Facebook offers users more online gender identities

Originally published February 13, 2014 at 7:27 PM | Page modified February 14, 2014 at 6:32 AM

MENLO PARK, Calif. You dont have to be just male or female on Facebook anymore. The social-media company has added a customizable option with about 50 different terms people can use to identify their gender and three preferred pronoun choices: he/him, she/her or a neutral they/them.

Facebook said the changes initially will cover the companys 159 million monthly users in the United States and are aimed at giving people more choices in how they describe themselves, such as androgynous, bi-gender, intersex, gender fluid or transsexual.

Theres going to be a lot of people for whom this is going to mean nothing, but for the few it does impact, it means the world, said Facebook software engineer Brielle Harrison, who worked on the project and is undergoing gender transformation, from male to female. On Thursday, while watchdogging the software for problems, she said she was also changing her Facebook identity from female to transwoman.

Facebook, which has 1.23billion active monthly users worldwide, also allows them to keep their gender identity private and will continue to do so.

The Williams Institute, a think tank based at UCLA, estimates there are at least 700,000 individuals in the United States who identify as transgender, an umbrella term that includes people who live as a gender different from the one assigned to them at birth.

The move by Facebook represents a basic form of recognition of the nations growing transgender-rights movement, which has been spurred by veteran activists and young people who identify as transgender at younger ages. The Human Rights Campaign (HRC) last year found that 10 percent of the 10,000 lesbian, gay, bisexual transgender youths it surveyed used other or wrote in their own gender terms.

Over the past few years, a persons Facebook profile truly has become their online identity, and now Facebook has taken a milestone step to allow countless people to more honestly and accurately represent themselves, HRC President Chad Griffin said.

The change to the gender-selection option is seen as a major step toward acceptance for people who dont self-identify as male or female, but the high-profile development seemed senseless to those who believe in two genders, no more.

Of course Facebook is entitled to manage its wildly popular site as it sees fit, but here is the bottom line: Its impossible to deny the biological reality that humanity is divided into two halves: male and female, said Jeff Johnston, an issues analyst for Focus on the Family, a national religious organization based in Colorado Springs, Colo. Those petitioning for the change insist that there are an infinite number of genders, but just saying it doesnt make it so.

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Facebook offers users more online gender identities