transphobia and bad customer service: why I will be leaving deviantART.
Have you guys seen http://transfinite.dreamwidth.org/215469.html ?
No?
Here's the gist of it:
Transfinite was a deviantART user who wished to specify her gender as "other," since she primarily identifies as neutrois. She realized the "unspecified/other" option had disappeared from deviantART and fell down a rabbit hole of terrible customer service, where the options were to choose a gender that did not fit or LEAVE THE WEBSITE. No sincere apologies... in fact, she was disdainfully told that if she was neither male nor female, she must be a hermaphrodite.
Wut.
This continued as hurtfully and terribly as before, with her ticket being "successfully closed" despite her repeated questions and no resolution.
Please go and read the article. You don't have to follow suit, but I will be leaving deviantART and when I deactivate my account, I will be telling them exactly why, and you may wish to consider doing the same. While my community on this site has been dead/dying off anyway, this is the last shove.
I don't like nor do I support this blatant cissexism and binary thinking. I don't like nor do I support absolutely terrible customer service. As someone who has to field questions from people every day about things I have no personal control over, all you have to do is sincerely apologize, at least ACT like the complainant has a serious problem even if YOU would not feel it was a big deal, and do something about it or forward it to someone who can. Also, if your personal information will never be sold to or used by a third party, why eliminate the "unspecified" option? This is clearly an attempt to target ads. I don't wish to have "girl" ads sent my way. This is another example of how sexism hurts EVERYBODY.
I'm going to leave this up for a while, but I'm moving my traffic over to http://www.artician.com with the intent of deactivating this dA account. You can import your whole gallery on artician and they offer an unspecified/"keep anonymous" option... plus, I don't know anyone who's had absolute horrors with customer service over there.
I know some people are still very involved in dA, and I am not telling you to delete your account, just to be aware. The more you know, right?
No?
Here's the gist of it:
Transfinite was a deviantART user who wished to specify her gender as "other," since she primarily identifies as neutrois. She realized the "unspecified/other" option had disappeared from deviantART and fell down a rabbit hole of terrible customer service, where the options were to choose a gender that did not fit or LEAVE THE WEBSITE. No sincere apologies... in fact, she was disdainfully told that if she was neither male nor female, she must be a hermaphrodite.
Wut.
This continued as hurtfully and terribly as before, with her ticket being "successfully closed" despite her repeated questions and no resolution.
Please go and read the article. You don't have to follow suit, but I will be leaving deviantART and when I deactivate my account, I will be telling them exactly why, and you may wish to consider doing the same. While my community on this site has been dead/dying off anyway, this is the last shove.
I don't like nor do I support this blatant cissexism and binary thinking. I don't like nor do I support absolutely terrible customer service. As someone who has to field questions from people every day about things I have no personal control over, all you have to do is sincerely apologize, at least ACT like the complainant has a serious problem even if YOU would not feel it was a big deal, and do something about it or forward it to someone who can. Also, if your personal information will never be sold to or used by a third party, why eliminate the "unspecified" option? This is clearly an attempt to target ads. I don't wish to have "girl" ads sent my way. This is another example of how sexism hurts EVERYBODY.
I'm going to leave this up for a while, but I'm moving my traffic over to http://www.artician.com with the intent of deactivating this dA account. You can import your whole gallery on artician and they offer an unspecified/"keep anonymous" option... plus, I don't know anyone who's had absolute horrors with customer service over there.
I know some people are still very involved in dA, and I am not telling you to delete your account, just to be aware. The more you know, right?