Topic: [APPROVED] it is time to banish girly to the shadow realm

Posted under Tag Alias and Implication Suggestions

The bulk update request #4835 is active.

remove alias dominant_femboy (0) -> girly (0)
remove alias femmy (1) -> girly (0)
remove alias feminine_male (0) -> girly (0)
remove alias girly_body (0) -> girly (0)
remove alias femme (3) -> girly (0)
remove alias sissy (0) -> girly (0)
remove alias twink (0) -> girly (0)
remove alias fem-boy (0) -> girly (0)
remove alias fem_boy (0) -> girly (0)
remove alias sissy_boy (0) -> girly (0)
remove alias girly_boy (0) -> girly (0)
remove alias effeminate (0) -> girly (0)
remove alias girlyboi (0) -> girly (0)
remove alias girly_boi (0) -> girly (0)
remove alias girlie (0) -> girly (0)
remove alias femboys (0) -> girly (0)
remove alias femboi (0) -> girly (0)
remove alias girlyboy (0) -> girly (0)
remove alias femmeboy (0) -> girly (0)
remove alias femboy (150098) -> girly (0)
remove alias feminine (135) -> girly (0)
remove alias femenine (0) -> girly (0)

Reason: this has gone on for long enough
...

The femboy -> girly alias is among of the oldest on the site, and it seems to have been created at the time without any discussion. Perhaps it wasn't a problem then, but it has become a problem for us now.
The name "girly" doesn't indicate the tag's proper usage whatsoever. As such, it is frequently added to posts of females, herms, and gynomorphs by people who haven't read the wiki. "Femboy" seems to be the most commonly used term for this concept, so I suggest using that instead. Any objections?

Now behold, the followup BUR:

mass update girly -> femboy alias dominant_femboy -> femboy alias feminine_male -> femboy alias sissy -> femboy alias twink -> femboy alias fem-boy -> femboy alias fem_boy -> femboy alias sissy_boy -> femboy alias girly_boy -> femboy alias effeminate -> femboy alias girlyboi -> femboy alias girly_boi -> femboy alias femboys -> femboy alias femboi -> femboy alias girlyboy -> femboy alias femmeboy -> femboy
As you can see, a few omissions have been made.

  • girly can't simply be aliased back to femboy. Since the whole issue here is the ambiguity of the term, we will be left with the same issue if we do that, as people who input a tag without checking its wiki/checking its aliases will still end up using the girly tag to tag feminine female/herm/gynomorph characters.
  • feminine, femenine, girlie, and girly_body seem to be the same thing, and likely can't be aliased back to femboy. Whatever ends up being done with girly will probably need to be done with these as well. These are also likely partly responsible for the current mess; people will tag something like "feminine" on their very feminine female character and end up tagging it as girly because they didn't check the wiki or aliases first.
  • femme, femmy - According to Urban Dictionary, the term "femme" seems to primarily refer to a feminine lesbian - as opposed to a "butch", a masculine lesbian. That makes this a doubly bad alias (which was also created a long time ago with no apparent discussion [furthermore by a user who was permanently banned 12 years ago with a very entertaining ban reason]), so aliasing this back to femboy would probably not be wise.

Something will need to be done about these leftover tags, but I don't know what yet.

Some ideas, maybe:

  • We could redefine girly as a counterpart to manly for especially feminine female/herm/gynomorph characters.
  • We could reinstate feminine as an umbrella tag for any character with feminine qualities regardless of gender, and would be implied by femboy. Though, this would make me think we should also have a masculine counterpart for that, implied probably by manly and tomboy.
  • Say "ehhh fuck it" and invalidate them all.

The last option would be the easiest, but probably not the best. I don't like how there's currently an imbalance between the genders - girly and manly for males but only tomboy for females with no feminine-female equivalent.

EDIT: The bulk update request #4835 (forum #365709) has been approved by @slyroon.

Updated by auto moderator

Not sure how I feel about not aliasing girly back to femboy, having to re-educate hundreds of users seems like it might be a lot more effort than the cleanup of the tag being misused. Changing the name won't entirely stamp it out, but I'd wager that it would be much lower.

I can already imagine the forum and Discord being flooded with "WHERE DID ALL THE GIRLY POSTS GO?" when it doesn't return results anymore.

faucet said:
Not sure how I feel about not aliasing girly back to femboy, having to re-educate hundreds of users seems like it might be a lot more effort than the cleanup of the tag being misused. Changing the name won't entirely stamp it out, but I'd wager that it would be much lower.

I can already imagine the forum and Discord being flooded with "WHERE DID ALL THE GIRLY POSTS GO?" when it doesn't return results anymore.

Well, perhaps it would be aliased back temporarily, at least long enough for everyone to get used to the change. Then, after... I dunno, a few months?... unalias it and put it somewhere else.

kemonophonic said:
What about ambiguous gender characters that are girly?

post #4043979

That can't be tagged femboy, can it?

That should just be tagged as female. Feminine appearance + no indication of male traits whatsoever = female.

Ambiguous gender characters never should have been tagged as girly in the first place. The wiki was edited by a former admin to specifically forbid its use on ambiguous gender characters.

scaliespe said:
Well, perhaps it would be aliased back temporarily, at least long enough for everyone to get used to the change. Then, after... I dunno, a few months?... unalias it and put it somewhere else.

Probably the best idea, it can get unaliased when there's a solid idea what to do with it rather than potentially leave it in limbo for days/weeks/months/years.

I really like the idea of having feminine/masculine umbrella tags that work regardless of the biological sex, feminine would be the ideal re-target for girly and there would be no less results than before, but actually populating these will be a pain in the ass.

The femboy -> feminine implication would be pretty solid, but you wouldn't be able to imply male -> masculine or adding femboy to a post would result in femboy male feminine masculine.

kemonophonic said:
What about ambiguous gender characters that are girly?

post #4043979

That can't be tagged femboy, can it?

I agree that this should just be female, not seeing any ambiguity here.

Use feminine_male.

I saw that tag in Hydrus's PTR as the alias for femboy etc tags, and it just clearly unpacks what girly purports to be. I made that the alias for girly in my tag repository. I like how little room for misinterpretation it seems to give. Also, I do support this as a compound tag. It's basically a character style genre for us at this point. People really do want to find this specifically and not feminine + male with whatever feminine females may appear in the search.

Femboy is a current trendy word for a certain set of clothing choices, behaviors, and attempted body presentations for physically male people attempting to present a feminine appearance. In some cases it's an identity or identity-affirming. I don't like all the baggage attached to femboy. Femboy is wrapped up in trans identity that could cause tagging problems, and I'm pretty sure it's one of a slew of words character owners use to describe their andromorph characters because they're not really sure what's right (I see that offsite).

People will disagree about what is "feminine" (e.g., a pink shirt), but girly faces that problem already and more. What is "feminine" is more of a cultural discussion at that point.

abadbird said:
Use feminine_male.

I saw that tag in Hydrus's PTR as the alias for femboy etc tags, and it just clearly unpacks what girly purports to be. I made that the alias for girly in my tag repository. I like how little room for misinterpretation it seems to give. Also, I do support this as a compound tag. It's basically a character style genre for us at this point. People really do want to find this specifically and not feminine + male with whatever feminine females may appear in the search.

Femboy is a current trendy word for a certain set of clothing choices, behaviors, and attempted body presentations for physically male people attempting to present a feminine appearance. In some cases it's an identity or identity-affirming. I don't like all the baggage attached to femboy. Femboy is wrapped up in trans identity that could cause tagging problems, and I'm pretty sure it's one of a slew of words character owners use to describe their andromorph characters because they're not really sure what's right (I see that offsite).

People will disagree about what is "feminine" (e.g., a pink shirt), but girly faces that problem already and more. What is "feminine" is more of a cultural discussion at that point.

I do worry that people would see the feminine_male tag and then apply that to the other gender tags, much like dominant or athletic

wolfmanfur said:
To be frank, a twink is a skinny adolescent boy. It should be aliased to teenager.

There's an overlap because of TWYS but twinks are generally slim and in that case you would search twink and get this.

post #3438999

Or blacklist teenager by accident because you are not into twinks.

strikerman said:
I do worry that people would see the feminine_male tag and then apply that to the other gender tags, much like dominant or athletic

Would mean like people making a bunch of feminine_* tags?

omegaumbra said:
Would mean like people making a bunch of feminine_* tags?

Right. Like someone tagging a character as feminine_female just because they aren't a tomboy or something.

strikerman said:
Right. Like someone tagging a character as feminine_female just because they aren't a tomboy or something.

If feminine_male is what we go with then feminine_female etc. could simply be aliased to female or aliased to feminine when it pops up

post #210045 Well, as example from the search. That feels like female tag is valid by appearance, right? Although the underwear make me wonder. XD
How it got tagged male/male in the first place is a wonder. We have plenty of camel_toe examples of females and gynomorphs with underwear like that.

maybe this is just me but femboy sounds really derogatory to me, girly always seemed a much more neutral word to use as the tagname. if there's problems with mistags caused by the current tagname I support the tag being changed in concept.

darryus said:
maybe this is just me but femboy sounds really derogatory to me, girly always seemed a much more neutral word to use as the tagname. if there's problems with mistags caused by the current tagname I support the tag being changed in concept.

That's just you.

The only word that's synonymous with girly and derogatory is sissy.

darryus said:
maybe this is just me but femboy sounds really derogatory to me, girly always seemed a much more neutral word to use as the tagname. if there's problems with mistags caused by the current tagname I support the tag being changed in concept.

I guess these kinds of tags should be descriptive, not slang. What's offensive to one person might be opposite for another.

I think it might help if we could get some more definite definitions for some of the tags. Especially since I'm fairly sure that at least some of the tags have slightly wider range of subjects that it could apply to, like feminine, or slightly narrower, like femboy. I do admit that it would also help if more people actually read the definition of the tags rather than just tagging whatever they think applies.

guardian_sage said:
I think it might help if we could get some more definite definitions for some of the tags. Especially since I'm fairly sure that at least some of the tags have slightly wider range of subjects that it could apply to, like feminine, or slightly narrower, like femboy. I do admit that it would also help if more people actually read the definition of the tags rather than just tagging whatever they think applies.

Part of the reasoning behind aliasing away ambiguous or confusing tags. People see the suggested replacement and go "Oh, try something else!", a lot of the time?

If I may throw another monkey wrench into this discussion real quick...

The girly tag currently means two different things, which is also a bit of a problem, albeit a lesser one than the mistagging issue.

From the wiki:

A male bodied character with a feminine personality, clothing, and sometimes body type (sans breasts of course).

That's an issue, because these are not the same thing. The first part is "feminine personality, clothing" which can refer to crossdressing, but also refers to things that would not qualify such as the aforementioned personality, as well as non-clothing gender bending, such as certain styles of makeup and jewelry. Also, the idea that the tag can be used on "gender norm breaking male bodied (male, maleherm, and andromorph) characters" (from the wiki again) works well with this concept. Put a pin in that.

The second part is "...and sometimes body type" casually thrown in at the end of the sentence as if they are part of the same concept. They are not. This is a matter of anatomy rather than behavior or presentation. You can have the former without the latter (a male with typical male anatomy who is crossdressing, wearing girly makeup or jewelry, or otherwise behaving in a feminine manner) and vice versa (a female-proportioned male character wearing typical male clothing or otherwise not presenting himself in a feminine manner in any regard). So I think these actually need to be two separate tags. The critical issue that this raises is that this part cannot be applied to any "gender norm breaking male bodied (male, maleherm, and andromorph) characters" - it can only be used on males. An andromorph with female proportions would just be a flat chested female, and a maleherm with female proportions a flat chested herm. Those two gender tags actually depend on the character having male proportions. It's not compatible with the "feminine personality, clothing" part of girly outlined above.

The issue, then, comes down to naming these tags. Which one is the true definition of femboy? Both, perhaps? Could there be two separate tags which imply femboy (or whatever name we end up coming up with as replacement for femboy, since some have taken an issue with that name) instead? Perhaps the feminine_male tag mentioned above would be ideal for the body type form of girly, as the name itself already excludes the intersex tags. Femboy could still work for the personality/clothing part, as those male-bodied genders are often referred to as "boy" such as the "cuntboy" term that was previously used in place of andromorph.

I agree entirely with OP here. Especially on femme and butch being bad aliases as they are now.

scaliespe said:
The issue, then, comes down to naming these tags. Which one is the true definition of femboy? Both, perhaps? Could there be two separate tags which imply femboy (or whatever name we end up coming up with as replacement for femboy, since some have taken an issue with that name) instead? Perhaps the feminine_male tag mentioned above would be ideal for the body type form of girly, as the name itself already excludes the intersex tags. Femboy could still work for the personality/clothing part, as those male-bodied genders are often referred to as "boy" such as the "cuntboy" term that was previously used in place of andromorph.

feminine_male contradicting other genders innately is convenient. Like that. Not sure "feminine" is going to be sufficiently unambiguous that it's discussing body and not presentation, though - in principle you should be able to figure that out because "male" is a body thing, not gender or gender presentation, but I don't know if that will be obvious.

feminine_proportions is easy to read/say and doesn't run into defining a "one true female body" that I think female_proportions would, but it's missing male in the name and would run into contradictory tagging e.g. andromorph feminine_proportions. feminine_proportioned_male is descriptive but clunky.

I guess proportionally_endowed_male exists, but proportionally_endowed, in general, isn't really about gender, per its wiki description. proportionally_endowed_gynomorph also exists (and is the most used of these, actually).

feminine_form_male, maybe, but "form" isn't as obviously a synonym for "proportion" and has a connotation of transforming / alternate forms that's maybe more common in fandom.

Maybe the most simple option is female_body_type? This has fairly obvious exclusionary implications for TWYS (you can't tag a female female_body_type and andromorphs, by definition, aren't female_body_type), and puts body type front and center - no question if this is about personality or gender expression here.

IMO it wouldn't make sense to implicate female_body_type to femboy (e.g. masculine-presenting female_body_type males) — but I also think defining femboy to be to the exclusion of female_body_type is basically going to be impossible to enforce. There are a lot of existing uses of femboy which would fit female_body_type. It should be possible for both to be tagged when appropriate — i.e, femboy is only about non-body presentation/expression, and female_body_type is only about body type.

I don't know if there really needs to be an umbrella tag holding both of them. They're different concepts talking about different things. ~female_body_type ~femboy would get you results including either (or both) if you really are looking for those. (Or if you're blacklisting, just use a line for each, likely combining with conceptually related tags if you're looking to get more specific.)

Aside: Worth writing out explicitly where to draw the ilne between gynomorph and female_body_type (or feminine_male or whatever). Similar tags about similar bodies are ripe for confusion if it isn't laid out totally clear!

scaliespe said:
...it can only be used on males. An andromorph with female proportions would just be a flat chested female, and a maleherm with female proportions a flat chested herm. Those two gender tags actually depend on the character having male proportions. It's not compatible with the "feminine personality, clothing" part of girly outlined above.

this is treating the howto:tag_genders flowcharts like they're law, but, in the real world, tagging isn't always quite that simple, that page even says out right "the following [...] are guides, not rules [...] there will be some exceptions". if tagging worked like this, you wouldn't be able to tag fully clothed characters as girly at all.

there are other secondary sexual traits outside of "breasts? (true/false)" that can push characters into "secondary" gender categories, facial_hair, manes on lions, horn size on bovids, etc..

darryus said:
maybe this is just me but femboy sounds really derogatory to me, girly always seemed a much more neutral word to use as the tagname. if there's problems with mistags caused by the current tagname I support the tag being changed in concept.

I always felt like it was the other way around - girly more derogatory than femboy. It always seemed strange to me that this site chose to use a word that's less descriptive and (in my view) less flattering, but I just went with it because it seemed like a firmly established tag.

sipothac said:
this is treating the howto:tag_genders flowcharts like they're law, but, in the real world, tagging isn't always quite that simple, that page even says out right "the following [...] are guides, not rules [...] there will be some exceptions". if tagging worked like this, you wouldn't be able to tag fully clothed characters as girly at all.

there are other secondary sexual traits outside of "breasts? (true/false)" that can push characters into "secondary" gender categories, facial_hair, manes on lions, horn size on bovids, etc..

Well, that’s what I was getting at, and it’s why I was talking about feminine proportions overall instead of just breasts. I’m talking about secondary sexual characteristics in their entirety. Perhaps I should’ve said that instead of just ‘proportions’ to be clearer. Regardless, I actually don’t like how the flowcharts seem to overemphasize the importance of breasts compared to other secondary sexual characteristics. I’m of the apparently unpopular opinion that even males can have breasts, and that tacking breasts onto a male doesn’t automatically make him a gynomorph, as it ignores all the other characteristics that ideally should go into determining gender. But that’s an entirely different can of worms which isn’t relevant to this thread.

The problem still is that male characters, especially under the current girly tag, may be drawn with any amount of feminine characteristics, generally sans breasts. I also think the most blatantly feminine characters should get flat_chested gynomorph instead, so that the entire distinction between male and gynomorph isn’t just whether or not breasts are present (and then having to determine whether the character has small_breasts or is just completely flat) but that’s apparently another unpopular opinion. If a character doesn’t have even a single masculine trait besides a penis, tagging that as male feels wrong to me, but people will take the gender help flowchart very literally and tag like that anyway. These are somewhat edge case characters that don’t come up all the time, but still. I do think that girly male in the anatomical sense should be limited to femininely proportioned but still recognizably male (regardless of genitals), at the very least, as opposed to characters that would be indisputably female if you only take away the penis. That might be too complicated for the average user, though.

Anyway, my point to begin with was that an entirely female-proportioned andromorph can’t technically even be an andromorph. Andromorph requires at least some clearly masculine anatomy. Likewise for maleherm. This is inconsistent with the current treatment of girly male, which can pretty much have any amount of female anatomy outside of breasts and genitals and still be tagged as male - at least as far as most people seem to be concerned.

alias dominant_femboy -> femboy

I really don't like this. This is a common kink and there's literally no way to search for it, because girly dominant is going to return way more results where they're submissive. Why was this ever aliased?

Donovan DMC

Former Staff

dsco said:
alias dominant_femboy -> femboy

I really don't like this. This is a common kink and there's literally no way to search for it, because girly dominant is going to return way more results where they're submissive. Why was this ever aliased?

We don't need subtags for every little thing out there, especially not subtags for subtags
It's aliased away for the same reason girly/girly is aliased away, it isn't a form or gender.

donovan_dmc said:
We don't need subtags for every little thing out there, especially not subtags for subtags
It's aliased away for the same reason girly/girly is aliased away, it isn't a form or gender.

Right, but it's different when there is quite literally no way to search for a common thing otherwise. We have far more specific tags for that reason? This makes no sense and actively makes using the site to find what you want harder.

There's a difference between aliasing away solo_male because male solo does the same thing, and aliasing away a tag for a common kink with no other way to search for it because "it's too specific" when we have tags for some of the most bizarre and specific kinks in existence.

Edit: I'd also like to mention that muscular_sub exists with 3k taggings and an alias.

Updated

donovan_dmc said:
That's only an alias, hardly anything concrete. It was also created just 2 months ago with little to no discussion.

I wasn't trying to use it as a gotcha, just pointing out that it exists. I feel like this is something that needs to be actually discussed on its own merit, but at the end of the day it's staff's decision and I won't throw a fit about whatever choice is made.

I feel like "femboy" is going to be a slur in 5-10 years. It reminds me of the 4chan crossdresser meme word that went from being something some of my friends used to self-identify to being treated as an extreme slur what felt like overnight.

arrow189 said:
I feel like "femboy" is going to be a slur in 5-10 years. It reminds me of the 4chan crossdresser meme word that went from being something some of my friends used to self-identify to being treated as an extreme slur what felt like overnight.

That just feels wrong to me. "tomboy" use to be derogatory, its now perfectly accepted, hell even being replaced by "tomgirl" to compliment "femboy"

slyroon

Former Staff

The bulk update request #7800 is active.

create alias dominant_femboy (0) -> femboy (150098)
create alias feminine_male (0) -> femboy (150098)
create alias sissy (0) -> femboy (150098)
create alias twink (0) -> femboy (150098)
create alias fem-boy (0) -> femboy (150098)
create alias fem_boy (0) -> femboy (150098)
create alias sissy_boy (0) -> femboy (150098)
create alias girly_boy (0) -> femboy (150098)
create alias effeminate (0) -> femboy (150098)
create alias girlyboi (0) -> femboy (150098)
create alias girly_boi (0) -> femboy (150098)
create alias femboys (0) -> femboy (150098)
create alias femboi (0) -> femboy (150098)
create alias girlyboy (0) -> femboy (150098)
create alias femmeboy (0) -> femboy (150098)

Reason: Femboy follow up

EDIT: The bulk update request #7800 (forum #402637) has been approved by @slyroon.

Updated by auto moderator

slyroon

Former Staff

The bulk update request #7801 is active.

remove alias femboy_prey (0) -> girly (0)
remove alias girly/girly (1) -> girly (0)

Reason: The reign of femboys has begun.

EDIT: The bulk update request #7801 (forum #402639) has failed: Error: Alias would modify other aliases or implications through transitive relationships. (create alias girly -> femboy)

EDIT: The bulk update request #7801 (forum #402639) has been approved by @slyroon.

Updated by auto moderator

kemonophonic said:
Someone will need to go through femboy -male and do some cleaning up.

Huh, I thought this was a rename and not a restriction of applying to males only

Should girly be unlocked now it's been aliased away? What about the new girly femboy?

kemonophonic said:
Someone will need to go through femboy -male and do some cleaning up.

femboy -male -maleherm -andromorph - as far as I'm concerned, femboy is still identical in use and definition to girly and should be handled the same, so maleherms and andromorphs are included.
That's really the main reason we couldn't go with feminine_male for this alias, as otherwise that probably would have been a better tag name, but it's limited to just males which poses a problem.

slyroon said:
The bulk update request #7800 is active.

create alias dominant_femboy (0) -> femboy (150098)
create alias feminine_male (0) -> femboy (150098)
create alias sissy (0) -> femboy (150098)
create alias twink (0) -> femboy (150098)
create alias fem-boy (0) -> femboy (150098)
create alias fem_boy (0) -> femboy (150098)
create alias sissy_boy (0) -> femboy (150098)
create alias girly_boy (0) -> femboy (150098)
create alias effeminate (0) -> femboy (150098)
create alias girlyboi (0) -> femboy (150098)
create alias girly_boi (0) -> femboy (150098)
create alias femboys (0) -> femboy (150098)
create alias femboi (0) -> femboy (150098)
create alias girlyboy (0) -> femboy (150098)
create alias femmeboy (0) -> femboy (150098)

Reason: Femboy follow up

EDIT: The bulk update request #7800 (forum #402637) has been approved by @slyroon.

Still think reconsidering the banishment of dominant_femboy and femboy_penetrating is a good idea due to how common they are as kinks and how often they're brought up in the forums by confused users. But that's mainly a topic for another thread (the josou seme one)

snpthecat said:
Huh, I thought this was a rename and not a restriction of applying to males only

Should girly be unlocked now it's been aliased away? What about the new girly femboy?

Agreed, I don't think we should be restricting femboy from applying to andromorph and maleherm characters, femboy -male -andromorph -maleherm would be more appropriate for cleanup.

Edit: Ninja'd

scaliespe said:
Well, perhaps it would be aliased back temporarily, at least long enough for everyone to get used to the change. Then, after... I dunno, a few months?... unalias it and put it somewhere else.

This is the current plan, BTW. It's aliased back for now while we figure out what to do with girly going forward. This will also give everyone some time to adjust to using the new tag. Personally, I'm in favor of aliasing girly to feminine and establishing feminine/masculine umbrella tags for character appearance regardless of gender, which can then be implied by femboy. But that's another discussion for another thread, which will needs its own round of voting.

Damn that's wack.
While I agree that femboys are obviously girly, I don't think I particularly agree with girly boys being femboy.

- I don't believe there's a crossdressing-like tag for accessories, make-up, etc, this means we can have a muscular manly man putting on a few "girly" accents end up as femboy.
- "manly" tag still exists, "feminine" doesn't at all, so I ask, if (as intended) people couldn't use "girly" on female-bodied characters, why couldn't we just keep alias girly to feminine? as the issue was people misusing the tag, while a logistical nightmare, having it co-exist with "femboy" would make more sense as people could just simply want anything "behaving" in a feminine way and use the newly aliased "girly" tag for that
- I see "twink" being included in the alias, this is just straight up wrong, as twink is just a slim gay male, nothing "femboy" about not having muscles.
- There's alot of tags with "girly" still in them, there's some forum posts talking about that, and looking at some wikis, it makes it a little awkward, "feminization" will now read as "turning male into femboy"; boys being male, femboys being boys, err, "male to male?" Mostly going back to the whole "girly" being mostly appearence than behavior, someone forced to crossdress will not always become a "femboy".
- Yikes, TWYS is gonna hate people (again); when I look at an image with a male wearing female clothing, I would say that's a crossdressing_male but because this tag doesn't exist and we only have an ambiguous "crossdressing" (I think we should get the tag, could be useful for images with multiple characters to specify which party is crossdressing) my second next thing would've been "girly" because yeah, I simply don't believe everyone likes being referred to as a "femboy", maybe people won't like "girly" either, but again, we should focus on the apperance of characters here. "girly" simply feels more objective than the heavily personality-based "femboy"

I probably got caught in the tangled mess that is my own ramble, but I tried my best to put my thoughts into words that make sense here. But alas.

Edit as a food for thought: Are thigh highs even feminine to consider any male wearing them girly?

Updated

kittyqattus said:
im not sure where to put this so
bit of a problematic post (locked tags -female -male femboy ambiguous_gender)
post #1938009

if you come across any cases like this again in the future, just report the post for tagging abuse and explain that there are tags locked that contradict each other like this.

I dunno why you included andromorphs and herms in the femboy tag. They literally are not males, if they were they wouldn't be named something different. A femboy is a feminine male specifically. Vice versa with tomboys.

Watsit

Privileged

I still don't think femboy (p.k.a. girly) should apply to "personality, clothing". Personality is very vague and open to interpretation when it comes to TWYS (even IRL, I'm not sure I could clearly explain what a "female personality" is), and clothing we already have a crossdressing tag for. I know when I look through the femboy tag, I'm looking for males that have a feminine body type; also including big muscular manly men that happen to be wearing high-heels or a bra feels like it's including different things under one tag, feminine-bodied males in "male clothing" and masculine-bodied males in "female clothing", and should be separated as people searching for one aren't likely to want the other.

And given a tag that indicates a male-type character with a feminine body type, that's the difference between an andromorph and a flat-chested female: whether or not they appear feminine, which is what femboy indicates.

watsit said:
I still don't think femboy (p.k.a. girly) should apply to "personality, clothing". Personality is very vague and open to interpretation when it comes to TWYS (even IRL, I'm not sure I could clearly explain what a "female personality" is)

The wiki using "personality" here is an English faux pas for "behavior." Common mistake, and easily spotted too. Personality is a broad collection of traits that make someone who they are and cannot be fully communicated in a picture. Behavior is an activity, action, what someone does and how they do it. These are very basic and important psychology concepts people should know for having conversations about these things.

Whether or not (or how) personalities can be masculine or feminine is an interesting question that could make for a great series of papers. Behaviors can absolutely be masculine or feminine, which is decided by cultural norms. Societies arrange themselves into gendered roles. Biological sex and instinct also drive some gendered behaviors.

But, in practice, on e621, these masculine and feminine behaviors should be easy to pick out. The harder part is classifying behaviors more toward the center and those with diminishing gendered expectations: when does a male making food become a feminine behavior? Those questions can get people fired up.

clothing we already have a crossdressing tag for. I know when I look through the femboy tag, I'm looking for males that have a feminine body type; also including big muscular manly men that happen to be wearing high-heels or a bra feels like it's including different things under one tag, feminine-bodied males in "male clothing" and masculine-bodied males in "female clothing", and should be separated as people searching for one aren't likely to want the other.

Yes. Arguably, girly is a better description for crossdressing muscle men than femboy. Even feminine_male is whack, because crossdressing muscle men are probably still more masculine than feminine lol.

Updated

YEAH BABY! That’s what I’ve been waiting for!

I was never a fan of the "girly" tag being used in place of "femboy", considering how broad and vague "girly" is, and how "femboy" is a little more specific (as I understand it) to a physically feminine male.
We're definitely going to need to clean up the new femboy tag though, especially for very masculine males tagged as "girly" originally because they're crossdressing. To a lesser extent, there are definitely a lot of clearly non-feminine slim/twinkish/cute/boyish male characters under the tag, where "femboy" is a bit of stretch.(*)

* personally I'd err on the cautious and liberal end of removing the tag from those posts though

Twink needs to be taken out of this alias. Not all twinks are femboys, not all femboys are twinks. Since it WAS aliased to girly it was a mistake made in the past, but there's no reason to preserve it going forward. If it's going to be aliased away it should be aliased to slim instead.

"femboy" is and has been a transphobic slur since its inception. Just because some unrelated group of people has been using it to refer to themselves doesn't change that.

I saw "girly" as a clever workaround to this. Y'know, be better than the rest of the internet. But either y'all have forgotten that or you're doing this in spite of it. In that case, awesome.
If you need a better workaround then I saw "feminine_male" from this thread as working pretty well too - just please for the love of god don't use a slur!!

victimoftroy said:
"femboy" is and has been a transphobic slur since its inception. Just because some unrelated group of people has been using it to refer to themselves doesn't change that.

Every time I see this brought up I only ever see trans women saying "that's fucking stupid". Stop buying into it.

victimoftroy said:
If you need a better workaround then I saw "feminine_male" from this thread as working pretty well too - just please for the love of god don't use a slur!!

feminine_male can't work because, with how we categorize gender, it'd exclude intersex characters.

Donovan DMC

Former Staff

victimoftroy said:
"femboy" is and has been a transphobic slur since its inception.

I have literally never seen or heard it used as a slur, I regularly use it to describe my own characters and other people's characters and no one bats an eye

victimoftroy said:
"femboy" is and has been a transphobic slur since its inception. Just because some unrelated group of people has been using it to refer to themselves doesn't change that.

I saw "girly" as a clever workaround to this. Y'know, be better than the rest of the internet. But either y'all have forgotten that or you're doing this in spite of it. In that case, awesome.
If you need a better workaround then I saw "feminine_male" from this thread as working pretty well too - just please for the love of god don't use a slur!!

Are you sure you're not confusing it with the term "trap" (which does have a history of being used both as a term for effeminate males and as a slur for trans women)? I have never heard femboy used in any context other than, well, a feminine boy.

regsmutt said:
Twink needs to be taken out of this alias. Not all twinks are femboys, not all femboys are twinks. Since it WAS aliased to girly it was a mistake made in the past, but there's no reason to preserve it going forward. If it's going to be aliased away it should be aliased to slim instead.

Somewhat agreed, I think "twink" often a little more in line with a lot of the posts under slim_male than femboy. It can apply to athletic males as well, the "otter mode" boyish look. "Femboy" is overtly feminine in visible presentation, twinks may be effete in behaviour but are masculine.

victimoftroy said:
"femboy" is and has been a transphobic slur since its inception. Just because some unrelated group of people has been using it to refer to themselves doesn't change that.

I saw "girly" as a clever workaround to this. Y'know, be better than the rest of the internet. But either y'all have forgotten that or you're doing this in spite of it. In that case, awesome.
If you need a better workaround then I saw "feminine_male" from this thread as working pretty well too - just please for the love of god don't use a slur!!

I can't find anything that suggests "femboy" is transphobic in origin, it emerged in the 1990s within the early online LGBT community to describe effeminate crossdressing men — maybe some people who initially describe themselves as a femboy went on to discover that they're transgender, however, the term "femboy" more or less by definition requires the femboy identify as a man (or nonbinary) who chooses to style and dress themselves to be feminine. If someone is using "femboy" as a slur for transgender women, they're misunderstanding the term or maliciously misusing it.

Voltscream may be on the right track, you might be thinking of "trap", which definitely is a less than stellar term, to dramatically understate things.

A very good change, females can be girly too. Hopefully people will also start using "manly" more.

As for people talking about "femboy" being transphobic, it's a classic way of claiming offense where there's none. This makes good-natured, conscientous people rush to make amends, and this is where you gain power over them. "Mansplaining", "cultural appropriation" are other instances of this tactic. About time people stopped falling for this manipulation.

Updated

scaliespe said:
The bulk update request #4835 is active.

remove alias dominant_femboy (0) -> girly (0)
remove alias femmy (1) -> girly (0)
remove alias feminine_male (0) -> girly (0)
remove alias girly_body (0) -> girly (0)
remove alias femme (3) -> girly (0)
remove alias sissy (0) -> girly (0)
remove alias twink (0) -> girly (0)
remove alias fem-boy (0) -> girly (0)
remove alias fem_boy (0) -> girly (0)
remove alias sissy_boy (0) -> girly (0)
remove alias girly_boy (0) -> girly (0)
remove alias effeminate (0) -> girly (0)
remove alias girlyboi (0) -> girly (0)
remove alias girly_boi (0) -> girly (0)
remove alias girlie (0) -> girly (0)
remove alias femboys (0) -> girly (0)
remove alias femboi (0) -> girly (0)
remove alias girlyboy (0) -> girly (0)
remove alias femmeboy (0) -> girly (0)
remove alias femboy (150098) -> girly (0)
remove alias feminine (135) -> girly (0)
remove alias femenine (0) -> girly (0)

Reason: this has gone on for long enough
...

The femboy -> girly alias is among of the oldest on the site, and it seems to have been created at the time without any discussion. Perhaps it wasn't a problem then, but it has become a problem for us now.
The name "girly" doesn't indicate the tag's proper usage whatsoever. As such, it is frequently added to posts of females, herms, and gynomorphs by people who haven't read the wiki. "Femboy" seems to be the most commonly used term for this concept, so I suggest using that instead. Any objections?

Now behold, the followup BUR:

mass update girly -> femboy alias dominant_femboy -> femboy alias feminine_male -> femboy alias sissy -> femboy alias twink -> femboy alias fem-boy -> femboy alias fem_boy -> femboy alias sissy_boy -> femboy alias girly_boy -> femboy alias effeminate -> femboy alias girlyboi -> femboy alias girly_boi -> femboy alias femboys -> femboy alias femboi -> femboy alias girlyboy -> femboy alias femmeboy -> femboy
As you can see, a few omissions have been made.

  • girly can't simply be aliased back to femboy. Since the whole issue here is the ambiguity of the term, we will be left with the same issue if we do that, as people who input a tag without checking its wiki/checking its aliases will still end up using the girly tag to tag feminine female/herm/gynomorph characters.
  • feminine, femenine, girlie, and girly_body seem to be the same thing, and likely can't be aliased back to femboy. Whatever ends up being done with girly will probably need to be done with these as well. These are also likely partly responsible for the current mess; people will tag something like "feminine" on their very feminine female character and end up tagging it as girly because they didn't check the wiki or aliases first.
  • femme, femmy - According to Urban Dictionary, the term "femme" seems to primarily refer to a feminine lesbian - as opposed to a "butch", a masculine lesbian. That makes this a doubly bad alias (which was also created a long time ago with no apparent discussion [furthermore by a user who was permanently banned 12 years ago with a very entertaining ban reason]), so aliasing this back to femboy would probably not be wise.

Something will need to be done about these leftover tags, but I don't know what yet.

Some ideas, maybe:

  • We could redefine girly as a counterpart to manly for especially feminine female/herm/gynomorph characters.
  • We could reinstate feminine as an umbrella tag for any character with feminine qualities regardless of gender, and would be implied by femboy. Though, this would make me think we should also have a masculine counterpart for that, implied probably by manly and tomboy.
  • Say "ehhh fuck it" and invalidate them all.

The last option would be the easiest, but probably not the best. I don't like how there's currently an imbalance between the genders - girly and manly for males but only tomboy for females with no feminine-female equivalent.

EDIT: The bulk update request #4835 (forum #365709) has been approved by @slyroon.

this just seems like a way to be politically correct so advertisers who "took offense" get their cake and can eat it two... Every old tag that was relevant is being phased out because e621 THINKS people are taking offense to it.
Meanwhile veteran users like me are like: "Where did this post go? Where did this post go? Where did THIS post go?" because tags are being entirely censored, phased out, and rewritten. My objection is
not only is this confusing, but is the opposite of user friendly, for obvious reasons.

I don't even frequent the forum, so this set of problems just stacks up over time.
Users should have the option to opt out of these changes, it's ridiculous.
I'm basically being indirectly told to keep up with thousands tags being changed every 24 hours, something that my schedule simply cannot do.
It would be easier if censored tags were archived & merged, rather than changed entirely, because someone got butthurt over an tags name. : In this world you can't please everyone, but you should at least try to make the tagging system not seem like a frickin' train wreck you can't look away from.

Updated

akros_the_speeddemon said:
this just seems like a way to be politically correct so advertisers who "took offense" get their cake and can eat it two... Every old tag that was relevant is being phased out because e621 THINKS people are taking offense to it.
Meanwhile veteran users like me are like: "Where did this post go? Where did this post go? Where did THIS post go?" because tags are being entirely censored, phased out, and rewritten.

"the advertisers"?

dba_afish said:
"the advertisers"?

people pull out all the time cause they're getting butthurt, users leave because their tags are being murked, grass grows, trees leaves crumble to the ground in fall, the truth is as I state it:
People don't want to play "try and catch up with a thousand tags being changed cause [User] or [advertiser] took personal offense with [tag here], so we've changed [tag here] that has been around for eons to [tag here] and made it non-synonymous with [old version of tag]" every day.

akros_the_speeddemon said:
people pull out all the time cause they're getting butthurt, users leave because their tags are being murked, grass grows, trees leaves crumble to the ground in fall, the truth is as I state it:
People don't want to play "try and catch up with a thousand tags being changed cause [User] or [advertiser] took personal offense with [tag here], so we've changed [tag here] that has been around for eons to [tag here] and made it non-synonymous with [old version of tag]" every day.

except e6 dosn't have external advertisers, really. all of the ads are hosted by Dragon Fruit themselves. and if, hypothetically, advertisers were going to pull out, I don't think it'd be because of our tag names...

also, like what the fuck are you even talking about? nothing has even changed. femboy still has the exact same definition as it did before the name was changed, girly still works exactly the same as a search term. the only thing that's changed is that the tag has a different name and maybe people will mistag it on female characters less.

wandering_spaniel said:
If feminine_male is what we go with then feminine_female etc. could simply be aliased to female or aliased to feminine when it pops up

Not true; cause you also have buff female figures: I.E. Buffpup, her avatar is masculine female, so defaulting feminine_female to be simply aliased to female or aliased to feminine would actually be worse as it's invalidating the entire reason for a feminine_female tag.
How it would not work:
Post of buffpups avatar: Feminine_Female would list it, which then would be listed by the following: > Feminine_female > Female < > Feminine
How it could work:
Post of buffpups avatar: Female > masculine < > buff < Masculine_Female
Post of dainty character who's female: Feminine_Female < > Dainty < > Lithe < > Thin < Small_Frame
< = single tag
> = single tag
< > = synonymous

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