Signal Boost: LJ Makes Gender a Required Field
Straight from Synecdochic over on DW:
* Gender will be a mandatory field at account creation, and it will be able to appear public on one's profile. (I can't tell if people with existing gender specification will be defaulted to "nobody can see it" or "everybody can see it".) (Subsequent changelog reading indicates that the public specificity has since been removed. It is unknown whether this is to require public specificity in the future or if it will remain private.)
* LiveJournal is removing the Unspecified option for the gender field. That's right: you get to be male or female. Period. That's it. ( Source.)
Ey has a comprehensive post on this issue of forcing LJ users to pick a binary gender, with some ways to protest this change. Synecdochic also includes a form letter and a few addresses to send it to. Go check it out!
ETA: Synecdochic just received a reply to her feedback, from Anjelika Petrochenko, US general manager:
hi Denise,
thank you for your feedback. This is all very informative, I received many email with this already.
However, the code update that you refer to is not live and did not have any chance to go live. That was a beta release, we always push code to beta to see if everything works correctly. In many cases it does not and we either fix bugs or pull the code from the final release plan.
We were going to add a gender field to the sign up user flow, which is fine, but by mistake it became a mandatory "female/male" field for everyone. This is why this is not going live. And this is what beta releases are for, to see problems and solve them before any user faces a problem.
I would appreciate if you share this information with your friends that are also concerned.
Best regards,
--
Anjelika Petrochenko
GM, LiveJournal US
* Gender will be a mandatory field at account creation, and it will be able to appear public on one's profile. (I can't tell if people with existing gender specification will be defaulted to "nobody can see it" or "everybody can see it".) (Subsequent changelog reading indicates that the public specificity has since been removed. It is unknown whether this is to require public specificity in the future or if it will remain private.)
* LiveJournal is removing the Unspecified option for the gender field. That's right: you get to be male or female. Period. That's it. ( Source.)
Ey has a comprehensive post on this issue of forcing LJ users to pick a binary gender, with some ways to protest this change. Synecdochic also includes a form letter and a few addresses to send it to. Go check it out!
ETA: Synecdochic just received a reply to her feedback, from Anjelika Petrochenko, US general manager:
hi Denise,
thank you for your feedback. This is all very informative, I received many email with this already.
However, the code update that you refer to is not live and did not have any chance to go live. That was a beta release, we always push code to beta to see if everything works correctly. In many cases it does not and we either fix bugs or pull the code from the final release plan.
We were going to add a gender field to the sign up user flow, which is fine, but by mistake it became a mandatory "female/male" field for everyone. This is why this is not going live. And this is what beta releases are for, to see problems and solve them before any user faces a problem.
I would appreciate if you share this information with your friends that are also concerned.
Best regards,
--
Anjelika Petrochenko
GM, LiveJournal US