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emily_shore January 31 2010, 00:44:12 UTC
"It's personal" is not an adequate third option for gender. In fact it's extremely offensive. Please try harder.

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Re: To me, "unspecified" is offensive azurelunatic January 31 2010, 04:09:23 UTC
Digging through the history, it came up in '01 in suggestions: http://community.livejournal.com/suggestions/36453.html... )

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Re: To me, "unspecified" is offensive trixieleitz January 31 2010, 04:41:34 UTC
b) I reject your gender binary

At the risk of endlessly multiplying entities, this could split into:
b/i) I reject gender/gender doesn't apply to me/I don't have a gender
b/ii) I have a gender, but it doesn't fit into either of your two boxes

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Re: To me, "unspecified" is offensive jamoche January 31 2010, 19:55:12 UTC
Ooh, pick me!

Female, but it's none of LJ's business, precisely because of this kind of idiocy. (And if I could, not Facebook's business either, since they use it for wildly mistargeted ads. They've got my age and education level, so I get ads suggesting I go back to school to become a nurse. WTF?)

You could probably word the poll to catch the distinction between "none of LJ's business, but otherwise I have no problem saying" and "none of anyone's business, thanks".

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Re: To me, "unspecified" is offensive azurelunatic February 1 2010, 19:21:20 UTC
Oh, goodness. Facebook is all kinds of special there.

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Re: To me, "unspecified" is offensive haveatthee January 31 2010, 03:28:41 UTC
Surely 'nondisclosed' is just another way of saying 'it's personal.' :/

It would be nice to have an option for gender variant people who would like to disclose their non-binary gender, even if is as clumsily as 'other'.

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Re: To me, "unspecified" is offensive azurelunatic January 31 2010, 04:40:54 UTC
And all along I've been reading LJ's setting of "unspecified" as "this user has chosen to not specify their gender to LJ", rather than "this user's gender is, in the physical world, unspecified in terms of the gender binary".

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Re: To me, "unspecified" is offensive trixieleitz January 31 2010, 06:43:42 UTC
Yes.

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Re: To me, "unspecified" is offensive ryf January 31 2010, 09:07:42 UTC
Me, too.

And I think that's how it was intended.

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Re: To me, "unspecified" is offensive littlebelleblue January 31 2010, 18:13:33 UTC
Yes. So "unspecified" works for me because LJ doesn't need to know my gender, whereas it might not work for someone who doesn't id with the gender binary. But I feel uncomfortable putting "it's personal" because that implies something else . . . I don't know quite what. And there's still a big gap for people who don't id with our binary gender system.

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Re: To me, "unspecified" is offensive jamoche January 31 2010, 19:58:28 UTC
"It's personal", to me, implies some vague "If you get to know me *really well*, I'll tell you."

"Unspecified" includes "I have no problem telling people who aren't going to use it for advertising, which does not include LJ."

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Re: To me, "unspecified" is offensive littlebelleblue January 31 2010, 21:42:38 UTC
Thanks! That's definitely part of it. In addition to all the wonderful things that everyone downthread has said.

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Re: To me, "unspecified" is offensive pauamma January 31 2010, 19:13:07 UTC
That (your reading) is how I translated it. Not that it would influence your reading, but you're not the only one. (And now I'm wondering what the other translation teams did.)

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Re: To me, "unspecified" is offensive springheel_jack January 31 2010, 07:27:39 UTC
Why only three choices? You'll never find a single option 3 that everyone will like. Why not just add a few more? People like more choices rather than fewer.

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Re: To me, "unspecified" is offensive radiantsoul January 31 2010, 15:40:56 UTC
Or none at all.
Presumably there is no need to record gender and so why bother? It is not as if it is a dating site and if people want to know the bizarre complications of what someone deems their gender to be then they can go into it in their journal.

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Re: To me, "unspecified" is offensive zingoch January 31 2010, 18:01:40 UTC
They want to target their ads.

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