Topic: Current gender tags within 'tag what you see' are impractical

I'm not here to argue about the tag system or where the line gets drawn between lore tags and general tags.
I am here to suggest that within the current 'tag what you see' way of doing things, gender tagging gets pretty case by case to such an extent that justifying a tag solely off what bits the character in question has doesn't really help anyone.

For example:

Female reptilian/draconic/ect characters with a vulva/slit, but no breasts under 'tag what you see' could easily qualify as andromorphs. Most are accurately tagged female, because the species specific context is generally understood alongside creator intention. I have no problem with this, but I bring it up as an example of nuance within gender tagging.
Likewise,
If a femboy character is drawn with smaller a-cups while having a penis, it would make the most sense for those searching for art of characters like that for it to be tagged male. This is despite the fact that a character with breasts (size unspecified) and a penis could fall under many tags (gynomorph, herm, intersex) depending on the tagger's interpretation.

Let's say im looking for female/male posts. It would not be helpful for a post with a character who has breasts and a vulva BUT is referred to within image dialogue with masculine pronouns to be tagged female/male. In most cases, this is due to character lore with the particular character being trans. Even ignoring this, it would be more effective to tag the appropriate physical markers (breasts, vulva) while excluding the female/male tag.
Asking how defined the chest of an andromorph character has to be before they get categorized as female when other characters with no breasts so to speak are tagged female (calling back to my reptile example) is purely subjective.

I would personally suggest the addition of an androgynous or otherwise gender tag, but the exclusion of a gender tag entirely when best applicable could also work.

Again, I have to make it very clear I am not against the tag what you see rule. I just think it would benefit everyone's user experience to exercise even a little nuance regarding gender tags.

https://e621.net/wiki_pages/460 is what you're looking for.

As for the male/female example you posted, blacklisting/negating the relevant lore tags will help.

Excluding gender tags just looks like a mistagged post, that's why we have tags like ambiguous gender

Also as is mentioned above the problem of misidentifying a character because of ambiguous characteristics is already solved as best as we can by lore tags

jasper1995 said:
could fall under many tags (gynomorph, herm, intersex)

Intersex should not be used alone, it is an umbrella tag and has no use without a more specific tag (gynomorph, andromorph, herm, maleherm)

donovan_dmc said:
Excluding gender tags just looks like a mistagged post, that's why we have tags like ambiguous gender

Also as is mentioned above the problem of misidentifying a character because of ambiguous characteristics is already solved as best as we can by lore tags

Intersex should not be used alone, it is an umbrella tag and has no use without a more specific tag (gynomorph, andromorph, herm, maleherm)

I see, I do agree that tag exclusion would likely come off as a mistake or accident. Maybe I could work on some tag negation templates for myself and anyone else who may find them useful. I appreciate the feedback!

jasper1995 said:
Female reptilian/draconic/ect characters with a vulva/slit, but no breasts under 'tag what you see' could easily qualify as andromorphs. Most are accurately tagged female, because the species specific context is generally understood alongside creator intention. I have no problem with this, but I bring it up as an example of nuance within gender tagging.
Likewise,
If a femboy character is drawn with smaller a-cups while having a penis, it would make the most sense for those searching for art of characters like that for it to be tagged male. This is despite the fact that a character with breasts (size unspecified) and a penis could fall under many tags (gynomorph, herm, intersex) depending on the tagger's interpretation.

Perhaps ironically, gender tags can be incredibly subjective. One person might look at a character and see them as androgynous, another might look at a character and see them as male. This happens a lot with canoncally androgynous characters like Kris from Deltarune since for cultural reasons lots of people habitually assume masculinity in things that don't actually lean strongly either way (like how you might draw a stick figure and automatically refer to it as "him" or a "stickman").

A lot of people give up and tag what they know anyways. I'm not fighting TWYS but I find it kind of silly sometimes that sometimes the appropriate tag for a character that everyone knows is female would be ambigous gender because her breasts and hips aren't defined enough. No one seems to complain about characters everyone knows are male or female being tagged as such even though they look ambigious, so I guess it's not a problem? :^)

eightoflakes said:
Perhaps ironically, gender tags can be incredibly subjective. One person might look at a character and see them as androgynous, another might look at a character and see them as male. This happens a lot with canoncally androgynous characters like Kris from Deltarune since for cultural reasons lots of people habitually assume masculinity in things that don't actually lean strongly either way (like how you might draw a stick figure and automatically refer to it as "him" or a "stickman").

A lot of people give up and tag what they know anyways. I'm not fighting TWYS but I find it kind of silly sometimes that sometimes the appropriate tag for a character that everyone knows is female would be ambigous gender because her breasts and hips aren't defined enough. No one seems to complain about characters everyone knows are male or female being tagged as such even though they look ambigious, so I guess it's not a problem? :^)

No totally, you articulated the loose thesis of my post better than I did lolol.

donovan_dmc said:
Excluding gender tags just looks like a mistagged post, that's why we have tags like ambiguous gender

Also as is mentioned above the problem of misidentifying a character because of ambiguous characteristics is already solved as best as we can by lore tags

Intersex should not be used alone, it is an umbrella tag and has no use without a more specific tag (gynomorph, andromorph, herm, maleherm)

donovan_dmc said:
Excluding gender tags just looks like a mistagged post, that's why we have tags like ambiguous gender

Also as is mentioned above the problem of misidentifying a character because of ambiguous characteristics is already solved as best as we can by lore tags

Intersex should not be used alone, it is an umbrella tag and has no use without a more specific tag (gynomorph, andromorph, herm, maleherm)

Sometimes mods intentionally exclude tags like ambiguous gender from being added to the post, so users have to just accept that the character with no female features shown and otherwise known to be male is somehow female. https://e621.net/posts/1714928

anon22 said:
Sometimes mods intentionally exclude tags like ambiguous gender from being added to the post, so users have to just accept that the character with no female features shown and otherwise known to be male is somehow female. https://e621.net/posts/1714928

it has been 7 years since the reggie nonsense happened, most of the staff team isn't even the same

anon22 said:
Sometimes mods intentionally exclude tags like ambiguous gender from being added to the post, so users have to just accept that the character with no female features shown and otherwise known to be male is somehow female. https://e621.net/posts/1714928

Admins can lock tags in place if people can't agree on which is what. They have the final say in things.

From the post you linked, it was locked by the head admin himself and I would agree with him (based on howto:tag genders).

• The character giving has a slightly feminine appearance, but the obviously-visible male genitalia makes him a male.
• The character receiving has an even stronger feminine appearance, with long_eyelashes and long_hair. No obvious genitalia can be seen here, but the overall appearance leans towards female.

If you don't like how something is tagged "wrong", you may add in the suitable lore tags to compensate or report the post again for tagging abuse and ask for a second opinion.

anon22 said:
Sometimes mods intentionally exclude tags like ambiguous gender from being added to the post, so users have to just accept that the character with no female features shown and otherwise known to be male is somehow female. https://e621.net/posts/1714928

do not invoke the fucking Reggie wars like Whygena was right on this.

Reggie almost always presents pretty much exclusively feminine (probably more explicitly feminine than a lot of female characters). if we were going to tag him as ambiguous_gender when his penis wasn't visible, we'd have to do the same for nearly all breast-less characters, both male and female. ignoring tertiary gender identifiers like this would also make tagging andromorph extremely difficult.

If you make a system that is somewhat usable* and therefore not insanely rigid, then someone who is intent on breaking that system will be able to do so. Therefore, per-case rulings (tag locks etc) will always be required in some amount. Such cases fail to show that there is anything fundamentally wrong with the particular system. Any honest critique will be based on cases that are not specifically constructed as attacks.

IMO there is reason to think that Reggie was such a constructed attack.

* that is, not only seeming friendly to the user but actually functional. Contrast E6 tagging with eg. AO3, where some tags are well formed -- media, pairing, genre -- and others are essentially unsearchable noise because they're in practice just freeform comments.

I am surprised that tag "futa" was removed and replaced with "intersex". It confuses a lot of people because intersex and futa is different things.

rubiont-47 said:
I am surprised that tag "futa" was removed and replaced with "intersex". It confuses a lot of people because intersex and futa is different things.

"futa" was not replaced with "intersex", "futa" was replaced with a combination of "herm" and "gynomorph", but "intersex" is the common ancestor tag so "futa" is aliased to "intersex" for lack of a better option.

rubiont-47 said:
I am surprised that tag "futa" was removed and replaced with "intersex". It confuses a lot of people because intersex and futa is different things.

You should really read some wiki pages before complaining across multiple topics

donovan_dmc said:
You should really read some wiki pages before complaining across multiple topics

May you please tell me what exactly am I should read from wiki? This thing is quite big to read.
*4 mins later*
Okay. I see what was done.

Related tags for intersex:
andromorph – male body, but with a vulva instead of a penis.
gynomorph – female body, but with a penis instead of a vulva.
herm – female body, with both a vulva and a penis.
maleherm – male body, with both a vulva and a penis.

This is kinda could be more confy to use. But futa was much more simple to use, I see for the first time term intersex is applied instead of this. And surprised that futanari is no mentioned at all in the wiki, not even in intersex tag. Only mentions that futanari will be replaced with intersex tag. . .

rubiont-47 said:
May you please tell me what exactly am I should read from wiki? This thing is quite big to read.
*4 mins later*
Okay. I see what was done.

Related tags for intersex:
andromorph – male body, but with a vulva instead of a penis.
gynomorph – female body, but with a penis instead of a vulva.
herm – female body, with both a vulva and a penis.
maleherm – male body, with both a vulva and a penis.

This is kinda could be more confy to use. But futa was much more simple to use, I see for the first time term intersex is applied instead of this. And surprised that futanari is no mentioned at all in the wiki, not even in intersex tag. Only mentions that futanari will be replaced with intersex tag. . .

I do not see how you would see this clean separation of broad physique and the presence/absence of specific sex organs, and decide that "futa" being simple is a good thing.

It is exactly as I explained in the other thread you replied to. Using these words is a good thing because we can define them in a way that is much less ambiguous than any variation of ふたなり. If we used something like "partial herm" instead of "gynomorph" then people would mess that up.

lafcadio said:
I do not see how you would see this clean separation of broad physique and the presence/absence of specific sex organs, and decide that "futa" being simple is a good thing.

It is exactly as I explained in the other thread you replied to. Using these words is a good thing because we can define them in a way that is much less ambiguous than any variation of ふたなり. If we used something like "partial herm" instead of "gynomorph" then people would mess that up.

Well. I personally never have seen term intersex, andromorph, gynomorph is used at all ever. Always everyone was using just futa. This is the first time when I see it beng used, only on e621. This is what confusing.

Will see. Would need some time to get used to it.

rubiont-47 said:
Well. I personally never have seen term intersex, andromorph, gynomorph is used at all ever. Always everyone was using just futa. This is the first time when I see it beng used, only on e621. This is what confusing.

Will see. Would need some time to get used to it.

"Intersex" is well established in various social circles, terms like "amab" (assigned male at birth) and "afab" (assigned female at birth) originated with intersex people wanting to describe the sex assignment they received from doctors.
Prior usage of "gynomorph" and "andromorph" was largely limited to scholarly pursuits, but adoption among furries in response to e621 using the words hasn't been bad.

While a layperson would basically only use "gynomorph" or "andromorph" because they're in e621-adjacent circles, the same is also true of "futa": people would only use these Japanese-derived terms if they're in Japanese-adjacent circles. Things like "wakamezake", "nyotaimori", "chichikurabe", etc. simply aren't approachable.

rubiont-47 said:
...And surprised that futanari is no mentioned at all in the wiki, not even in intersex tag. Only mentions that futanari will be replaced with intersex tag. . .

Technically, we do have the old futanari wiki with all the explanations, but we don't use it anymore since the tag has been aliased to intersex.
Having a whole section in the intersex wiki explaining the minor differences between futanari & intersex and its related tags would be more messy than helpful.

thegreatwolfgang said:
Technically, we do have the old futanari wiki with all the explanations, but we don't use it anymore since the tag has been aliased to intersex.
Having a whole section in the intersex wiki explaining the minor differences between futanari & intersex and its related tags would be more messy than helpful.

The thing is, that most people is more know about term like futa, than terms like intersex. So just alliasing futa with intersex without explaining why so, is more confusing than just not telling anything. I can confirm it from my own example.

rubiont-47 said:
The thing is, that most people is more know about term like futa, than terms like intersex. So just alliasing futa with intersex without explaining why so, is more confusing than just not telling anything. I can confirm it from my own example.

you've been on the site since 2018 and you haven't even noticed, let alone been bothered until the last 24 hours, though, and the same is true for most users. so is it really that big of a deal?

rubiont-47 said:
The thing is, that most people is more know about term like futa, than terms like intersex. So just alliasing futa with intersex without explaining why so, is more confusing than just not telling anything. I can confirm it from my own example.

You should be able to search the forums or the alias request history to see why certain tags get aliased away.
In the case of futanari, it was done on topic #24263 more than a decade ago for reasons already explained on this thread.

rubiont-47 said:
The thing is, that most people is more know about term like futa, than terms like intersex. So just alliasing futa with intersex without explaining why so, is more confusing than just not telling anything. I can confirm it from my own example.

You can't look at your own confusion and just extrapolate to say that everybody else must be equally confused.
Your recent comment doesn't exactly have much consensus from other users, you're digging up old forum topics where everybody except OP disagrees with the usage of "futa", you're hijacking an old thread on an unrelated topic, etc.
If anything, the obvious conclusion is that you're in the minority and everybody else is getting along just fine. Either they don't search for any form of intersex, or they learn the search terms that actually get them what they want.
We also recently removed a bustyboy -> intersex alias and adoption has been really good; it allows an actual niche that isn't covered by alternation like futanari -> ~gynomorph ~herm.
Rather, I see more people thinking "andromorph" thinks "anthropomorphic", not people complaining about a futanari -> intersex alias.

This alias genuinely seems like the least of our concerns, and without new code to dynamically redirect certain tags to alternation syntax, no serious effort to unalias "futanari" will ever succeed because it just doesn't improve tagging, doesn't improve searching, and does not serve any purpose that's not already covered by gynomorph and herm.

dba_afish said:
you've been on the site since 2018 and you haven't even noticed, let alone been bothered until the last 24 hours, though, and the same is true for most users. so is it really that big of a deal?

Well, sadly I am incredible lazy at uploading files. So I posted only two futa drawings. Back then they was fine with being tagged as futa. At some point they was swapped to intersex. Yesterday one lovely artist posted another link to his animation without implying any futa so i was eager to watch it and entered e621, only to be ended up confused why is there futa on the animation. Since on his FA was no futa mentions. Turned out that he was using this local term intersex on his FA what greatly confused me and angered some people that I was confused.

rubiont-47 said:
Well, sadly I am incredible lazy at uploading files. So I posted only two futa drawings. Back then they was fine with being tagged as futa. At some point they was swapped to intersex.

this is untrue. I know it's untrue, because that "some point" you're talking about was, in 2015, 3 years before your account was created.

dba_afish said:
this is untrue. I know it's untrue, because that "some point" you're talking about was, in 2015, 3 years before your account was created.

Questionable. I tagged both drawings as futa when I was putting tags, I know it for sure because I am being quite aware of the characters that i am drawing. But in tagging history they have only intersex mention.

rubiont-47 said:
Questionable. I tagged both drawings as futa when I was putting tags, I know it for sure because I am being quite aware of the characters that i am drawing. But in tagging history they have only intersex mention.

It's an alias, the tag you put in is being replaced with the new tag