Recently, I've had two uploads featuring a pair of disembodied hands, namely these:

post #513148

post #514083

Both pairs don't immediately seem to belong to someone clearly female or male, so I deemed an ambiguous gender tag to be appropriate.

However, for some reason people can't seem to leave the tag alone. The Klonoa pic started a small tag war, as you can see from the comments and history, and now someone took it off the other one that has only been there for about ten hours.

Nobody's been adding male or female tags that weren't already there, or straight or gay or even solo, there's just a general disagreement with these hands being enough for an ambiguous_gender tag. Which seems strange, because there's obviously someone else involved in both pictures (even if largely off-cam) and apparently, these people would rather just not specify what they are, even if that is very unclear. But then you're basically saying we might as well bin the tag entirely.

Not that it's always needed, I mean...

post #333740

Nobody would care for a specification of the cat's questionable gender here. But in sexual situations, yes, then it's always preferred over nothing. Right?

So, what exactly is the rule of thumb here?

I'd be fine with leaving them genderless. I don't think anyone searching ambiguous_gender would care to see images like the ones linked.

Alright. Anyone else wish to chime in?

I agree with Frosted Butts.

While I'm against leaving them untagged for purposes of completion's sake, I do agree with Ippiki that to tag them with a gender would be improper in those cases. If there were some other way to tell gender available, I'd say to do it still, tohugh, of course.

With an issue such as this, I personally feel using ambiguous_gender is pointless and inaccurate. Regardless of the gender, disembodied_hands is a tag for that. The hands might not even be attached to a body, they could be magical.

Okay then, the consensus seems pretty clear. I'll just have to stop using the tag in situations like these, at least for the time being.

I have to strongly disagree. The disembodied hands could be female, could be a dickgirl, could be a male. That's what ambiguous means. It means there is no definable sexual traits and thus cant assign a gender.

Only post I'm making since I'm going throught severe opiate withdrawal and my irritably, and emotions are all fucked up right now.

ippiki_ookami said:
I'd be fine with leaving them genderless. I don't think anyone searching ambiguous_gender would care to see images like the ones linked.

This, precisely

Esme_Belles said:
I have to strongly disagree. The disembodied hands could be female, could be a dickgirl, could be a male. That's what ambiguous means. It means there is no definable sexual traits and thus cant assign a gender.

Hum. You know, good point Esme. For sexual situations, what gender they are is, well, ambiguous. It is technically and factually correct.