From Huffington Post: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dana-beyer/facebooks-gender-identities_b_4811147.html?view=print&comm_ref=false
Dana Beyer
02/19/2014
Last week Facebook made news by announcing it was providing a much broader menu of options to its users with respect to sex and gender identity. Their new drop-down “custom” field added, by last count, 53 variations to that category.
As expected, there was a rush of praise from the LGBT community, and condemnation from Fox News and its reactionary brethren. On further analysis, I believe this is significant progress yet not as momentous a change as some imagine.
The progress is noteworthy because it is empowering individuals to identify as they choose, and giving them a smorgasbord of abundance. What was once limited to “male”/”female” now expands to all the possible ways trans and gender-nonconforming people identify to themselves, their friends and community. That can only help the individuals develop self-confidence and a stronger sense of self-worth and, in so doing, educate the general population to all the varieties of gender identification and expression that exist.
Most of the choices are redundancies of commonly accepted terms, which have traction in very small subgroups within the community. When I taught second-year med students at Georgetown Medical School last week, I listed some of those variations, knowing that they had probably heard some of them over the past few years. The Facebook list is more extensive, yet in many ways it simply adds minor variations with which to divide up the gender pie. For instance, what was once an overarching sociopolitical category called “transgender,” and what was once included as a major community subgroup, “MTF transsexual,” is now broken up into “MTF,” “male to female,” “transsexual,” and a great number of variants, including “transgender,” “transsexual,” “transgender female,” “transgender woman,” “transsexual female,” “transsexual woman,” “transgender person,” “transsexual person,” “trans female,” “trans woman,” “trans person,” “trans* female,” “trans* woman,” “trans* person.” Many of these may be gone in the next major Facebook update or remain in use only within the subcommunities in which they are relevant. The broader terms, such as “transgender” and “trans,” will continue until and unless another term rises to prominence as the language evolves.
For all intents and purposes, for the general public, at least, all those terms I just listed refer to the same phenomenon and are just forms of regional and subcultural dialects. And while some members of the gay community find this explosion of identifiers strange, I would just remind them of those identities currently or previously in common use in the gay and lesbian communities: “top,” “bottom,” “versatile,” “twink,” “twunk,” “sandwich,” “bear,” “cub,” “otter,” “drag queen,” “dyke,” “bull dyke,” “diesel dyke,” “sport dyke,” “power dyke,” “stone butch,” “soft butch,” “femme,” “soft femme,” “lipstick,” “boi,” “stud,” “hasbian,” “LUG,” “drag king,” “gayelle.” The distinctions among some of these are as inconsequential to the larger population as some of the distinctions among the trans listing above.
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