I believe it would be worthwhile to temp alias herm to femherm to transfer current content as it's likely mostly accurate, than alias herm to a disambiguation. As people tagging maleherm on posts aren't technically wrong when they tag it with herm, though it only gets the tag changed to maleherm if someone catches it. I think that changing it to this type of tag and disambiguation would make mixing of the tags less likely, and thus the site more organized.

I'm not in favor of this change, but I am in favor of

• herm
• male_herm
• female_herm
• ambiguous_herm

I would be willing to try and help cleanup this section, but I don't know if I should start now, or wait until something is final.

Idem said:
I'm not in favor of this change, but I am in favor of

• herm
• male_herm
• female_herm
• ambiguous_herm

I would be willing to try and help cleanup this section, but I don't know if I should start now, or wait until something is final.

how could something be an ambiguous herm?

My idea for an ambiguous_herm is when both the pussy and penis are visible, but there are no further clues to the sex of the character.

I hope these highlight scenarios where an ambiguous_herm tag would be applicable. These were found just by going through the recent posts tagged with herm .

I have suggested this arrangement of having herm to be blanket tag for male herm, female herm and ambiguous herm. It would make blacklisting what I don't like a lot easier.

With the change from dgirl/cboy -> gynomorph/andromorph it may be a good time to talk about herm no longer implying intersex.

I know that it is a critique that has been brought up in the past, but I am ignorant to both sides of that argument.

Perhaps something like

• cis
• male
• female
• ambiguous (?)
• herm
• male_herm
• female_herm
• ambiguous_herm
• intersex
• gynomorph
• andromorph

I am unaware of how intersex people would feel having gynomorphs and andromorphs implied to that tag, or how it would work for e621. It may be preferable to change the name from intersex to something else.

Many people may only want to see male and female images and a I'm sure a change like this would create a disruption in the blacklist of those users.

I think only the term herm is needed. Penis and vag is what herm means, we don't really need other tags for it like male/female herm, it'll just make things unnecessarily complicated when searching for porn.

ThePyromancer said:
I think only the term herm is needed. Penis and vag is what herm means, we don't really need other tags for it like male/female herm, it'll just make things unnecessarily complicated when searching for porn.

maleherm already exists. The tags are to classify which gender the shown character more aligns with

ThePyromancer said:
I think only the term herm is needed. Penis and vag is what herm means, we don't really need other tags for it like male/female herm, it'll just make things unnecessarily complicated when searching for porn.

It's already split in two. We have maleherm, and herm tag is only for "female herms" and "ambiguous herms".

Also can you actually read the discussion? Current suggestion is that we would have herm tag to cover all herms, and sub tags for characters with female body, male body and ambiguous body. It would not make any harder for anyone to look up any characters with vagina and penis. In fact it would make it easier since it would put everything under herm tag instead of having it split in maleherm and "everything else" herms

If we have an umbrella tag for herm we should neither have a disambiguation for it, nor an ambiguous_herm tag. The disambiguation would be clutter and the ambiguous could just be the umbrella "herm" without a specific tag.

The latter we already do with species tags, if it's not clear which exact species it is just use the next step up.

Also cis as an umbrella term for male and female makes little sense, as that's for gender identity, something we don't care about.

NotMeNotYou said:
If we have an umbrella tag for herm we should neither have a disambiguation for it, nor an ambiguous_herm tag. The disambiguation would be clutter and the ambiguous could just be the umbrella "herm" without a specific tag.

The latter we already do with species tags, if it's not clear which exact species it is just use the next step up.

Also cis as an umbrella term for male and female makes little sense, as that's for gender identity, something we don't care about.

being used as umbrella tag also works, I was thinking disambig because if femaleherm was implicated to the site the general userbase wouldn't know to use it.

NotMeNotYou said:
If we have an umbrella tag for herm we should neither have a disambiguation for it, nor an ambiguous_herm tag. The disambiguation would be clutter and the ambiguous could just be the umbrella "herm" without a specific tag.

The latter we already do with species tags, if it's not clear which exact species it is just use the next step up.

The rationale I had for this was people could be as specific as they wanted. If it suits someone's fancy they can go and change species tags to be more specific, but if we force ambiguous_herm to be under the umbrella term only it muddies up the tag. There is no longer a simple way to search or blacklist something specific, only with herm -male_herm -female_herm could this be done. There would be no succinct way to express this in tags either.

I think it should exist for the same reason the ambiguous_gender tag exists.

NotMeNotYou said:
Also cis as an umbrella term for male and female makes little sense, as that's for gender identity, something we don't care about.

I didn't think cis would be the right term for it, but I was trying to express having a word there to organize the whole thing into a nice hierarchy. I'm not sure that the hierarchy would even be useful, but wanted it to match the other parts. I realize that using the word cis would probably get even more people against this cause.

Versperus said:
being used as umbrella tag also works, I was thinking disambig because if femaleherm was implicated to the site the general userbase wouldn't know to use it.

This would be my main concern also, people would want to use herm the same way, not caring about male_herm and female_herm. I support just implicating herm to the new umbrella term (which may very well end up being herm)

Idem said:
I think it should exist for the same reason the ambiguous_gender tag exists.

The problem here is consistency with the ambiguous_gender tag, as that one only exists as a fall back, it's not a "gender" by itself.
If you can see that it's a type of herm it's no longer ambiguous.

Idem said:
With the change from dgirl/cboy -> gynomorph/andromorph it may be a good time to talk about herm no longer implying intersex.

I know that it is a critique that has been brought up in the past, but I am ignorant to both sides of that argument.

Perhaps something like

• cis
• male
• female
• ambiguous (?)
• herm
• male_herm
• female_herm
• ambiguous_herm
• intersex
• gynomorph
• andromorph

I am unaware of how intersex people would feel having gynomorphs and andromorphs implied to that tag, or how it would work for e621. It may be preferable to change the name from intersex to something else.

Many people may only want to see male and female images and a I'm sure a change like this would create a disruption in the blacklist of those users.

The opposite of "intersex", at least as far as I've heard, is "dyadic". It doesn't make sense to implicate the male and female tags to "cis", because that would imply that all the other gender tags are "trans", and it could be seen as contradictory in the case of gender tf sequences for example. TWYS, as they say.

IRL a person with a vagina and a penis would definitely be considered intersex, so e621's current broad usage is pretty accurate. I don't see any issue with calling all anatomical arrangements other than male or female "intersex", since again that's how it works IRL, so I'd only have a problem if it *only* referred to gyno/andro-morphs.

The reason IRL intersex people shouldn't be called "hermaphrodites" (other than it being a loaded term) is that it's not very accurate when applied to humans. Biologically, a creature is "hermaphroditic" if it makes both sperm-type and egg-type gametes, and that's part of its species' reproductive strategy. Slugs, for example, are simultaneous hermaphrodites, and they reproduce by fertilising each other's eggs. Human intersex conditions often just result in infertility and pretty much never in functional ovaries *and* testes, and as a species we reproduce the M/F way. Given the whole point of this site, though, a lot of the herms here actually are biologically hermaphroditic, but I wouldn't complain about switching to a different term.

Anyway, I do agree that it would be helpful to reorganise the "herm" genders. Looking at the horizontal flowchart on howto:tag_genders, just as unknown/absent genitals and unknown/absent breasts with ambiguous body type lead to "ambiguous_gender" and the differentiation of any of those features leads to "male" or "female", it would make sense to tag mixed-genital characters with unknown/absent breasts and ambiguous body type as "herm" and those with breasts or feminine body type as "femherm" (and to leave those with masc body type and no visible breasts as "maleherm"). As things are, a maleherm is a character that looks entirely male except for a pussy added to the taint, but there's no way to distinguish between characters that look entirely female except for a penis added just above the pussy (femherms, aka "futanari" in some circles) and characters that would have to be tagged as ambiguous_gender if you covered their genitals. You could argue that it's following the same structure as tagging for female genitals and some females would also look ambiguous if not for a visible pussy, but following that logic, since some males would look ambiguous with covered genitals too, it would make just as much sense to tag femherms as "femherm" and call maleherms and androgynous herms alike by the default "herm". TL;DR: Why does e621 treat "herm" as inherently feminine?