Cayen said:
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.

I'm no admin, but I'mma stop you there. You can't just go and FFD every post that is incorrectly tagged because of a the misunderstanding that tans people shold not be here.

What the guys have been trying to say is that you can't tag for sure that what they are or what they feel (unless otherwise noted, hence "what you see") out of spite of feeling different.

Sure you can feel whatever your mood is but the tagging system is not conditioned for that. Mostly because, to my reasoning, e621's tagging system is centered on what you want to find with the exact tags you've added and not give you a bunch of unrelated stuff like many search engines...

Now, listen, I don't have anything against you as a transexual, but this sort of attitudes make me reevaluate a person...

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

The orientation of the physical ACTION taking place in the image is what is being tagged, not the sexual identity of the characters within. The point of TWYS is to only tag things you can VISIBLY SEE.

Cayen said:
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.

Do you want to get banned for abusing the flagging tool? Go right on ahead then. Don't think about ban evading either. I look at the list of banned users every week for the lolz and I can tell you that the admins here are all over alts like fleas on a dog.

I would advise that your best course of action is to go recruit your Trans Tumblr army, but 90% of them won't go through with it as their fragile special snowflake minds will have been triggered by some stupid shit on the front page.

Cayen said:
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.

Just because someone disagrees with what you're saying the site should do does not mean that they are ignorant of trans issues. This attitude of "if you're not for me, then you're against me" is one reason why you're encountering so much resistance here. You're pointing out something that has been pointed out several times before, but the solution you're offering is completely counter to the policies that have actually made e621 the best furry art archive on the internet. Users who do not agree with your reasoning and proposed solution would say (and have said) that you don't understand the harm that it would bring to the site itself.

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

Because it's gay sex. Two males can not have sex with each other and not have it be a homosexual act. It is the act itself that is being tagged "gay", not the characters.

Cayen said:
In other words, because I and people like me are a tiny minority within the community, I have no power to see myself represented.

This has nothing to do with the fact that you're in a minority, and EVERYTHING to do with the fact that the site is not intended to do what you're wanting it to do. The site is not a character database, its intended purpose is not for representation. Its intended purpose is for the categorization and indexing of artwork, NOT characters. The site is also not intended to host/index literature; that doesn't mean that we're insensitive and unfair to writers, it simply means that we (the administration) want the site to be about artwork, because we have no interest in making it about anything more than that at this time.

Cayen said:
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.

I'm not sure I understand why you think you're not included when they say "our tagging rules". You're a user, they're users, you collectively are "e621's users". The only one removing you from the group of "e621's users" is yourself, by assuming that you're automatically not being included when other users say "our tagging rules". Other users may try to apply different labels to you (SJW, tumblr user, etc), but that only means that we have e621 users who are also those things, not e621 users vs tumblr users (which would be more the case if users from one site were creating user accounts on another site specifically to antagonize/debate that site's users).

The reaction that you've received from your dissent only means that your position is an unpopular one, not that you're automatically not an e621 user just because you disagree with the majority. As far as I can tell, that's just an assumption you've made in order to turn it into "Cayen" vs "e621 users".

Cayen said:
You'll allow depictions of people like me but god forbid you tag us properly.

We tag according to what the site's purpose for tagging is. You're wanting that purpose to be something that it's currently not, which is why you're not getting anywhere by trying to tell people that things aren't being tagged properly.

Cayen said:
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.

This entire argument is again centered around the fact that you're expecting the site to do something that it is not intended to do in the first place. If we're "erasing trans people", then we're also erasing gays, lesbians, and STRAIGHT people too because we don't allow the tagging of sexual orientation, only the tagging of sexual acts (e.g. a solo picture of a "gay" character, by e621's rules, can't be tagged gay; same goes for every other orientation too).

Again, you're complaining that you/your characters are not being represented by something that the site is not intended to do to begin with. Although not the best example, it's analogous to complaining to a restaurant manager that your waiter didn't feed you himself after he brought you your food. You're assuming that other waiters are putting food in their customers' mouths and that you're being singled out for some reason, when in reality no one is being fed by their waiters because that's not something that the restaurant is intended to do to begin with.

This is why the TWYS Explained page very clearly states the following:

TWYS Explained said:
Most artists and character owners are used to using websites where they can build their own personal collection of artwork and have direct control over it. This allows them, to an extent, to have control over how the artwork is presented and what additional information should accompany the artwork, if any. They often use the site's own tagging/keyword system to relay that additional information. For example, if a picture contains a fully clothed character that appears to be female, the artist may add "herm" as a tag on the post to clue people in that the character is actually a herm instead of a female. On those sites, this is fine; if the artist wants to draw things in a way that they look like something else, that's entirely their own creative decision to do so.

However, this is NOT the intended purpose of tags on e621.net.

E621's tagging system is intended to relay virtually NO ADDITIONAL INFORMATION or context about an image. Therefore, for every post on the site, it can be assumed that e621's tagging system is actually saying "this post appears to contain X" rather than "this post definitely contains X".

The very fact that e621's policy is "Tag What You See" INTRINSICALLY means that all tags on a post are only claims as to what's visible in an image, not what "actually is" in an image. Claiming what "actually is" in an image is often far more subjective than just saying what an image appears to contain, so we use the less-subjective method of TWYS.

All that being said, we're not here to stomp all over anyone and tell them that they don't matter or that we're unwilling to work with them. We are (or at least I am) completely open to suggestions for how to properly represent characters, as we depend on being on the good graces of character owners and artists so we can host their artwork. However, the solution is not going to be "get rid of or drastically change TWYS", because that is a fundamental policy to this site's success, and because (as I've stated several times) tags are not intended to do what you're wanting them to do. Solutions that don't involve changing tagging policy are the solutions that have the greatest chance of being implemented.

Cayen said:
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.

FatherOfGray said:
The orientation of the physical ACTION taking place in the image is what is being tagged, not the sexual identity of the characters within. The point of TWYS is to only tag things you can VISIBLY SEE.

Do you want to get banned for abusing the flagging tool? Go right on ahead then. Don't think about ban evading either. I look at the list of banned users every week for the lolz and I can tell you that the admins here are all over alts like fleas on a dog.

I would advise that your best course of action is to go recruit your Trans Tumblr army, but 90% of them won't go through with it as their fragile special snowflake minds will have been triggered by some stupid shit on the front page.

Alrighty. Thread locked.