***Update (30 April 2014): You can download an early draft of the article which is called The Gender Binary Will Not Be Deprogrammed: Facebook’s Antagonistic Relationship to Gender.***
***Update (19 February 2014): Thanks to the amazing folks at the Feminist Approaches to Social Media workshop at CSCW this past weekend (16 February 2014), a few software programmers (including Christian Holz), and a few other academics working in HCI (human-computer interaction), all of whom I have had the pleasure to discuss these ideas with over the last few days, my thinking has been steadily developing. I hope to share some of it soon!***
News outlets have been circulating the original AP report about Facebook’s decision to add new gender options to user profiles (after many years of protest!) and this video also accompanies the report:
I’ve been writing and thinking about this issue and related issues for a couple of years. My TEDx talk called Why Gender Matters in Social Media Design also discusses it. My thinking has come a long way since the TEDx talk and I have a journal article near submission that I can’t wait to share.
I haven’t had a great deal of time to think through it all yet but here is my initial reaction in two paragraphs (the first is less academic and more general):
Facebook’s change to their gender options is a clear step forward but it is still not enough. Despite these positive changes, Facebook’s software is still based on an understanding of gender that is rooted in very traditional, restrictive ideas. The tension between this traditional understanding of gender as only about males and females and a more flexible understanding of gender as a spectrum is at the heart of this issue and societal problems like gender-based violence are related to this tension. Software plays an increasingly important role in society and this change reflects the ongoing exchange between society and technology.
On Thursday, February 13, 2014 Facebook launched a major change to their gender options for user profiles. In addition to male and female, users now have a “customizable option with about 50 different terms people can use to identify their gender as well as three preferred pronoun choices: him, her or them.” In many ways this is great news not only for the trans*gender and gender non-conforming community who have petitioned Facebook for many years, but also for society as a whole as we move slowly towards greater tolerance and an understanding of gender that is fluid, as opposed to the rigid binary of masculinity and femininity. At the same there are more opportunities to develop Facebook’s coding of gender, and here are just a few: there has been no change for the sign-up page (would-be users must select male or female; no other options are available), male/female remain as defaults, users cannot select different genders for different segments of their network (which can be a safety issue), the invisible list of 58 genders and three pronouns remains restrictive in part because it carries forward a rigid logic.