Oh LJ...

[angelikitten]

LiveJournal's making a change to the gender setting on the profile page.

* Gender will be a mandatory field at account creation.

* 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.)
I... I don't even have words to explain how much this hurts me. And it does

Comments

[sleepless_x]

Why are they pulling this crap? >:(

[suburbanamnesia]

Advertisers, likely. D:< *deepsighofrage*

[angelikitten]

*nods* It's the only explanation anyone's come up with so far. Except, possibly, huge amounts of ignorance.

[angelikitten]

Because they are most definitely not awesome.

[naath]

Official line is that it was a fuck-up. Now, I'm willing to buy that because it never went live, the code in question contains other fuckups and the code in question would not totally remove the 'unspecified' option (which I would expect a policy-change to do).

However, even if we are to accept that it was a simple fuck-up (and, I write code for a living... such fuck ups are not unknown) this is one in a long line of fuckups that hit marginalised groups HARD and barely impact on other people. This, to me, speaks of a lack of diversity training and awareness at LJ-Central (and indeed, in companies in general). Yes, it's easy to sleepily write code that omits some option the policy says should be there - but it is easier if you personally didn't really know/care why that option was there, if you care about the option you're less likely to forget about it when coding.

[squinting_kitty]

I agree.