I'd like to start by talking a little about myself.

I'm a transgender person. Specifically, I'm genderfluid. My sense of gender fluctuates from moment to moment. Sometimes I fall on the spectrum of male and female and in-between, sometimes I don't. Sometimes I wear skirts; sometimes I wear jeans and a T-shirt.

Unfortunately, the gender tags on this site don't reflect the reality of thousands of people like me who are trans and who find theirselves erased from the site. This didn't originate with e621, but it is perpetuated by it through the various policies in place about how to tag images.

e621 uses its famous "tag what you see" policy to determine what a valid tag is. This is incredibly problematic when it comes to gender. How someone presents does not determine their gender; this is their expression, not their identity. A character who has breasts and a vagina is not necessarily female; a character with a flat chest and a penis is not necessarily male. These gendered tags are the result of an essentialism that presumes that one's body configuration or choice of dress determines their gender. Thus, the only image currently in the 'transgendered' tag (which is the incorrect term) shows the otter character Scott, who is, according to his reference sheet (and elsewhere on the site!), male. There are no posts for 'trans_woman', 'trans_girl', 'trans_man', 'trans_boy', or 'genderqueer'. The only image in the 'trans' tag is a MLP-themed pride flag image, and the tag 'crossgender' is apparently for changing established cis characters of one gender into cis characters of another gender, or gender transformation images, even when this is the result of a canonical sex change operation. Similarly, FTM and MTF are gender transformation tags, despite these being well-established, if outdated, trans terms. According to e621, trans people do not exist.So where does that leave me? While artists don't always produce trans characters — the mythological 'dickgirl' and 'c-boy' are established terms in the furry community for people apparently born with certain combinations of physical traits — people with real identities who are depicted in images, images that have been uploaded to this site, are erased with no recourse. Trans people like me cannot find others like ourselves, and this is very isolating as a minority of a minority.Someone who has a flat chest and a penis but who wears feminine clothing is seen to be a crossdresser, or a femboy, or 'girly', regardless of how they identify, and due to the tagging policy, this is 'what you see', and so those are the tags used. Canonically trans characters like Jay Naylor's Audrey are tagged with dickgirl, which is an offensive term (in general, but one thing at a time -- it especially should not be applied to a trans girl). People who are genderqueer, genderfluid, or other identities are impossible to tag, because there is no standard visual marker of our identity.The TWYS FAQ as written says this:

TWYS's end-goal is to make sure that when you search for something, you find only posts where you can actually see what you're searching for in the picture. Think about it: if you search for "balloons" on Google's Image Search, you expect it to display pictures that contain balloons, cause why should it show anything other than what you're searching for? Likewise, on e621.net, if you search for "herm", we want to make sure that the results presented to you are ones that actually appear to contain herms; we want to make sure you find exactly what you're searching for.

[...]

Gender tags (male, female, herm, etc) are typically at the heart of most TWYS debates. The reasons for this are numerous, but it boils down to A) artists drawing characters in ways that make it difficult to determine gender, and B) characters designed in such a way that they can easily appear to be either one gender or another (e.g. a herm wearing clothes typically looks just female). Again, there's nothing "wrong" with doing this, but it undoubtedly leads to confusion and people getting the wrong ideas if the artwork is ever viewed by itself. Again, e621 currently is interested only in a character's APPARENT gender, not their DEFINED gender. But sometimes even the apparent gender isn't obvious; in these cases, an administrator will need to make the final decision.

This policy does not follow from its stated goals. You should be able to search for 'balloons' and get balloons. But when something is actually a balloon, but doesn't appear to be one, then it does not cease to be a balloon, and it should show up in searches for balloons. You should not only get the most stereotypical possible example of what people think of when they say 'balloon', and nothing else. This is how Google Images actually works. To do otherwise would be like searching for cakes and not seeing certain images that appear in that google search because they appear to be, say, Legos, or books, instead of something edible.

In fact, if e621 were a site that catalogued pictures of food, it would be impossible to search for cakes that appear to be other things, because they could not be tagged as cakes. The two bolded phrases in the first paragraph show that e621 is not pursuing a tagging policy that would make its results resemble Google Images. It is pursuing a tagging policy where all books are judged by their covers. Even if those books are actually cakes.

If a character is canonically a herm, and they are wearing clothing that does not 'prove' their hermness, they would not be tagged 'herm' but, as the explanation post says, 'probably... just female'. Does this not give the wrong idea, and reduce each character to their genitals? If someone finds clothed art of a character, and that character is tagged 'female', they do not expect a herm in other images of that character. Yet if they search for more explicit images they will be confronted with the truth. This is the second reason e621's policy does not follow from its goals. If someone does not want to see images of characters with penises and vaginas, if in fact they blacklist images of characters with penises and vaginas, they then should not be shown characters with penises and vaginas, regardless of whether they are showing or not.

Furthermore, what "wrong idea" would a user get if they saw an ostensible female character tagged 'herm'? They would visually presume that character is female, look at the tags, and go, oh, wait, they're not, they're a herm. The only way I can think to parse the phrase "wrong idea" is to say that e621 believes correctly identifying the gender of the character you're looking at is 'the wrong idea' to give its users. I honestly have no idea what else that could refer to. This directly contradicts the statement that "there is nothing 'wrong' with doing this". If I'm wrong, please tell me what wrong idea could be had by correctly tagging a character's gender.

Third, these characters are frequently representative of the person who owns the copyright to them. To apply a term to that character is to apply a term to the identity that person chooses to show to at least some part of the world. For this reason it is imperative that we do not misgender that person. If, for example, I had a genderfluid charater that represented me, I would not want my images uploaded with the tag of 'male' or 'female' or 'dickgirl' or anything like that based on how that character looks in that image. People would make assumptions about my anatomy and my gender based on those images and I would have to spend large amounts of time and energy disabusing those ideas when they are brought to me. As a non-binary trans person that would be incredibly offensive and harmful; my stated gender is disbelieved and its reality denied on a continuous basis, online and offline. And yet e621 is a large, relatively mainstream furry image hosting site, which means that it should have a responsibility to be inclusive. Allowing other people to gender me how they see me means that literally nobody will get it right.

For this, I propose that the 'tag what you see' policy be abolished for gender tags. Perhaps a gender category could be developed the way the artist tag has evolved to be outside the main tagging system. The artist tag uses outside information to categorize images, as some images have no watermark or signature, and yet they are still on the site with the artist tag intact. There is no reason that the same could not apply to the genders of the characters in the image.

The tag 'transgender' could be a catch-all tag for all trans characters, and 'cisgender' for non-trans characters. Non-binary characters could be tagged with 'non-binary' and a descriptive gender beyond that ('genderfluid', 'genderqueer', 'agender', et cetera). Specific cultural genders could be tagged with only that gender. (Hijra and kathoey characters would not be tagged 'non-binary', or even 'transgender', because those terms require a gender binary to be coherent, and the genders in question exist in cultures that do not have a binary system.)

For example, say there is art of a character of mine, Igneus Praeceptis, who is canonically genderqueer. In the gender category, there would be three tags: 'transgender', 'non-binary', and 'genderqueer'. My character, Chanté, whose invented culture has a gender 'Siren', would be tagged 'Siren' and nothing else. My trans character Glire, however, could go either way. She conceptualizes herself as a girl — not a trans girl, just a girl. So she could be tagged as 'female' and 'transgender' for categorization purposes, or just as 'female'.

e621 has a list of tags for body parts. People who want to see vulva can easily search for vulva. People who want to see only unsheathed penises can easily search for penis -sheath. People who want to see girls without penises could easily search for female -penis. This is not a hardship or an inconvenience, it is the way the tagging system is meant to work: Broad categories are narrowed by using the intersection of, or the mutual exclusion of, another category. It works like this for every other combination of tags, it can work for this combination.

My point here is not to propose a system and demand its adoption. My point is that that a system that doesn't harm people is possible, and it doesn't have to require a complete overhaul of the way e621 does tags. The current system isn't irreparable, but it is currently broken. It erases people like me from being represented on the site in favour of offensive or essentialist categories of people based on how they look and not how they identify. It doesn't mean to be exclusive, but it is, and to maintain this policy is to uphold bad definitions of gender without caring about the harm those definitions cause to people.

I study the social construction of gender and other relevant sociological fields at the university level. I am also a trans person. I know what I'm talking about. I'm willing to answer any questions anyone has about what I've said here if anything needs clarification.

okay fuck

I'm too caffeinated and too tired to deal with this special snowflaking gender shit right now, even to make a snarky joke about it

Edit:

don't spill your oh-so-special genderliquid on anything here, especially not a tagging system that tags SEX, not GENDER.

I don't even want to know what genderfluid tastes like

On e621 we don't tag gender.
We do not take it upon ourselves to label anyone's gender.

The "gender" tags are simply used as an easy way to label common sets of genitals/body types.
We're not saying that the character is that gender, just that in the image that set of parts is what you can see.

I think you're overthinking a rule on a site which has the purpose to get someone what they want as fast as possible so that they can jerk off/shove various animal dong replicas inside them.

Also, you really shouldn't expect porn to be politically correct.

Edit: Please look into what kind of website E621 is and then you will understand why TWYS is supreme to all other options, by a long, long way.

Tag what you see bugs me for a lot of reasons. I find it sad that a character who is documented to be a specific gender by the artist or creator will simply get slapped with a tag that's blatantly wrong because some flowchart decides otherwise.

I've never really bothered to bring it up, because, as the previous posts show, there's a lot of resistance against changing the status quo, mostly by people who aren't affected by any of it.

DragonCat said:
Tag what you see bugs me for a lot of reasons. I find it sad that a character who is documented to be a specific gender by the artist or creator will simply get slapped with a tag that's blatantly wrong because some flowchart decides otherwise.

I've never really bothered to bring it up, because, as the previous posts show, there's a lot of resistance against changing the status quo, mostly by people who aren't affected by any of it.

You. Can't. See. Gender.

DragonCat said:
Tag what you see bugs me for a lot of reasons. I find it sad that a character who is documented to be a specific gender by the artist or creator will simply get slapped with a tag that's blatantly wrong because some flowchart decides otherwise.

I've never really bothered to bring it up, because, as the previous posts show, there's a lot of resistance against changing the status quo, mostly by people who aren't affected by any of it.

User A uploads this image of his character to E621
post #404939

User A says his character is a herm, he tags it as a herm.
Only a penis can be seen in the image, a person who haven't seen the character as a herm in other images will see it as a male.

User B searches E621 for Herm porn. User B really doesn't like Male porn.
User B finds the post.
User B's penis cries.

Please tell me you understand this very basic example.

Oh god tumblr is leaking

Halite said:
On e621 we don't tag gender.
We do not take it upon ourselves to label anyone's gender.

The "gender" tags are simply used as an easy way to label common sets of genitals/body types.
We're not saying that the character is that gender, just that in the image that set of parts is what you can see.

This is what people seem to miss. When we tag some character as "transgender" we're only talking about the physical aspects of said character's body, not their actual gender. Its usually impossible to tell in a picture what a character's 'actual gender' is (or perhaps I should say 'mental gender' for lack of a better term), because most people, fantasy furry characters included, don't go around wearing shirts displaying their current gender. So by gender, we mean 'physical gender' or 'sex.'

We're not trying to label anyone's gender, because someone will eventually be hurt by a mistagging. Instead, we don't deal with it at all.

Furthermore, there are thousands, HUNDREDS of thousands of images on e6 that would need to be retagged if we implemented anything like this, and you'd have to do research on each character to be able to find out what their gender is. And what if that character identifies as different genders on different days? What if you offend someone by tagging all of their character's images as cisgender, but "Hey! In that picture they identified as a female! Wtf!?"

Not worth the effort or the drama. This is a porn site, not a relationship site. Most people don't care what that fox with an X and Y chromosome identifies as, they just enjoy watching it have a good time taking a dick up its butt.

The tagging system is not about what you know. It's not about how you feel. It's what "we" see.

ippiki_ookami said:
Oh god tumblr is leaking

OMFG Brace youselves the feminazis are coming

RioluKid said:
OMFG Brace youselves the feminazis are coming

Why would they even be in this thread?

This has nothing to do with feminism. Besides, what's a 'feminazi' anyway?

I mean, the Nazis hated this idea of women in any sort of position of power.

Ryuzaki_Izawa said:
What's a 'feminazi' anyway?

I mean, the Nazis hated this idea of women in any sort of position of power.

Feminazi is a slang term to refer to the militant/extremist faction of the Feminists. The ones who bitch on Tumblr and make death threats and stuff.

*Ignores Blizzard of a post*
Shoo, SJW Special Snowflake! Don't make me get my broom!

FatherOfGray said:
*Ignores Blizzard of a post*
Shoo, SJW Special Snowflake! Don't make me get my broom!

a broom? a flamethrower is more effective

Cayen sais:
Long post

DragonCat said:
I've never really bothered to bring it up, because, as the previous posts show, there's a lot of resistance against changing the status quo, mostly by people who aren't affected by any of it.

Like MANY other people said, this site has a pretty closed system tht allows US the users to find images that appeal to us.
Do you realize how hard would be to Re tag 493,281 posts (as of 09/08/2014) for something as subjective as the character/artist mental portrait of gender?

This is why genderless tag is constantly wiped out, it could be uses to describe organic things that are not meant to have a gender.

Ryuzaki_Izawa said:
Why would they even be in this thread?

This has nothing to do with feminism. Besides, what's a 'feminazi' anyway?

I mean, the Nazis hated this idea of women in any sort of position of power.

Basically misandry, death to men, HEIL women

About how the term was forged, I have no idea.

NoctemWerewolf said:
Basically misandry, death to men, HEIL women

But that's stupid

Ryuzaki_Izawa said:
But that's stupid

No it's not just google quinnspiracy

RioluKid said:
No it's not just google quinnspiracy

But that's stupid as well.

Conspiracies are just stupid in general

Ryuzaki_Izawa said:
But that's stupid as well.

Conspiracies are just stupid in general

The guy's obviously trying to start shit

Ryuzaki_Izawa said:
But that's stupid as well.

Conspiracies are just stupid in general

http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-London/2014/09/01/Lying-Greedy-Promiscuous-Feminist-Bullies-are-Tearing-the-Video-Game-Industry-Apart

RioluKid said:
http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-London/2014/09/01/Lying-Greedy-Promiscuous-Feminist-Bullies-are-Tearing-the-Video-Game-Industry-Apart

Don't derail the thread please

TheHuskyK9 said:
Don't derail the thread please

Boring conversation anyway

FatherOfGray said:
*Ignores Blizzard of a post*
Shoo, SJW Special Snowflake! Don't make me get my broom!

SJW is a stupid term.
A. Social Justice Warrior is not a pejorative, it's a compliment. Everyone should desire social justice, it means equality for everyone.
B. It's not accurately representing the hate mongering that some people perpetrate in the name of equality. There is no good hate.

Cayen said:
[a lot of points about the internal identification and significance of self-identification in regards to gender, not re-quoted here for space]

Gender is not something you can see. If you could, then genderqueer and transgender individuals would be identified from birth (if not from the womb itself) as being a different gender than their physical, external parts. But they aren't because gender is very real but it's also very interior. What we can see are physical parts (for transgender individuals that can actually be distressingly misleading, but they are still part of what can be seen). And we can also see external expressions of gender (clothing, styling, hair styles, makeup/shaving/nail polish, and all the other ways that people express feminine, masculine or androgyny to the world to symbolise how they identify or feel). But how they actually identify and feel is still internal, not seen by others, not possible to "guess" or just "know" with any certainty by looking at someone. So we don't tag gender, because it cannot be seen by simply looking at someone in real life. And even less can be seen from a two-dimensional symbolic representation of some aspects of them: a picture.

A picture of a pre-transition male-bodied female, a picture of a cisgendered male-bodied male, and the picture of a genderfluid male-bodied person on a masculine day will look the same. It's not broken to tag them the same way and leave the interpretation to the viewer. But it doesn't erase the identity of the character the artist envisioned either. Both exist simultaneously. A picture is simply a flat, two-dimensional representation of maybe a tenth of what's known about the character it depicts. Not everything about that character is visible, and that means we can't tag it. It doesn't erase it though.

Tags do not define the picture, they only describe what is visible in the picture. Things which aren't visible can be included in the description box, to enhance a viewer's experience and understanding of the character/picture/situation/etc. And some people will come up with their own personal interpretations of what they see no matter what - a universal phenomenon with art is that the viewer experiences what the art makes them feel and reminds them of from their own lives, even if that's not anything that the artist intended. A picture is worth a thousand words, but still leaves a lot unspoken.

And while I will say that our tags are a little bit heteronormative and cisgender-biased in some of the terms (crossdressing for example), but the point of words is to communicate. So imperfect they may be, they still get the information conveyed, and that means they do work. And I do still find that all gender types are findable here. FTMs can be found under cuntboy when half-transitioned, male when fully transitioned, and female when pre-transition.

Again, you can't look at the external body traits and decide whether that person secretly feels like a man in a woman's body. To assume all female-bodied, feminine dressing persons are only "female" runs the same risk of disregarding their own sense of gender identity. Every single picture on this site could be featuring a transgender person in various states of self-expression. If someone wanted to view them with that in mind, they could. By saying some of them need to be tagged in order to distinguish them from the others, you're unintentionally 'erasing' the identities of people who look like everyone else but identify otherwise. There's just no way to know how the person in that picture would feel, think or self-identify. Their gender isn't visible, isn't assumable and it isn't taggable. Looking at them, you have no way of knowing if it's a transgender, genderqueer, third-gendered, cisgendered, androgynous, etc person. Even fursonas are separate from the real person they're based on. Tagging what external traits are visible in one picture doesn't change even the tiniest bit about how the person who inspired/commissioned/drew that picture feels about their real self in real life. Nobody has that kind of power over a person's self-identity. Who that real person is, is not that easy to change. Since we don't get to decide any of who that person is, we don't tag any of the gender identities. Instead we tag traits: the external expressions, styles, and parts. It's a code, a sum of visible parts, not gender at all.

"Killing people is easy. Being politically correct is a pain in the ass."

Note how the OP hasn't responded once and

Cayen said:
I study the social construction of gender and other relevant sociological fields at the university level. I am also a trans person. I know what I'm talking about. I'm willing to answer any questions anyone has about what I've said here if anything needs clarification.

HMMM

TheHuskyK9 said:
Note how the OP hasn't responded once and [quoted OP about inviting people to discuss things]....HMMM

I'd give them a little more time before assuming they just bailed. That post must have taken awhile to write. They could have taken a break after they finished it and didn't expect such prompt responses. It happens. But if they aren't back within a day, then yeah, they probably changed their mind about discussing the subject for an absolutely unknown reason. At least, that would be my guess. *shrug*

OP, if you want to step into a holy $#!&^@*% minefield of offending people, you go right ahead labeling images by gender. If you're even remotely involved in LGBTQ issues, or even aware of them, then you know what a bad idea gender-labeling is. And nobody, to within statistical error, wants to put "L" or "Q" or most any other letters besides "M", "F", and "X" on their driver's license.

e6 doesn't actually tag "gender". It tags "sex". But it's called "gender" because in the context of this site's images, "sex" is a verb. There are intersex tags to cover various cases in which a character visually/physically expresses various combinations of breasts, penis, and vagina, plus an ambiguous_gender tag.

I'm sorry that's confusing, but that's just how it is. When someone here says they're trying to sex a cat, they're usually being brrbrrdrrs (and about to incur the wrath of admins), and not trying to identify whether they have to worry about someday adopting out a litter of precocious little fuzzballs. That confusion pretty much covers 90% of your post. As for the other 10%...

I like how your Google Image Search example is about 500 images of patently recognizable cakes, 2 images of pancakes, and 1 of fishcakes. The TWYS rule would apply very cleanly if these were on e6. I mean, I don't think pancakes or fishcakes would be grouped under "cake", but that's why e6 is usually better than Google.

Japanese gameshows aside, the fact remains that a cake normally bears a modest resemblance to a cake. The only example on e6 that I could quickly find of a cake shaped like something else was post #95055, in which the cake is tagged as "cake" but not the character that the cake is shaped after.

get your sjw gender pronoun bullshit out of here and back to tumblr where that garbage belongs

Why do posts like this always boil down to "These depictions of fantasy characters have feelings too! We should treat them like people!"?

A picture of a cake is not a cake.
A picture of a gun is not a gun.
A picture of a person is not a person.

Cayen said:
I'm a transgender person. Specifically, I'm genderfluid. My sense of gender fluctuates from moment to moment. Sometimes I fall on the spectrum of male and female and in-between, sometimes I don't. Sometimes I wear skirts; sometimes I wear jeans and a T-shirt.

How does one "feel like a gender"?
What does your choice of clothing have to do with the current gender you feel like?
Why not just ignore gender and wear what you want?

I identify as a pragmatist first and foremost (person second) and the introduction throws so many exception errors I feel like drinking before work.

memeboy said:
get your sjw gender pronoun bullshit out of here and back to tumblr where that garbage belongs

Halite said:
SJW is a stupid term.
A. Social Justice Warrior is not a pejorative, it's a compliment. Everyone should desire social justice, it means equality for everyone.
B. It's not accurately representing the hate mongering that some people perpetrate in the name of equality. There is no good hate.

This is one of the biggest reasons I don't tag EVERYTHING in my posts just some things I know -for a fact- are proper tags.

One thing I hate is "Tag what you see" Because I've seen bad tags come out of it.

A good example was a post I found where you could see the rear of a character, very feminine but with a dick. Other pictures of this character showed it had breasts so well, you all know what the proper tag is.

Except in this image, the tag was "Femboy"

Which is wrong. Looking into the comments I found an argument between the artist and another member who kept changing the tags on eachother because the member was. "Tagging what he sees" And the artist is tagging what he knows. The freaking character was not a femboy, or male. (Technically) So seeing this kinda shit makes me kinda hate the tagging system in some ways. I can understand some of these complaints, but not nearly all of them. You're on the case of the admins/users because of tags like. "Dickgirl" Being "Offensive." These are not serious complaints about the tag system, this is a case of.

I did in fact take a break. I spent most of today writing that post and I didn't know the speed with which people were going to reply. I didn't know that anyone was going to give this thread the time of day. I'll start responding to things in order.

Ryuzaki_Izawa said:
I don't even want to know what genderfluid tastes like

I'm only responding to you to say, better than yours.

TheHuskyK9 said:
Note how the OP hasn't responded once andHMMM

And I'm only responding to you to say, this would be a great point if you'd actually asked a question, but you didn't. Let's not be presumptively impatient on behalf of other people, shall we?

Peekaboo said:
I think you're overthinking a rule on a site which has the purpose to get someone what they want as fast as possible so that they can jerk off/shove various animal dong replicas inside them.

Also, you really shouldn't expect porn to be politically correct.

Edit: Please look into what kind of website E621 is and then you will understand why TWYS is supreme to all other options, by a long, long way.

I could respond this a bunch of ways, but the one I think will resonate with you the most is: I want to jerk off to images of trans people. Not femboys. Not dickgirls. Not cuntboys. Trans people. People like me. Why is my ability to find the porn I want, the porn that already exists here, less important than yours?

Peekaboo said:

User A says his character is a herm, he tags it as a herm.
Only a penis can be seen in the image, a person who haven't seen the character as a herm in other images will see it as a male.

User B searches E621 for Herm porn. User B really doesn't like Male porn.
User B finds the post.
User B's penis cries.

Please tell me you understand this very basic example.

Sex/gender? male, female, intersex (herm, maleherm, dickgirl, cuntboy), ambiguous gender, neuter

That second bit is from the official e621 tag checklist. Maleherm's an established tag. If user B's penis is going to cry at male-coded herm characters, they can always blacklist maleherm, which should be the tag for that post.

If this person is into male herms and not males, then perhaps they could simply trust that the tag system is accurate and that they're seeing a male herm from a weird angle, and imagine the male herm's vulva for this one image. You know, like how trans people have to use their imagination to headcanon any representation at all right now, even when the image in question is meant to be a canonical trans girl.

Here's a question for you in return: Say someone uploads this image to e621. How do you tag it so I can find everyone like them? I point out that the gender of the character is on the image.

Tokaido said:
This is what people seem to miss. When we tag some character as "transgender" we're only talking about the physical aspects of said character's body, not their actual gender. Its usually impossible to tell in a picture what a character's 'actual gender' is (or perhaps I should say 'mental gender' for lack of a better term), because most people, fantasy furry characters included, don't go around wearing shirts displaying their current gender. So by gender, we mean 'physical gender' or 'sex.'

We're not trying to label anyone's gender, because someone will eventually be hurt by a mistagging. Instead, we don't deal with it at all.

This passes the buck and misses the point. Mislabeling a trans girl as a 'dickgirl' hurts people right this second and that is deemed as acceptable.

Moreover, sex and gender are both socially constructed, and even on this site they are not objective. People we assign 'male' to are assumed to grow up into men. On e621 they are expected to conform to a certain narrow range of body types and behaviours. Feminine men have an entirely different tag, the 'femboy' tag (assuming that tag isn't filled with mislabeled trans girls). Yes, I checked, there are a myriad of posts tagged 'femboy' and not 'male'. So 'males' are still gendered, despite the tags ostensibly only being about physical traits.

Beyond that there are tags for physical traits. You want to see cock? Penis. You want pussy? Pussy. You want tits? Breasts.

Furthermore, there are thousands, HUNDREDS of thousands of images on e6 that would need to be retagged if we implemented anything like this, and you'd have to do research on each character to be able to find out what their gender is. And what if that character identifies as different genders on different days? What if you offend someone by tagging all of their character's images as cisgender, but "Hey! In that picture they identified as a female! Wtf!?"

Not worth the effort or the drama. This is a porn site, not a relationship site. Most people don't care what that fox with an X and Y chromosome identifies as, they just enjoy watching it have a good time taking a dick up its butt.

You must have missed the point where I told you I was genderfluid. There's your tag.

And yeah, people are going to screw up and offend people by labeling things they aren't. Again, that already happens. It just happens in acceptable ways right now.

NoctemWerewolf said:
Like MANY other people said, this site has a pretty closed system tht allows US the users to find images that appeal to us.
Do you realize how hard would be to Re tag 493,281 posts (as of 09/08/2014) for something as subjective as the character/artist mental portrait of gender?

If you implemented a new gender tag and started it out with every male character (233197, just less than half that number) given 'cisgender' and 'man' or 'guy' or whatever, you would not have many posts left over to retag in that category. The same goes with 'female' and 'cisgender'/'woman' or 'girl' (286954). Admittedly there's going to be overlap in those posts. though if you believe the straight tag, there's only about 63,000 of them, meaning we're at somewhere in the 400,000-450,000 range.

You could then leave every other tag alone and let trans tags come in on a case by case basis. This is where the relative minority of trans folk comes in handy: There are only a few images left to be tagged in this way that aren't of the equivalent of 'cis' or 'natural' dickgirls or c-boys, et cetera. Moreover, I get the feeling that whatever small trans contingent of e621 exists probably collectively knows a significant portion of what images depict trans people. If you send out a sitewide announcement telling people they can tag things as trans now, you'll probably get within the typical incompletion rate of most of the tags on e621 fairly quickly.

You vastly underestimate a clever hack and the power of crowdsourcing.

But wait, you say, people are going to be offended when they're tagged wrong?

There are no trans people on e621 according to the tags. I think we can collectively live with a few misgenderings if we're allowed to exist.

But all that is actually beside the point. That e621 didn't bother to be inclusive from the getgo is not an excuse not to put in the legwork now. It's all momentum deferred.

furrypickle said:
A picture of a pre-transition male-bodied female, a picture of a cisgendered male-bodied male, and the picture of a genderfluid male-bodied person on a masculine day will look the same. It's not broken to tag them the same way and leave the interpretation to the viewer. But it doesn't erase the identity of the character the artist envisioned either.

So let's tag all of them 'trans girl'. If the interpretation is best left to the viewer, let's say that every person with a flat chest and a penis is trans, regardless of how they identify.

No?

That would be ridiculous?

I agree with you. The reason it's ridiculous is that people have an expectation of the kinds of things they're going to see when they load up images of males, and you'd anger everyone, not least of which trans women, who are not male. The expectations for what a guy looks and acts like is rooted in a lot of sexist and cissexist thought, but it's very definitely A Thing That Happens. This is why I'm not proposing ripping out the body-based tags, even though they're still problematic. I'm advocating adding specificity to what alredy exists.

Tags do not define the picture, they only describe what is visible in the picture.

Yes, but people define the tags and what they mean, and choose which meanings are good to use and what aren't, and people like me get to see people who literally do identify as male get two hundred thousand posts with their identity on it, and an argument when I propose maybe getting a tag of my own.

Why is the tag 'cuntboy' and not 'trans man'? Why is the tag 'dickgirl' and not 'trans woman'? Because these are not trans characters. They exist in a largely fictional biological reality where body parts can be swapped in and out in any combination. The result of a system in which characters are tagged based on their physical appearance and nothing more means that categories will exist for that physical appearance and not for the things that are not visible. We are in agreement with that. I do not understand why it is so hard to grasp that the system erases some identities that exist and tags others that exist, and also some that do not exist.

According to e621, herms exist and trans people do not, and that is legitimately harmful.

By saying some of them need to be tagged in order to distinguish them from the others, you're unintentionally 'erasing' the identities of people who look like everyone else but identify otherwise. There's just no way to know how the person in that picture would feel, think or self-identify.

And by saying that you should only tag what you see, you are already erasing the identities of people who look like everyone else but canonically identify otherwise. Except only your method results in zero trans people anywhere. If you started tagging trans women, you wouldn't run out of cis people or dickgirls any time soon.

Cis men get to see theirselves represented everywhere, including with a tag of their own. Cis women get to see theirselves represented everywhere, including with a tag of their own. Binary trans people get the offensive tags 'dickgirl' and 'cuntboy', neither of which are appropriate to apply to an entire group of people, and non-binary people get nothing at all.

And, yes there is a way to know.

We literally do have that ability.

Hey Jay Naylor, does your character Audrey identify as a trans woman? Yes? You put it in the description of the comic about her? Cool. Into the tag she goes.

Each post should have a source. The collective sources of a character will almost certainly gender the character at some point.

You fail to realize that each artist knows how their creations identify, even if they don't realize it. What does everyone do when they create their character? Design them, usually starting with species, age, and yes, gender and sex. Some people conflate the two and create cis guys by using 'male', or cis gals by using 'female' (and look at that, they're represented no problem). Some define their character based on their gender. Neither is especially better or worse. So one shouldn't be treated better or worse than the other.

Moving forward, there should be literally no problem with tagging the genders of characters in new uploads. Characters aren't living, breathing people. They're constructs of their creators. Those creators know everything about those characters, and what they say should be word of god. Especially when artists create trans characters to attempt to gain representation in an overwhelmingly cisnormative world that actively tries to pretend that trans people don't exist.

ikdind said:
OP, if you want to step into a holy $#!&^@*% minefield of offending people, you go right ahead labeling images by gender.

The only reason we're not in a holy $#!&^@*% minefield of offending people right now is because there are less of me than there are of you.

Like, you truly don't get it, do you. According to this site I'm a dickgirl. That should be a $#!&^@*% minefield of offending people but instead it's business as usual, because people by and large don't know about, acknowledge, respect, or support trans identities.

If you're even remotely involved in LGBTQ issues, or even aware of them, then you know what a bad idea gender-labeling is.

Then we should abolish the sex/gender system altogether and just go by body parts. Assigning sex to a character inevitably genders them, because of the social construction of sex.

And nobody, to within statistical error, wants to put "L" or "Q" or most any other letters besides "M", "F", and "X" on their driver's license.

Well shit, I'm glad that e621 has the same standard of proof for sex as the DMV. That changes everything.

e6 doesn't actually tag "gender". It tags "sex". But it's called "gender" because in the context of this site's images, "sex" is a verb. There are intersex tags to cover various cases in which a character visually/physically expresses various combinations of breasts, penis, and vagina, plus an ambiguous_gender tag.

Picture an anthro male husky.

Most people on this site would picture someone relatively built, wide shoulders, et cetera. Also probably jeans and a T-shirt, or khakis, or other stereotypically masculine attire. (I don't really wear that kind of clothing, I have no idea what guys wear now.) Also a certain range of behaviours, both based on the species and, yes, based on the character's presumed gender. When an entire society presumes a certain range of expressions expected from one sex, it socially constructs sex as being a metonym for its associated gender.

I'm sorry that's confusing, but that's just how it is.

It's not confusing.

It's harmful.

I probably understand it more than you do.

I like how your Google Image Search example is about 500 images of patently recognizable cakes, 2 images of pancakes, and 1 of fishcakes. The TWYS rule would apply very cleanly if these were on e6. I mean, I don't think pancakes or fishcakes would be grouped under "cake", but that's why e6 is usually better than Google.

When I searched, I found a cake that looked like a lego set and a cake that looked like a stack of books. From a thumbnail it wasn't clear that those were cakes, the only reason I knew they were is beause I'd searched for 'cakes'. That's why I constructed my examples the way I did. And hey, they are both cakes, and with an unmodified google image search, they showed up.

So, way to somehow find a way to miss my point I guess.

Japanese gameshows aside, the fact remains that a cake normally bears a modest resemblance to a cake.

Right, but we don't disqualify a cake from being called that based on how it looks. The fact that 99.984% of all cakes are shaped a certain recognizable way and the rest look like the Death Star or Hogwarts has nothing to do with my point. That the ones that do look like the Death Star or Hogwarts are still cakes.

However, clearly that metaphor failed, so I'm abandoning it after this reply.

NotMeNotYou said:
Why do posts like this always boil down to "These depictions of fantasy characters have feelings too! We should treat them like people!"?

I'm not sure what post you were reading, but my post made the argument that actual, real trans people have feelings too, and we should be treated like people? Maybe? I guess that was too subtle.

How does one "feel like a gender"?

The term is 'gender orientation'. It refers to your internal sense of gender, not your gender expression (how you display that orientation, including labels) or your gender identity (how other people read your expression). Ever heard someone say they feel feminine when they wear lingerie? Same thing.

I identify as a pragmatist first and foremost (person second) and the introduction throws so many exception errors I feel like drinking before work.

Well, shit, there's your problem. If you're a Turing-complete AI, of course you would have trouble with a complex and nuanced gender identity. I'll talk to someone I know, hook you up with the latest heuristics.

Call me crazy but this seems like a lot of attention to a problem. I'm not saying that your identity should be questioned or something, but what we mostly say here with TWYS is that we just, let's say, identify what's happening at the current moment in a picture.

Say you've seen a random dude on the street and probably even said hello to him but who can confirm to you (besides him, but it would be somewhat inappropriate asking) that he isn't a he but a she instead and that what's in his her pants isn't a penis...

There's where you just labeled that person in that specific moment as a dude...

I hope I explained myself in sort of an understandable way, it's 1 Am (where I am) and I'm probably just rambling... Good night.

Edit: Also, my apologies for not reading the first post. It seemed like a lot of text (neatly formatted, I give that to you) and my brain can't handle that much...

Oop, I missed one.

Cutedementia said:
One thing I hate is "Tag what you see" Because I've seen bad tags come out of it.

A good example was a post I found where you could see the rear of a character, very feminine but with a dick. Other pictures of this character showed it had breasts so well, you all know what the proper tag is.

Except in this image, the tag was "Femboy"

Which is wrong. Looking into the comments I found an argument between the artist and another member who kept changing the tags on eachother because the member was. "Tagging what he sees" And the artist is tagging what he knows. The freaking character was not a femboy, or male. (Technically) So seeing this kinda shit makes me kinda hate the tagging system in some ways. I can understand some of these complaints, but not nearly all of them. You're on the case of the admins/users because of tags like. "Dickgirl" Being "Offensive." These are not serious complaints about the tag system[...]

The best part about the proposal is that having an artist tag what they know (or letting the users tag what the artist knows through information gained via sources) satisfies both the legitimate and (to you) illegitimate complaints. There are multiple reasons to do it, and you agree with one of them, so, what do you care why else I might want to? Let the artist decide the gender of the character and alleviate the scenario where an artist has to argue about their own work.

If there are pictures with characters explicitly saying "I'm a transgender" or something like that, then feel free to tag that. I don't know how you would otherwise be able to tell what a fictional drawing "thinks" about itself.

At any rate why the hell does it matter?

Well, sometimes I feel like a nut, sometimes I don't...
Does that make me fluid as well?

And one more before I actually go to bed.

Xch3l said:
Call me crazy but this seems like a lot of attention to a problem. I'm not saying that your identity should be questioned or something, but what we mostly say here with TWYS is that we just, let's say, identify what's happening at the current moment in a picture.

Except it's not. It's what appears to be happening. Big difference.

Say you've seen a random dude on the street and probably even said hello to him but who can confirm to you (besides him, but it would be somewhat inappropriate asking) that he isn't a he but a she instead and that what's in his her pants isn't a penis...

There's where you just labeled that person in that specific moment as a dude...

I hope I explained myself in sort of an understandable way, it's 1 Am (where I am) and I'm probably just rambling... Good night.

First of all, 'he' and 'she' are not shorthand for genders or sexes. Pronouns are not inherently gendered. Neither are vaginas. Dude could be a dude for all you know. If they're a cis woman who appears masculine enough to be read as a guy? Awesome. More power to her. But they could also be a man.

Second of all, I try not to presume gender. It's a habit and it can be broken. If I meet someone and I need to use their pronouns I'll attempt to ask for them, or use singular they as a placeholder. I avoid 'sir' and 'ma'am' and other honourifics unless they're my top and they will tell me how they want to be addressed at that point. If they want to tell me how they identify or what's in their pants I'll be happy to guard the knowledge. Other than that it's not relevant to my day-to-day interactions with people. This is the easiest way to avoid misgendering someone.

And because I know someone will try to gotcha me with this: No, this gender agnosticism doesn't extend to who I fuck, and so it shouldn't extend to who I jerk off to either.

Cayen said:
And I'm only responding to you to say, this would be a great point if you'd actually asked a question, but you didn't. Let's not be presumptively impatient on behalf of other people, shall we?

No question needs to be asked if I already know the answer. Let's not be a smart aleck with users, shall we?

I'm not sure what post you were reading, but my post made the argument that actual, real trans people have feelings too, and we should be treated like people? Maybe? I guess that was too subtle.

We aren't talking about real people. We are talking about tagging drawings

Cayen said:
According to e621, herms exist and trans people do not, and that is legitimately harmful.

Drawings

Hey Jay Naylor, does your character Audrey identify as a trans woman? Yes? You put it in the description of the comic about her? Cool. Into the tag she goes.

So by your logic, if the artist draws a male (no breasts, has penis and manly figure) and he says it's definitely a female, we should tag it female because he says so? No

The only reason we're not in a holy $#!&^@*% minefield of offending people right now is because there are less of me than there are of you.

Gee I wonder why

Like, you truly don't get it, do you. According to this site I'm a dickgirl. That should be a $#!&^@*% minefield of offending people but instead it's business as usual, because people by and large don't know about, acknowledge, respect, or support trans identities.

You're a drawing also? Check this out: TAGS DO NOT APPLY TO REAL PEOPLE, ONLY DRAWINGS. DRAWINGS ARE FICTIONAL AND ANY ARTIST CAN MAKE A CHARACTER HOWEVER THEY WANT

Cayen said:
I'm not sure what post you were reading, but my post made the argument that actual, real trans people have feelings too, and we should be treated like people? Maybe? I guess that was too subtle.

You seem to have misunderstood me, persons have feelings, the pictures we tag do not.
You can't offend the picture by tagging it with dickgirl because the picture doesn't care.
We can possibly offend the creator of the character depicted in the image when he believes we are trying to label him, instead of the picture.
But that is the entire problem, we tag the pictures, not the character / person behind the picture.

If we were to tag real people, like, having a database of real people for a school project or the likes and the tags "dickgirl", "herm" and stuff would be used to describe the people themselves I would have a problem with that as well, since you'd reduce people to a quick glance of some stranger.
But we don't, we don't label the people, we the label the image, if the pixels on the image resemble a penis we tag penis, if the pixels resemble a figure that is closely associated to that of a female woman we tag female.

Cayen said:
The term is 'gender orientation'. It refers to your internal sense of gender, not your gender expression (how you display that orientation, including labels) or your gender identity (how other people read your expression). Ever heard someone say they feel feminine when they wear lingerie? Same thing.

Well, shit, there's your problem. If you're a Turing-complete AI, of course you would have trouble with a complex and nuanced gender identity. I'll talk to someone I know, hook you up with the latest heuristics.

But why is it important to the discussion that you're genderfluid? Or that you sometimes wear skirts and on other days t-shirts and jeans?
How does the fact that you're a (genderfluid) person influence your argumentation or the arguments inside your argumentation?

Personal problem aside that I can't begin to grasp why people would allocate some time of their day to worry about what gender they identify at the moment, or in general, it just seems highly pointless that you'd start an argument with an introduction of yourself.
I could go so far as to say you did it for a cheap shot at argument from authority, which is quite a silly thing to do.

EDIT:

Halite said:
SJW is a stupid term.
A. Social Justice Warrior is not a pejorative, it's a compliment. Everyone should desire social justice, it means equality for everyone.
B. It's not accurately representing the hate mongering that some people perpetrate in the name of equality. There is no good hate.

That term is sarcastic, they are neither warriors, nor interested in social justice.

Could someone sum this up within 100 words - Walls of Text make my brain pass out.

If i got this right currently my answer would be:
I think humanity should use it's intelligence to solve more important problems. Like how to keep our planet alive or escape from it once it dies. Or how to prevent war.
Not why does this website not list how i feel and not what a image looks like. Sorry if I sound ignorant but I'm just an average straight guy.
Also if you're genderfluid (and I got that term right)... couldn't you just search for tags you are currently aroused by?

rebane said:
Could someone sum this up within 100 words - Walls of Text make my brain pass out.

If i got this right currently my answer would be:
I think humanity should use it's intelligence to solve more important problems. Like how to keep our planet alive or escape from it once it dies. Or how to prevent war.
Not why does this website not list how i feel and not what a image looks like. Sorry if I sound ignorant but I'm just an average straight guy.
Also if you're genderfluid (and I got that term right)... couldn't you just search for tags you are currently aroused by?

Gender is not technically a physical thing, however is used as such here. That is the basis of the complaint.

Honestly, I'd like to see a change in the policy for TWYS to be able to include known or stated features of a character's sexual genitalia, even if those features are not visible due to obstruction only. After all, there are artists that want their characters tagged correctly.
(similar to outside knowledge for name and such)

Such as a hermaphrodite with balls from the front covering the pussy from being shown, but not a crotch shot in which the artist is not yet done and has given no pussy or a reinterpretation of the character.

Because technically you should not be able to look up "herm -pussy" and find results based on the policy

rebane said:
Could someone sum this up within 100 words - Walls of Text make my brain pass out.

Oh man, so I'm not the only one

If there's no way to tell "gender identity" from just looking at someone, how could an image convey that hidden info (other than text)? If it is known, you could use a pool instead of a tag.

Also, "problematic" is my trigger word.

Cayen said:
A lot of things

There are many things I wish to say, and I even started writing out a very, very long response, but you know what? I realized that I was just restating my previous points in more detail. And you did the same in your response, literally just reiterating things we've already said. We've come to the point where I'm not going to change your mind, and you're not going to change mine. There's no point in debating further.

The majority of commentors, including the site staff, have already come to a decision about your proposed change to the tagging system, and that decision is "No. That doesn't belong here."

Let me just leave this quote I coincidentally found today about this very topic. In response to the question (paraphrased) "Why do people from tumblr claim to be so persecuted, and then overreact to such little things?" Reddit user Analpumping poignantly commented thusly:

Ko-san said:
If there are pictures with characters explicitly saying "I'm a transgender" or something like that, then feel free to tag that. ...

No, don't.
We don't tag text, we tag what's visible.
If a cat says "I'm a dog" in the image, we don't tag it as a dog.

deadoon said:
Gender is not technically a physical thing, however is used as such here. That is the basis of the complaint.

Except, again, no it isn't used as such here.
We don't tag gender, we simply use the available words because tagging "Visible_penis_and_breasts_but_no_visible_vagina" is stupid as a tag when "dickgirl" works too.

Honestly, I'd like to see a change in the policy for TWYS to be able to include known or stated features of a character's sexual genitalia, even if those features are not visible due to obstruction only. After all, there are artists that want their characters tagged correctly.
(similar to outside knowledge for name and such)

Such as a hermaphrodite with balls from the front covering the pussy from being shown, but not a crotch shot in which the artist is not yet done and has given no pussy or a reinterpretation of the character.

Because technically you should not be able to look up "herm -pussy" and find results based on the policy

Because ruining the ability to search this website is the best thing that could happen right?
The normal user here can't care less about your(or anyone's) character.
They want to search for something that they're looking for, usually to masturbate too.
They want to search male, and find males, female and find females, and herms and/or dickgirls to find those as well.
They don't want to search male and find a image of a female with the artist saying "Oh, it's ok that this looks like a female, the character identifies as male, so that's what it really is on the inside."
Person interested in males cannot masturbate to that, well, some people can't.

rebane said:
Could someone sum this up within 100 words - Walls of Text make my brain pass out.

If i got this right currently my answer would be:
I think humanity should use it's intelligence to solve more important problems. Like how to keep our planet alive or escape from it once it dies. Or how to prevent war.
Not why does this website not list how i feel and not what a image looks like. Sorry if I sound ignorant but I'm just an average straight guy.
Also if you're genderfluid (and I got that term right)... couldn't you just search for tags you are currently aroused by?

I can sum up the entire thread in 1 sentence:

OP, and possibly others are butthurt about TWYS rules, this fact changes nothing.

Halite said:
No, don't.
We don't tag text, we tag what's visible.
If a cat says "I'm a dog" in the image, we don't tag it as a dog.

Except, again, no it isn't used as such here.
We don't tag gender, we simply use the available words because tagging "Visible_penis_and_breasts_but_no_visible_vagina" is stupid as a tag when "dickgirl" works too.

Because ruining the ability to search this website is the best thing that could happen right?
The normal user here can't care less about your(or anyone's) character.
They want to search for something that they're looking for, usually to masturbate too.
They want to search male, and find males, female and find females, and herms and/or dickgirls to find those as well.
They don't want to search male and find a image of a female with the artist saying "Oh, it's ok that this looks like a female, the character identifies as male, so that's what it really is on the inside."
Person interested in males cannot masturbate to that, well, some people can't.

I can sum up the entire thread in 1 sentence:

OP, and possibly others are butthurt about TWYS rules, this fact changes nothing.

Text does have a hand in tagging as you can both see it and it describes the picture. For example, if you see a picture of two people having sex but they have fairly neutral faces you tag sex and whatnot, then you read the text with one saying "No, stop! Someone help!" you can safely add rape. For a more solid one we have a pic of two Lucarios in an awkward position with lustful faces all covered in body fluids. You would assume sex but the text that you can clearly read tells you there is no penetration and that they are fighting so the tags change.

Case in point, you still see text.

I can already sense that this will be another thread like forum #136094

REPEAT.

Peekaboo said:
I can already sense that this will be another thread like forum #136094

How this forum will play out

>"Better than thou" attitudes.
>Arguments being posted against OP's viewpoints.
>OP dismissing arguments with no good reasoning as to why.
>OP again stating his opinion.
>People getting mad.
>Everything is worse.

REPEAT.

This said, Imma drop off of this thread now. Becaue I haven't sleeped correctly and I become harsh by barely thinking what I say...

TheHuskyK9 said:
No question needs to be asked if I already know the answer. Let's not be a smart aleck with users, shall we?

What, the answer about why I'm not responding? Yeah, you really had my number on that one. I sure didn't respond to anything, and it sure was suspicious, you caught me red-handed.

We aren't talking about real people. We are talking about tagging drawings

No, you are talking about drawings. I am talking about real people. In fact, you are talking about real people as well, you just don't realize it.

This is simple to test. If this discussion had zero affect on you? It would be trivial to accept my proposal, or at least work on it a bit without so many cries of 'tumblr is leaking' and 'sjw' and such. The fact that what I posted made people actively lose their shit means that they believe the change affects them.

So we're mostly talking about who should be affected and how.

I am telling you, as a trans person, as someone affected by the tagging system, that the way the site treats tagging is harmful. Trans characters exist and I can't search for them. I've attempted to appeal to empathy, but apparently it's impossible for people to understand what anyone outside their little bubble might feel about a situation that doesn't affect them, so I've also appealed to lust and authorial prerogative.

Nobody's responded to either of those, by the way. Why is it that what I want to look at is less of a priority than what other people what to look at? Why does some random user get right-of-way over the artist?

NotMeNotYou said:
We can possibly offend the creator of the character depicted in the image when he believes we are trying to label him, instead of the picture.
But that is the entire problem, we tag the pictures, not the character / person behind the picture.

If this were true then images of blackface would not be harmful because they don't depict any individual black person, yet they are. The problem with the tags as stated is that they are harmful caricatures of trans people, and while I find it exceedingly problematic that they exist in their current form, I'm actually willing to live and let live on that one, so long as I also get a thing that works for me. So long as it is explicit that dickgirls are one thing and trans women are another, I'll live with it.

But why is it important to the discussion that you're genderfluid? Or that you sometimes wear skirts and on other days t-shirts and jeans?
How does the fact that you're a (genderfluid) person influence your argumentation or the arguments inside your argumentation?

Personal problem aside that I can't begin to grasp why people would allocate some time of their day to worry about what gender they identify at the moment, or in general, it just seems highly pointless that you'd start an argument with an introduction of yourself.
I could go so far as to say you did it for a cheap shot at argument from authority, which is quite a silly thing to do.

Shit, I thought someone was going to call me out for the sociology thing. Nope, apparently my identity is the authority people don't accept.

Look, if you were, say, a member of a group that had a tattoo on your hand from birth, one that people checked and treated you differently based on whether you had it or not, you'd know what it is like to be one of those people better than someone who doesn't have the tattoo, right? Obviously you would. You are one. You spend every waking moment of every day as a member of that group. On a personal level, it's impossible for anyone outside that group to have that much experience being you. So nobody should be able to tell you better than you do what affects you and how.

That's why I said it. I'm saying, I am a trans person, this is how the tags affect me and people like me. My identity is important because I am one of the affected group, and these are my own experiences. I'm not talking on behalf of others whose experience I don't share, I'm talking on behalf of myself first and foremost, and others who share my experience second.

I am the ultimate authority on my own life and experiences. I know how this shit affects me, and I have the training to explain how external social forces shape my experience of life.

That's why I said it.

If you want to know how I experience gender, send me a private message or something. The details aren't relevant to this topic.

Ko-san said:
If there are pictures with characters explicitly saying "I'm a transgender" or something like that, then feel free to tag that. I don't know how you would otherwise be able to tell what a fictional drawing "thinks" about itself.

At any rate why the hell does it matter?

Asked and answered, but I want to answer that last part again.

It matters because representation matters.

People are social creatures, and media is a microcosm of the world. Even porn. Even furry porn. Cis people are able to search for, and find, hundreds of thousands of images of characters who identify the way they do, act the way they do, and to an extent look the way they do (as much as a cat or a fox could). However, trans people don't get to do that, not here. We can't go onto e621 and search for people who identify the way we do. e621 doesn't consider us important enough to acknowledge.

And this wouldn't be so bad -- it's only furry porn after all -- except for the fact that this happens literally everywhere. Trans characters on TV are frequently played by cis characters, and they're overwhelmingly used as victims or punchlines. Visible trans people make up almost none of the public, to the point that nobody really knows how many of us there are, because it's so dangerous for most people to openly identify that way that if you start identifying as trans your chance of being murdered goes all the way up to 1 in 12, with most of those victims being people of colour. In short: We don't get to see other trans people reflected int he world the way cis people see theirselves reflected constantly, above and beyond our relative rarity (no more rare than redheads, by the way), and it's largely an artificial problem. It doesn't have to be this way.

The only place that trans people are really able to identify openly is online, and even this, as evidenced here, produces problems. People in this very thread have questioned my identity, questioned my motives, and failed to see the point of any of this because it doesn't affect them. The point is that people like me are invisible on this site and unable to see each other, and that in combination with every other invisibilizing force that affects trans people produces a profound sense of isolation. I'm asking for the site to change, just slightly, to help reduce that isolation.

The only reason y'all don't see it as a problem is because you think shit happens here the way it does everywhere, and it isn't a problem to you. It does happen here the way it happens everywhere else. That's the fucking problem.

rebane said:
Could someone sum this up within 100 words - Walls of Text make my brain pass out.

Just for you, I'm going to actually attempt to do this. If you read nothing else, read the spoiler.

75 words. Reductive, but there you have it.

If i got this right currently my answer would be:
I think humanity should use it's intelligence to solve more important problems. Like how to keep our planet alive or escape from it once it dies. Or how to prevent war.

I'm not talking about sending a manned expedition to Io to mine its rich deposits of naturally occuring tags, I'm talking about a small change in website policy. That's literally it.

If you want to go on about how there are better things we could be doing with our time, I assume your next act is to private message every furry artist whose work you've ever looked at to say that they could be using their talents for more lofty goals, and they should stop drawing animal people fucking, posthaste. (Or turn their animal people fucking into something that serves some lofty goal somehow.)

Not why does this website not list how i feel and not what a image looks like. Sorry if I sound ignorant but I'm just an average straight guy.
Also if you're genderfluid (and I got that term right)... couldn't you just search for tags you are currently aroused by?

Due respect, but I could have guessed you were an average straight guy.

This website explicitly caters to straight furries, gay furries, bisexual furries, and lesbian furries. Apparently people who are trans and attracted to other trans people don't get to be catered to.

Also, while I'm at it, for anyone doing the 'you're not special' derail: Note that I'm explicitly saying, in various ways, that I'm not asking to be treated in some special way. I'm asking to be treated like everyone else is, and yeah, that requires a tweak to the tagging system, but it's a tweak that really should already exist in some form.

Halite said:
If a cat says "I'm a dog" in the image, we don't tag it as a dog.

Right, and you know why you don't do that?

Because there is no widespread phenomenon of transspecies characters.

Like, if things were different, they wouldn't be the same. Trans women are women, and trans men are men. Falling back on heavily gendered sex tags is as good as saying that trans women and men are not really men or women, and not even giving us a tag is as good as claiming we don't exist in a meaningful way.

Except, again, no it isn't used as such here.
We don't tag gender, we simply use the available words because tagging "Visible_penis_and_breasts_but_no_visible_vagina" is stupid as a tag when "dickgirl" works too.

Who made the words available? Again, they didn't grow naturally on Io and we didn't send an expedition there to harvest them. They were invented, popularized, and embedded into the working of the site. These are design decisions, and I'm saying, the system needs to be redesigned.

The word may work for you. It does not work for me.

Because ruining the ability to search this website is the best thing that could happen right?

Tell me why adding functionality will ruin the search.

Literally no part of the tag system has to change from what is known. You want to search for males? Search for males. I am only asking for an addition to what is already there to be able to find people like myself. If being able to do that ruins the site for you, I question why it's so necessary to your enjoyment of the site that I don't get to find people who are like me and you do.

The normal user here can't care less about your(or anyone's) character.
They want to search for something that they're looking for, usually to masturbate too.

Asked and answered, but to reiterate: So am I. I'm not allowed to tag things in order to find existing things on the site I'm interested in, given the policies around tagging.

They want to search male, and find males, female and find females, and herms and/or dickgirls to find those as well.
They don't want to search male and find a image of a female with the artist saying "Oh, it's ok that this looks like a female, the character identifies as male, so that's what it really is on the inside."
Person interested in males cannot masturbate to that, well, some people can't.

hence why I suggested the cisgender tag.

Look, it's actually pretty simple, here. If Nicki Minaj can fucking get it, I think you can.

Ko-san said:
Text does have a hand in tagging as you can both see it and it describes the picture. For example, if you see a picture of two people having sex but they have fairly neutral faces you tag sex and whatnot, then you read the text with one saying "No, stop! Someone help!" you can safely add rape. For a more solid one we have a pic of two Lucarios in an awkward position with lustful faces all covered in body fluids. You would assume sex but the text that you can clearly read tells you there is no penetration and that they are fighting so the tags change.

Case in point, you still see text.

So let's do this.

Keep 'male' and 'female' and even 'dickgirl' and 'cuntboy' and everything else exactly how it is. Everyone's happy? Nobody's got to buckle down and collectively tag 500,000 images.

Onsite descriptions now become a source of information about the character, as do other images on the site. If the description tells you you're looking at a trans girl, you tag the image trans_girl instead of male. Instead of male. This way there are no people complaining that any icky trannies are in their tags.

e621 sends out a sitewide broadcast saying that this is a change in policy, write a post explaining what it is and why, and encourages all its users who have canonically trans images favourited to update their descriptions and retag them. The site continues as normal.

This is a miniscule change and it will still go a long way to doing what it needs to do. I'm not asking for the moon, I'm asking for one change in one aspect of the tagging policy. You don't even have to abolish TWYS, now. Just extend it to the description box. Let people who create trans characters say they're trans on the site, and tag them accordingly. That is literally all you have to do.

Tokaido quoted:
To the actually oppressed microaggressions aren't on the same level as hate crimes - they're not even noticed.

There is such a phrase, 'the death of a thousand cuts'.

But the quoted statement is false on its face. People talk about both, because both happen to people. there are people in Ferguson, MO who talk about the use of the N-word /and/ the fact that a black 17-year-old was shot in the street. The fact that I haven't been murdered, raped, arrested, or beaten (thank god) doesn't mean I don't know it's a greater risk to me, and further, I don't think I need to be raped or beaten or arrested to talk about the tags on an image site. I /have/ been harrassed for identifying the way I do and expressing myself to match, in the real life. I'm not organizing a campaign against e621, I'm not marching in the streets, I'm not going to a furry convention and setting up a booth just to badmouth it. I'm making a forum thread talking about a problem with the site's policy.

I'm not claiming persecution. I'm claiming erasure. I'm telling you how that erasure is a problem for me to not see people who are like me. I'm asking the site to institute a small, proportional change to fix that. The fact that this small change is met with huge resistance on multiple fronts is a sign of the fact that cis people are the ones who see persecution where there is none. Look at the guy who said that adding tag support for trans people will ruin searching, as if that was an inevitable consequence of the site instituting any change whatsoever. Look at the guy who created an account on e621 at some point, navigated here, to a forum discussing furry porn, and burned time and keystrokes to write a comment to someone they'd never met about how they're wasting their time on frivolous efforts instead of, apparently, getting off the computer and curing cancer. Look at the people giving me seven permutations of that's just the way it is, so shut the fuck up, aka the appeal to deez nuts fallacy.

The fact is, I'm asking for a minor change in how the site works in order to be treated with as much respect as any cis person who browses the site, and so far that's too much for any of you to even consider without raising a giant stink.

So I question which of us has the persecution complex.

Cayen, you aren't going to change anyone's mind and you certainly aren't going to change the tagging system here. You are wasting your time.

This is truly the most hilarious and/or depressing read I've had in months.

Tell me why adding functionality will ruin the search.

Literally no part of the tag system has to change from what is known. You want to search for males? Search for males. I am only asking for an addition to what is already there to be able to find people like myself. If being able to do that ruins the site for you, I question why it's so necessary to your enjoyment of the site that I don't get to find people who are like me and you do.

If you want to look for "people like yourself", this isn't the proper place. This is for drawings.

BTW I haven't noticed anybody link to it yet, so here is the thread and the drama within that caused the transgender tag to get tossed. https://e621.net/forum/show/87830?page=1

You can see ippiki_ookami's decision to kill the tag on Page 3. This is also reflected when you search "transgender" under "aliases".

Cayen said:
If this were true then images of blackface would not be harmful because they don't depict any individual black person, yet they are. The problem with the tags as stated is that they are harmful caricatures of trans people, and while I find it exceedingly problematic that they exist in their current form, I'm actually willing to live and let live on that one, so long as I also get a thing that works for me. So long as it is explicit that dickgirls are one thing and trans women are another, I'll live with it.

Well, I can live with that, although would like to argue that blackface, and in extension any other negative caricature, is only hurtful if you let it.
Yes, there are idiots who literally pull a gun and blow your head of for being black/trans/jew/alive and people like that are using imagery like that to defame people but the point is still, it is a powerless image.
As the wise idiots on 4chan say "The more you hate it the stronger it gets."
Blackface shouldn't be used in a responsible/sensible comic because it would enforce its validity, as should the other stereotypical caricatures.

Our problem however is that we don't have an alternative on terms that accomplishes the same thing as dickgirl, or bunching together a couple visible traits and then labeling the character in the image.
The question has been asked again and again, just not to you, what term would you use to describe a dickgirl poignant and to the point?
We only want to accurately describe the visible body, nothing else, and based on this limitation the available terms are extremely limited, we do not want to tag gender, we do not want to tag the identification of the character, we just want to do a sober description of the body.

Which is also why your request for the tagging of trans woman is getting so much hate, we can't see it.
We have to live (or rather decided to) fully tag based on the assumption that the image we see exists in a vacuum, that the author and any description died years ago, and that the tags serve the purpose to describe the image as accurately as possible, solely on what we can see. In essence our tagging follows the 'Death of the Author' principle, we do give leeway on artistname, charactername, copyright holder and allow some other information into the mix (like saying we see a typically female body so we say it gets female, if penis on said female is visible it gets dickgirl, and so on).
But otherwise we strife to follow this as closely as possible, if it is something we can't see it's not a good tag for a majority of our users.

However, I wouldn't mind a second tagging set with "implied_X" tags (or something to that extent) that allows much more outside information into the mix and can be toggled on and off at will, that would kick our search function into overdrive like you wouldn't believe (also curb stomp discussion like this, but the implementation of something like that would be horrendous, thus not going to happen anytime soon).

So yeah, at the moment you'll have to live with the fact that the majority wants his porn delivered like this, since the alternatives either go against our principles our are useless to us, if you see a solution that follows TWYS we'd more than want to hear it, but it does have to adhere to our current policy, because that is why people visit us, and we don't want to alienate our users, even if a couple have to suffer.

Cayen said:
Shit, I thought someone was going to call me out for the sociology thing. Nope, apparently my identity is the authority people don't accept.

Look, if you were, say, a member of a group that had a tattoo on your hand from birth, one that people checked and treated you differently based on whether you had it or not, you'd know what it is like to be one of those people better than someone who doesn't have the tattoo, right? Obviously you would. You are one. You spend every waking moment of every day as a member of that group. On a personal level, it's impossible for anyone outside that group to have that much experience being you. So nobody should be able to tell you better than you do what affects you and how.

That's why I said it. I'm saying, I am a trans person, this is how the tags affect me and people like me. My identity is important because I am one of the affected group, and these are my own experiences. I'm not talking on behalf of others whose experience I don't share, I'm talking on behalf of myself first and foremost, and others who share my experience second.

I am the ultimate authority on my own life and experiences. I know how this shit affects me, and I have the training to explain how external social forces shape my experience of life.

That's why I said it.

Well, that would then need to be placed at the end, to reinforce the made points on your personal experience, not at the beginning, where you create the foundation on which the following arguments build on (despite the fact that it seems obvious to use your own experiences for it this just creates the wrong impression that this is the sole reason for the argumentation, not the fact that you believe it affects more than just you).
(Note, this is just more or less semantics for me, just on a much bigger scale since I take discussions and argumentations rather seriously, no matter how silly)

Cayen said:
If you want to know how I experience gender, send me a private message or something. The details aren't relevant to this topic.

If you feel like typing something up, please do!
I'm seriously way too pragmatic to bother about stuff like that, I have a body, a seriously shitty one at that, but for me it's just a tool, I don't identify with my body, I just live with it.
Give me the chance to replace it with a sweet ass robot body and I'm all up in that bitch, more uses, and less time wasted in keeping it working would be well worth losing this limiting flesh carcass.
Also shiny metal is awesome.

how about, OP, you leave our tagging rules alone

Good God.

So many words. It's like someone pasted War and Peace onto their forum post.

Peekaboo said:
I can already sense that this will be another thread like forum #136094

How this forum will play out

>"Better than thou" attitudes.
>Arguments being posted against OP's viewpoints.
>OP dismissing arguments with no good reasoning as to why.
>OP again stating his opinion.
>People getting mad.
>Everything is worse.

REPEAT.

Hopefully we can avoid what happened at the end.

This post doesn't seem to be going anywhere. Cayen, as the users have stated here, we do not tag gender. The Tag What You See policy is the mainstay of e621, and even though it may get updated to accommodate new art and art styles, it will still reflect what you can view on the post.

Let's stop with the drama, the arm-flailing, calling each other names (sarcastically or not), and the insinuations. I would like to thank Cayen for taking the time to write up their post, as it did appear to take quite a bit of time, but it is not something we are currently discussing.

If you wish to continue the drama, name-calling, and other negative connotations thereof in this thread, then the administration may give you a record for it.

You could always label an ambiguous character as Trans or otherwise in the description... I mean, it would let those who really care know that the character in question is supposed to be a trap or whatever, while still allowing other viewers to find images based on normal TWYS rules.

Use a pool set

Lance_Armstrong said:
Use a pool

...if you want to get banned for abusing pools

I don't see it happening soon, but if we tagged our post with the most recent academic concepts, it can be used to study the construction of gender in the furry fandom by analyzing the amount, votes and comments of each one of the posts with those tags.

I can kind of understand why the OP consider unfair, but asking other people to retag everything for free against their will is also very unfair. This community is mostly composed by members who, voluntarily, manages the posts for free. If we have such a community, we should decide as a community (of course the admins will have the final words but I believe they will still have the opinions of the most loyal members in mind.

I also work at the academic level just like the OP, so I know how hard it is to see some wrong concept being used. Considering that the OP is studying the construction of gender and is a transsexual himself/herself, I can see how passionate he/she feels about this. It's more on a personal level than anything else. OP, please don't feel offended because I don't think is anyone intention here to offend you or other transgender people.

Cheers

ippiki_ookami said:
...if you want to get banned for abusing pools

Yeah. Sets are more for personal use.

I meant set then. I haven't used them so I didn't know what they were called.

Halite said:
Except, again, no it isn't used as such here.
We don't tag gender, we simply use the available words because tagging "Visible_penis_and_breasts_but_no_visible_vagina" is stupid as a tag when "dickgirl" works too.

Because ruining the ability to search this website is the best thing that could happen right?
The normal user here can't care less about your(or anyone's) character.
They want to search for something that they're looking for, usually to masturbate too.
They want to search male, and find males, female and find females, and herms and/or dickgirls to find those as well.
They don't want to search male and find a image of a female with the artist saying "Oh, it's ok that this looks like a female, the character identifies as male, so that's what it really is on the inside."
Person interested in males cannot masturbate to that, well, some people can't.

Seriously? That wasn't my argument at all all I said was suggest a change to the "tag what you see" to allow for non visible body parts that are only not visible due to something obstructing their view. Not the characters self view.

Also nice strawman .

deadoon said:
Seriously? That wasn't my argument at all all I said was suggest a change to the "tag what you see" to allow for non visible body parts that are only not visible due to something obstructing their view. Not the characters self view.

Also nice strawman .

Not a straw man, because my post works exactly as well if you simply change "identifies as" to "is labeled by the artist as".
You see, it's only a strawman if it is used to make the argument valid, but since it's a valid argument in either context it's not actually a fallacy.
Your attack of my method, instead of the content of my argument is, however, a fallacy.
So well done there.

The point is, and was, that allowing tags outside of what is visible in the image will give bad search results, and cause blacklists to filter out images that they shouldn't.
It would severely damage the search-ability of this website, and make tags less useful because they would carry less meaning.

Cayen said:

Long response

If you implemented a new gender tag and started it out with every male character (233197, just less than half that number) given 'cisgender' and 'man' or 'guy' or whatever, you would not have many posts left over to retag in that category. The same goes with 'female' and 'cisgender'/'woman' or 'girl' (286954). Admittedly there's going to be overlap in those posts. though if you believe the straight tag, there's only about 63,000 of them, meaning we're at somewhere in the 400,000-450,000 range.

You could then leave every other tag alone and let trans tags come in on a case by case basis. This is where the relative minority of trans folk comes in handy: There are only a few images left to be tagged in this way that aren't of the equivalent of 'cis' or 'natural' dickgirls or c-boys, et cetera. Moreover, I get the feeling that whatever small trans contingent of e621 exists probably collectively knows a significant portion of what images depict trans people. If you send out a sitewide announcement telling people they can tag things as trans now, you'll probably get within the typical incompletion rate of most of the tags on e621 fairly quickly.

You vastly underestimate a clever hack and the power of crowdsourcing.

But wait, you say, people are going to be offended when they're tagged wrong?

There are no trans people on e621 according to the tags. I think we can collectively live with a few misgenderings if we're allowed to exist.

But all that is actually beside the point. That e621 didn't bother to be inclusive from the getgo is not an excuse not to put in the legwork now. It's all momentum deferred.

I do NOT understimate the power of hacks, coding it's my area of expertise. About crowdsourcing, member level of e621 hierachy has a limited tag changes per hour, meaning that you need to convince A LOT of people to start tagging massively, and unfortunately, not everyone gets involved in tagging projects.

Also like almost everyone has said, tags such as straight, gay, lesbian and bisexual are meant to describe sexual acts, not the sexuality itself.

I do not think a bot and specially crowdsourcing would work here.

I respect your ideas and actions to find something trans related, as everyone has the rigth to like whatever they like, as much as you say trans get offended by words like dickgirl, some people gets offended by beign cataloged as "cisgender"(whatever that is).

As much as you meant something with good will, you can't force your ideas into other people.

I'm surprised this thread hasn't been locked yet.

Some person coming on and complaining we all don't know what were doing and we're disgracing a certain class of people by not tagging them correctly.

Some tag things are understandable as I said earlier, like a female with a flat chest and no tits/nipples is labeled as a cuntboy.

But the argument "Wow fuck you for not tagging people as transgender" Is annoying. If the character in question was originally female, and now has no breasts and a dick. That makes them male, so you tag male. You don't tag transgender, because no one can tell. No one's going to search. "Transgender" Just to see a bunch of characters on the screen they don't know. So you wouldn't be able to even tell which one is the trans, it would just be a girl and a guy fucking and you'd never be able to tell. So the tag is useless.

The tag complaints are understandable for when you -can- tell gender. (Example being the cuntboy thing I mentioned up there ^ Or the femboy misunderstanding before. Where as in those situations it's easy to say that the tagger is wrong. In this kinda example it's not.

EDFDarkAngel1 said:
This post doesn't seem to be going anywhere. Cayen, as the users have stated here, we do not tag gender. The Tag What You See policy is the mainstay of e621, and even though it may get updated to accommodate new art and art styles, it will still reflect what you can view on the post.

Let's stop with the drama, the arm-flailing, calling each other names (sarcastically or not), and the insinuations. I would like to thank Cayen for taking the time to write up their post, as it did appear to take quite a bit of time, but it is not something we are currently discussing.

I am attempting to start the discussion. I'm well aware that the administration of e621 is not intending to modify TWYS at the moment. I am also well aware that when another user attempted to ask the administration to change the tag name 'cuntboy', they received a reply to the effect of 'take it up on the forum'. And the users of this forum, with all due respect to most other people in this thread, is ignorant of trans issues and does not understand the harm of erasure.

You can't see sexuality, either, but you'll tag M/M images gay.

In other words, because I and people like me are a tiny minority within the community, I have no power to see myself represented. Someone asked me above 'how about you leave our tagging rules alone'. This is telling. It's not my tagging rules, even though I'm as much a member of e621 as they are (and have been around for longer). I've dissented and thus I'm not seen as 'one of you' any more.

You'll allow depictions of people like me but god forbid you tag us properly. Characters can come in so long as they aren't described with words actual real people use to describe theirselves.

So here's my final proposal.

I'm willing to go combing the site for any and all canonically trans characters. I'll start with Jay Naylor's Audrey. I'll point to sources that prove the character's transness, mark every damn one of them for deletion, and you can remove them on the basis that trans characters are not allowed on e621, as the tags to tag them are disallowed. If you're going to erase trans people from the site, go all the way and delete us. Don't be a hypocrite and allow those images on; take a stand and say, no, we don't care about trans people, we don't want to tag for them, and we don't want their images on our site.

Dude. Just shut up.

Cayen said:
stuff

You have no idea how much restraint I had to use in order to not link that one Adam Sandler movie clip.

Cayen be like : http://www.quickmeme.com/img/94/94a48fe45b19b9b6af3b464615b9a05d9cb82be56cac0de20dfdaa91b50c1605.jpg