What is your Gender?
Jul 12th, 2008 | By Silent Observer | Category: API
Facebook users who haven’t yet specified their gender in their profile will have to do so in the coming few weeks. Under a new gender policy introduced by the Web site, it will start prompting users to choose whether they’d like to be referred to as ‘him’ or ‘her’, ‘he’ or ’she’. Many people came up with the complaint that due to no gender/sex specification requirements, they were ultimately listed under the wrong gender by default thereby leading to a lot of confusion. Until now, those who didn’t specify their gender in their profile have gotten themselves tagged as ‘him’, ‘her’, or ‘themselves’ which may not be necessarily true. Hence the new policy will make translation work easier. For those who don’t want the tyranny of gender, they can remove gender entirely from their account/s, including how to refer to gender in mini-feeds. The reason behind the change is, the fact that many international languages rely much more heavily on gender-related syntax. The complication, however, may arise from transgendered members of the site who don’t identify with traditional gender assignments. That’s why, it appears, and they will be able to manually opt out of the ‘him/her’ classification. It’ll take an extra step in the process, but it will still be possible.







Thanks for the great info. I hope you’ll follow this with some more great content.