


Yes.


Basically the same way we've done it over the years. If you see a dick and the person's sex is set to female then it needs to be changed. If you don't see a dick but it's hairy legs, adam's apple, and square shoulders then use common sense. In cases where it's truly ambiguous then we'll likely just leave it how they had set it.


My mind is pretty made up now about differentiating sex and gender. They are truly different things, and I believe all the arguments people have would simply dissolve if they thought of them as independent things. The people arguing that a man is a man and a woman is a woman are talking about biological sex, but they are using that as an argument against the social construct that we call gender, and that's not fair. It's this conflation that keeps everybody arguing. From what I understand, except for extremely rare instances, birth sex IS binary, and can be determined by just looking at "the bits."


We'll definitely have more than three gender options... but only 2 sex options

I don't mean to interject but as someone who lives this sort of life I do see the need to have some sort of "sex" identifier at least for explicit content search results. It's like Messmaster said, buyers in the download section looking for explicit content may be a bit put off by finding bits they weren't expecting 5 minutes into the video. I don't know anyone who's gotten or plans on getting bottom surgery (changing exactly what it sounds like) but crude as it may sound, what a person has down there that would show on video makes the most sense to me. Connecting people to content they're interested in.

However for personal profiles and non-explicit content I think DungeonMaster makes a lot of sense. "Sex" doesn't matter here because no one's going to see what's down there anyway. I'd gladly hit the female button and whatever checkbox that conveys the concept that "in case it matters, she wasn't born that way" just in case someone I talk to may find out later and somehow feel deceived.

In general I avoid the "Trans" tag like the plague because in practice I've found it is not used by people such as myself anywhere nearly as often as it is with people into crossdressing. For the uninitiated, they and people like me are worlds apart. Honestly I avoid it here (along with fetlife where I chose MtF) for that exact reason, a lack of anything in common with people using a term.

edit: I don't mind answering any kind of questions no matter how they're phrased, I'm about as unoffendable and open as a person may be. I've had some really fun conversations in bars after informing the occasional person about how I was born compared to now.

That's one of the many things that makes this site more challenging to run than normal social networking sites. We want to respect who you are inside as far as gender, but being a media site, it's what's outside that matters when it comes to organizing content for our viewers' filters. If we recognize sex and gender as independent properties that deserve their own respect, then we can ultimately let the users decide if they want to find other users based on their sex, or based on their gender.