July 29, 2011
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Dear Friend
Dear Friend,
Imagine that one day Facebook suddenly erased your identity from its social network- What would you do? The right to an online identity is something that most of us have come to take for granted, yet there are millions of people in every part of the world who are denied this right.
What we love about Facebook is the ability for people to create and customize online identities to reflect our lives. When it comes to languages, we can list virtually any language in the world, or even make up languages- how else could we show off our fluency in “Language of Love”? If our ability to choose religions, languages, and interests are limitless, why should Facebook impose limits on something as essential as gender?
Join me and urge Facebook to become a vehicle, not a roadblock, in the uphill drive for recognition and respect of trans identities:
Comments (8)
it’s their identity, they have a right to claim whatever they are.
HUGS
@estadquietos - yeah but Facebook doesn’t have place for it. On Facebook you can either be Male or Female. Unlike religion where you can type stuff in in Sex you only get the choice of male or female. It is something that ignores all FTM, MTF, genderqueer, intersexed etc
oh yeah, i forgot about that. i am sure that makes people feel very left out =/
i’d go to google plus. then again i’m not sure what the options are on there with regards to gender.
Sorry I only hang out on Xanga but good luck on this.
@Kristenmomof3 - I do think some people would like these choices; I think other trans people would prefer simply ‘male’ or ‘female’ for identifiers of their true selves. Interesting post. It reminds of when FB added “In a domestic partnership with” to its relationship choices. A lot of people cheered this, but some GLBT couples I know refused to use it, because they didn’t feel the need to identify as something “other” than just being “in a relationship.” I don’t think purely “male” or “female” fit everyone’s ways of identifying themselves, so I do think more choices are always better.
I am totally confused with this, I guess excuse my confusion but the last I knew was that someone was either male or female, right? haha at this moment oddly enough my kids are all discussing who is a girl and/ or boy.. Mainly arguing whether or not Ga Ga (the doll) is boy or girl.
@ZOLMAMA - Many people consider themselves to be cisgendered, that is, belonging to either the man or woman gender corresponding to their biological sex of male or female. Intersexed or
hermaphroditic people are those who have physical sex characteristics of both females
and males. Some people are TRANSGENDERED. Some people are Female to Male. Some are Male to Female. Androgyny is a term—derived from the Greek words ανήρ, stem ανδρ- (anér, andr-, meaning man) and γυνή (gyné, meaning woman)—referring to the combination of masculine and feminine characteristics. Some are genderqueer. Genderqueer (GQ; alternatively non-binary) is a catch-all term for gender identities other than man and woman, thus outside of the gender binary and heteronormativity. both man and woman (bigender, pangender). neither man nor woman (genderless, agender). moving between genders (genderfluid). Some genderqueer people prefer to use gender-neutral pronouns such as one, ze, sie, hir, ey or singular “they”,”their” and “them”, while others prefer the conventional binary pronouns “her” or “him”. Some genderqueer people prefer to be referred to alternately as he and she (and/or gender neutral pronouns), and some prefer to use only their name and not use pronouns at all. Pangender is a term used to describe people who feel that they cannot be labeled as male or female in gender. As such it has a great deal of overlap with genderqueer. Pangendered people feel that they do not fit into binary genders, instead identifying as mixed gender (both male and female) or as a third gendered.