Topic: [BUR] male -> masc & female -> femme

The bulk update request #13300 is pending approval.

create alias male (3091674) -> masc (0) # has blocking transitive relationships, cannot be applied through bur
create implication andromorph (30956) -> masc (0)
create implication maleherm (7688) -> masc (0)
create alias female (3087872) -> femme (0) # has blocking transitive relationships, cannot be applied through bur
create implication gynomorph (241069) -> femme (0)
create implication herm (31157) -> femme (0)

Reason: Last month there was a topic proposing this in the wake of an off-site debate about whether our tagging system misgenders characters. Unfortunately, that proposal got buried by screaming and the topic was locked before there was much discussion about it. I believe it is a good idea, so I'd like to make it into a formal proposal.

Summary: Outsiders don't understand that our male and female tags refer to physical sex rather than gender identity, so tagging pre-transition trans characters by their biological sex looks like misgendering. Gender lore tags appease some complaints, but not all. Replacing these tags with names that refer to presentation rather than gender could smooth this issue, and I would argue is actually more accurate, since these tags are used even for fully-clothed characters whose genital configurations are ambiguous or unknown within the image. Especially given how many furry characters are trans or intersex, I think this may ultimately be a more efficient way to categorize them anyway.

This can be done with limited costs to usability, as the current male and female tags would be equivalent to a <masc/femme> -intersex search, only a small increase in complexity.

There were additional arguments that the targets should be the existing masculine and feminine tags, with possible inclusion of femboy and tomboy as well. See topic #56644 for further discussion about those tags.

Related discussions:

• topic #56139 discusses manly
• topic #58228 discusses the boyish -> tomboy alias
• topic #40593 discusses the twink -> femboy alias

The bulk update request #13301 is pending approval.

create alias male (3091674) -> masculine (119) # has blocking transitive relationships, cannot be applied through bur
create implication andromorph (30956) -> masculine (119)
create implication maleherm (7688) -> masculine (119)
create alias female (3087872) -> feminine (698) # has blocking transitive relationships, cannot be applied through bur
create implication gynomorph (241069) -> feminine (698)
create implication herm (31157) -> feminine (698)

Reason: Alternate for those who prefer the targets be masculine and feminine.

Not all males are masculine, and not all females are feminine, so those aliases don't seem good. Implicating the intersex tags to masculine/feminine also completely destroys what male and female are for.

beholding said:
This can be done with limited costs to usability, as the current male and female tags would be equivalent to a <masc/femme> -intersex search, only a small increase in complexity.

You are not taking into account posts featuring both male/female and "masc/femme" intersex characters. Your proposed system would be much less useful than the current one.

A few issues I see:

• over 6 million (!) posts were tagged assuming something different and this would create tons of mistags
• fixing this would require insane amounts of effort and just make searching harder once finished
• what happens to ambiguous_gender? Would a feminine but ambiguous character be tagged femme?
• this is already a problem but making the tag more vague would probably worsen the issue
• intersex tags still describe physical sex, but the much more common male/female no longer do

And that's assuming I understood the meaning of the tags from the name, which is again more vague. Will we need to explain to every single person who tags what exactly is meant by masc/femme?

I'm going to cut it short there because the more I think of it the more problems pop up.

From what I said in the last topic:

If there was an umbrella term for this, I don't think femme would be appropriate. Many women [female, herm, gynomorph etc] are masculine [ie butch, tomboy etc] and femme is a term used almost exclusively to refer to feminine-presenting people, usually lesbians, and masc is also a term used - prominently - for masculine-presenting lesbians.

Also, re: topic #56644 - feminine and masculine were intended to be legitimized as tags and have certain gender presentations such as femboy or tomboy imply them, but they got lost in the cracks somewhere.

I do think an umbrella tag for "feminine" and "masculine" bodies [ones with breasts or not, with or without feminine features, etc] could be useful. What to call it, if not masculine or feminine, would be the hard part. That, plus the fact that "masculine" and "feminine" are presentations that people can't really agree on universally. Many people consider a woman with a pixie cut to be masculine or a slender man who shaves his legs to be feminine, and it very much shows in how people tag tomboy.

Masc and femme and masculine/feminine are not the way to go about this because these words are not the same as the site's definition for male and female.

braixenarchivist said:

• over 6 million (!) posts were tagged assuming something different and this would create tons of mistags

No? Those posts were tagged assuming a masculine presentation, which is what the new tags would refer to. Like I said, most of those posts are tagged for fully-clothed characters for whom we don't actually know their genital situation. The only issue is if we want to bring femboy and tomboy into this, since those would conflict, but I'm personally against that for precisely that reason.

braixenarchivist said:
And that's assuming I understood the meaning of the tags from the name, which is again more vague. Will we need to explain to every single person who tags what exactly is meant by masc/femme?

I don't think they're terribly hard to understand. Masc = looks masculine, femme = looks feminine.

watsit said:
Not all males are masculine, and not all females are feminine, so those aliases don't seem good.

masculine and feminine have no current definitions, so we could simply define them to bring them in line with this usage if needed. Together they only have ~750 posts, which is viable for a cleanup project.

gattonero2001 said:
You are not taking into account posts featuring both male/female and "masc/femme" intersex characters. Your proposed system would be much less useful than the current one.

Fair point. I do still think it's better to rephrase the tags towards presentation rather than gender, though. Is there a better term we could use for "standard" male/female presentation?

Edit for ninja while I was writing this:

moonlit-comet said:
Masc and femme and masculine/feminine are not the way to go about this because these words are not the same as the site's definition for male and female.

The thing is, people don't tag male and female based on the site definition either. Like I said, plenty of fully-clothed characters are tagged simply based on the presence or absence of visible breasts, even though they could well be andromorphs, gynomorphs, or hermaphrodites under the clothes. Heck, even the very first poster child for male could theoretically be a maleherm despite being nude; the angle of the shot doesn't let us check. (Many ambiguous characters are also tagged male, probably due to a combination of our patriarchal culture seeing male as the default and due to many ambiguous characters having flat chests.)

beholding said:
No? Those posts were tagged assuming a masculine presentation, which is what the new tags would refer to. Like I said, most of those posts are tagged for fully-clothed characters for whom we don't actually know their genital situation.

You can't claim this is true for every single upload. Some tag depending on femme/masc presentation, but a non-trivial amount of people tag based on visible sex characteristics.

BraixenArchivist's point about there being 6 million posts with these tags is important because that is 6 millions posts we would have to sift through and double check under this system, because "female" and "femme" are words with drastic differences. I don't think that's feasible.

beholding said:
Heck, even the very first poster child for male could theoretically be a maleherm despite being nude; the angle of the shot doesn't let us check.

This is what TWYS is for. They could theoretically be a maleherm, yes, but there's no visible proof of that, so they're tagged male.

I appreciate the trans inclusion, I do agree that the way things are right now can misgender characters and that is a problem, but I believe it's more nuanced than you're making it out to be and this would be a sloppy, destructive solution.

Aside from wishing that null was a lore tag, I have no issues with the current gender and lore tag system. It's functional, and easy enough to understand.

I've never felt uncomfortable tagging my nonbinary characters as male. They look male, so people who want to see or avoid male appearances can do so easily with one tag. My esoteric gender lore is irrelevant to people's blacklists, and adding nonbinary_(lore) allows those who are interested to find them easily.

watsit said:
Not all males are masculine, and not all females are feminine

I heavily agree with this. This alias would confuse me when tagging my characters, because instead of "has penis and balls only = male" I would have to consider the definition of masculinity. Even if functionally nothing has changed, I would have to describe characters like Maxmu as masculine, when I don't personally think they are.