Topic: Question about gender tags

I have reviewed howto:tag genders, which seems to state in vertical flowchart section 3 that a character with breasts and a female bodytype but male genitals should be tagged gynomorph, not male. However, the male tag is completely full of characters like this. Sometimes both tags are applied, but often just male is. This is obviously not what most people searching the male tag are looking for. In theory lore tags could be used to filter, but posts rarely have them.

Are these guidelines simply new and not fully applied yet? Or am I misunderstanding something?

If a character has breasts and a penis (not moobs) and is tagged male, that is likely a mistag and should be fixed.

efsuibdy9ongdruhjy said:
Sometimes both tags are applied, but often just male is. This is obviously not what most people searching the male tag are looking for.
...
Are these guidelines simply new and not fully applied yet? Or am I misunderstanding something?

Nothing new has changed. It is highly likely you saw some mistags or had missed another character/character feature in the scene.

Can you give some examples?

In theory lore tags could be used to filter, but posts rarely have them.

Not really, the gender lore tags can only apply to posts that deviate from their canonical gender (e.g., a character tagged as being ambiguous_gender due to TWYS, so a male_(lore) tag is supplemented).

It should not be used to denote a character's gender when it is not in conflict with what is already tagged (e.g., a character is already accurately tagged as male, so there is no need for male_(lore)).

moonlit-comet said:
If a character has breasts and a penis (not moobs) and is tagged male, that is likely a mistag and should be fixed.

That is an enormous project then, since this issue is prolific. To put it in perspective, "gynomorph male solo" and "male breasts penis solo" together have almost 10k works like this. Obviously some works are justified having those tag combos (ex. due to disembodied parts), but a quick glance at that search shows a huge percent of them are mistagged by that rule. There are also an enormous number of mistagged examples of each without the solo tag, which will be painstaking to sort through.

thegreatwolfgang said:
Can you give some examples?

Not really, the gender lore tags can only apply to posts that deviate from their canonical gender (e.g., a character tagged as being ambiguous_gender due to TWYS, so a male_(lore) tag is supplemented).

It should not be used to denote a character's gender when it is not in conflict with what is already tagged (e.g., a character is already accurately tagged as male, so there is no need for male_(lore)).

I am on mobile currently so compiling a long list of links would be challenging, but I linked some tag combos in my previous reply that have a huge number of mistagged posts showcasing the issue.

Regarding lore tags: If a single character tagged gynomorph is not supposed to also be tagged male/female, then it seems like they should have a lore tag conveying their actual author-specified gender (except in the exceptionally rare case where the author specified they self-identify as a gynomorph, of course). Yet the number of 'gynomorph' tagged works is almost 5x larger than the male and female lore tagged works combined. Rectifying this sounds like a herculean task.

Edit: On a similar note, upon closer inspection it seems like the few uses of the 'gynomorph_(lore)' tag are often applied to characters who also are lore-tagged as trans women, with no indication the author has ever referred to them as a gynomorph. I thought lore tags were only for author-specified identities?

efsuibdy9ongdruhjy said:

Edit: On a similar note, upon closer inspection it seems like the few uses of the 'gynomorph_(lore)' tag are often applied to characters who also are lore-tagged as trans women, with no indication the author has ever referred to them as a gynomorph. I thought lore tags were only for author-specified identities?

gynomorph_(lore) is mostly intended for "this character would be tagged gynomorph if you could see their junk, but the camera is only showing them from the waist up or something is covering their groin or something, so they're tagged female" or "this character would be tagged gynomorph if you could see more of their body but pretty much only their penis and/or balls are visible at the moment, so they're tagged male".

dfn-451 said:
gynomorph_(lore) is mostly intended for "this character would be tagged gynomorph if you could see their junk, but the camera is only showing them from the waist up or something is covering their groin or something, so they're tagged female" or "this character would be tagged gynomorph if you could see more of their body but pretty much only their penis and/or balls are visible at the moment, so they're tagged male".

It is? That is not what the tag description says, and is a significant departure from the other lore tags being based on word of author/owner/canon.

listlesssky said:
It is? That is not what the tag description says, and is a significant departure from the other lore tags being based on word of author/owner/canon.

It is the artist's word that tells us that a character would have certain body parts if we had a clearer view of their body though.

wanni said:
It is the artist's word that tells us that a character would have certain body parts if we had a clearer view of their body though.

But again, this usage case is never specified on the gynomorph page or the gender tag guidelines page. In fact, it directly contradicts the guidelines which say "Lore tags should only be used when the general category tags do not accurately describe the character's gender." Nowhere does it mention using them to clarify hidden physical traits. In fact, the gender tag pages explicitly state they are "regardless of the physical or biological sex". Hence the 'nonbinary' lore tag being applied even if a character has visible male or female genitals.

Also, since i'm back on my desktop I did go through the first page of the 'male' tag and find actual examples as TheGreatWolfgang requested. Gynomorphs with massive breasts, lipstick, eyelashes, etc are consistently tagged both gynomorph and male, despite the gender tag guide saying they should just be tagged gynomorph:

https://e621.net/posts/5953978
https://e621.net/posts/5931744
https://e621.net/posts/6003486
https://e621.net/posts/5891366
https://e621.net/posts/5960101
https://e621.net/posts/5934206
https://e621.net/posts/5927488
https://e621.net/posts/5926837
https://e621.net/posts/5925338
https://e621.net/posts/5924437
https://e621.net/posts/5915694
https://e621.net/posts/5909154
https://e621.net/posts/5899197
https://e621.net/posts/5899077
https://e621.net/posts/5892429
https://e621.net/posts/5865232
https://e621.net/posts/5860867

I only searched one page deep too. From the stats, it seems like about 1/5th of the 220k gynomorph tagged characters are also tagged male.

Tagging these characters with both male and gynomorph instead of just gynomorph feels like it's in contradiction with TWYS as well. If someone searches 'male' or '-female', they don't expect half the results to be women with dicks shoving their massive boobs into the camera. In theory blacklisting 'breasts' would help, but that tag is applied extremely liberally to men who are chubby or have pecs:

https://e621.net/posts/5862150
https://e621.net/posts/5997424
https://e621.net/posts/5975722
https://e621.net/posts/5944263
https://e621.net/posts/5914472
https://e621.net/posts/5908073
https://e621.net/posts/5904721
https://e621.net/posts/5903468
https://e621.net/posts/5861418
https://e621.net/posts/5860151

listlesssky said:
But again, this usage case is never specified on the gynomorph page or the gender tag guidelines page. In fact, it directly contradicts the guidelines which say "Lore tags should only be used when the general category tags do not accurately describe the character's gender." Nowhere does it mention using them to clarify hidden physical traits. In fact, the gender tag pages explicitly state they are "regardless of the physical or biological sex". Hence the 'nonbinary' lore tag being applied even if a character has visible male or female genitals.

Also, since i'm back on my desktop I did go through the first page of the 'male' tag and find actual examples as TheGreatWolfgang requested. Gynomorphs with massive breasts, lipstick, eyelashes, etc are consistently tagged both gynomorph and male, despite the gender tag guide saying they should just be tagged gynomorph:

https://e621.net/posts/5953978
https://e621.net/posts/5931744
https://e621.net/posts/6003486
https://e621.net/posts/5891366
https://e621.net/posts/5960101
https://e621.net/posts/5934206
https://e621.net/posts/5927488
https://e621.net/posts/5926837
https://e621.net/posts/5925338
https://e621.net/posts/5924437
https://e621.net/posts/5915694
https://e621.net/posts/5909154
https://e621.net/posts/5899197
https://e621.net/posts/5899077
https://e621.net/posts/5892429
https://e621.net/posts/5865232
https://e621.net/posts/5860867

I only searched one page deep too. From the stats, it seems like about 1/5th of the 220k gynomorph tagged characters are also tagged male.

Tagging these characters with both male and gynomorph instead of just gynomorph feels like it's in contradiction with TWYS as well. If someone searches 'male' or '-female', they don't expect half the results to be women with dicks shoving their massive boobs into the camera. In theory blacklisting 'breasts' would help, but that tag is applied extremely liberally to men who are chubby or have pecs:

https://e621.net/posts/5862150
https://e621.net/posts/5997424
https://e621.net/posts/5975722
https://e621.net/posts/5944263
https://e621.net/posts/5914472
https://e621.net/posts/5908073
https://e621.net/posts/5904721
https://e621.net/posts/5903468
https://e621.net/posts/5861418
https://e621.net/posts/5860151

some of these are just stock standard mistags, some because the uploader probably didn't know what to tag, some because there's some leftover tags from a parent post.

although some of these are just fine:

post #6003486 is two characters
post #5934206 so is this
post #5927488 I think this should be m/f. the way this is portrayed dosn't seem like portal masturbation, but rather the penis is no longer "hers".
post #5925338 this is male_prey

dfn-451 said:
some of these are just stock standard mistags, some because the uploader probably didn't know what to tag, some because there's some leftover tags from a parent post.

although some of these are just fine

Agreed. The real issue is the fact there are many thousands of them. A very significant chunk of the first page of 'gynomorph male' is art with only gynomorphs.
It feels like there is large-scale inconsistency about whether or not to tag gynomorphs as male, which makes the 'male' and '-female' tags ineffective filters.

Another significant chunk of the results are gynomorphs plus a disembodied_penis, which seems to imply the 'male' tag even if no male character is actually visible.
Again, this feels like a TWYS issue since someone searching 'male' is not likely to be looking for works where no actual male is visible, just a gynomorph.
And we can't tell just by looking at it if the disembodied dick belongs to a male or to another gynomorph (as is implied in many works).

The ambiguity of some pieces makes it harder to sort through as well, since there are many like the ones you addressed that already have contradictory tags.
Ex. the second and fourth ones you mentioned are tagged 'solo' due to the second character barely being visible. Either the solo or male tag should be removed.

listlesssky said:
But again, this usage case is never specified on the gynomorph page or the gender tag guidelines page. In fact, it directly contradicts the guidelines which say "Lore tags should only be used when the general category tags do not accurately describe the character's gender." Nowhere does it mention using them to clarify hidden physical traits. In fact, the gender tag pages explicitly state they are "regardless of the physical or biological sex". Hence the 'nonbinary' lore tag being applied even if a character has visible male or female genitals.

This usage is specified in the gynomorph_(lore) page.
The fact some physical traits are hidden means that general tags may not be able to accurately describe the character's gender, not by contradicting it but by being incomplete.
The lore tags are applied regardless of the physical/biological sex depicted in the post. A character may be regarded by the artist to have a gynomorph body but if this isn't apparent from what is visible in the image for all general tagging purposes it isn't a gynomorph but may be tagged as a gynomorph by lore.

wanni said:
The fact some physical traits are hidden means that general tags may not be able to accurately describe the character's gender

Physical traits like body type do not imply gender for the purposes of lore tags, the lore pages themself say this repeatedly.
A clothed character being specified as transgender also does not inherently tell us what their underlying body type is gynomorphic or not, it's rarely specified whether they are pre or post-op.
Yet, the gynomorph_(lore) tag is applied to trans_woman_(lore) indiscriminately, even to characters whose underlying body type is never specified.

wanni said:
gynomorph body

This is the crux of the issue: Being a gynomorph is a body type relating to physical traits, not a gender.
And the gender tagging page says "Lore tags should only be used when the general category tags do not accurately describe the character's gender.", nothing about physical traits.

This creates a contradiction.

In the rare event of an artist explicitly specifying a character's gender as 'gynomorph' this lore tag would be appropriate.
But I have yet to see such a thing in all my years browsing, and we don't have tags for any other obscure or nontraditional genders except the general 'nonbinary' one.

Weighing all this, the gynomorph_(lore) tag and other 'body type' lore tags probably shouldn't even exist. Doubly so because people are frequently mistagging works with them that should just be tagged with the non-lore versions.
Hell, nearly a quarter of the gynomorph_(lore) tagged works are tagged with the non-lore version too.
That should probably be a separate thread, though.

Hmm. So you are saying that these tags are being used both to imply 'body parts that are occluded' and to specify gender, depending on the post in question?

I see why the former use would be the 'intuitive' use. The impossibility of making lore tags 'intuitive' is one reason to doubt their general usefulness -- aside from their potential to appease unhappy artists. There's probably at least some people who looked at the wiki definition and specifically decided 'but using it to mean that is dumb, so I'll use it this other way that is personally convenient', as well as the people who are just confused or uninformed.

savageorange said:
Hmm. So you are saying that these tags are being used both to imply 'body parts that are occluded' and to specify gender, depending on the post in question?

Exactly. If their purpose is to imply body parts that are unseen like that, there probably should be a lot more of them, and their pages should be updated to specify that as a proper use.

But currently, all the pages simply say they're only for gender, not body parts. But gynomorph/andromorph/herm are not genders, just body types, yet they have lore tags anyway. So it's understandable that this has led to confusion and rampant mistagging.

All of those 'body type' lore tags have hundreds of works that are tagged with both the lore and nonlore version at the same time, are tagged with the lore that should be tagged with the nonlore, etc... it's kinda a mess!

listlesssky said:
I am on mobile currently so compiling a long list of links would be challenging, but I linked some tag combos in my previous reply that have a huge number of mistagged posts showcasing the issue.

Like @Moonlit-Comet said, I can see there are a whole lot of mistags for pecs and moobs.
The solo tag should also not be used in posts showing a character surrounded by floating penises, it would be duo solo_focus instead.

listlesssky said:
It is? That is not what the tag description says, and is a significant departure from the other lore tags being based on word of author/owner/canon.

Ugh, that is an issue pending fixes, see topic #56446 & topic #58914.

In practice, only use lore tags if it conflicts with something in the general tags.

thegreatwolfgang said:
In practice, only use lore tags if it conflicts with something in the general tags.

Ok, so to clarify: If there is a canonical trans woman character who is clothed and tagged female, and there is no indication from outside sources of her body type under those clothes, the lore tags would be trans_woman_(lore) and trans_(lore), but not gynomorph_(lore) since we don't know what she's got going on under there?

I'll admit, i'm not 100% sure what the purpose of the 'body type' lore tags (gynomorph, herm, etc) are when body types are almost always visible and thus appropriate for the non-lore versions of those tags, and in the cases where they aren't visible they are rarely specified by the authors.
They seem to basically only get misused: misapplied to characters whose body types aren't specified, misapplied in spots where the non-lore versions should've been used instead, or misapplied to works that already have a non-lore version of them.

listlesssky said:
Ok, so to clarify: If there is a canonical trans woman character who is clothed and tagged female, and there is no indication from outside sources of her body type under those clothes, the lore tags would be trans_woman_(lore) and trans_(lore), but not gynomorph_(lore) since we don't know what she's got going on under there?

Lore tags are based on whatever the character identifies as, if they're a trans woman and identify as female, then gynomorph (lore) would not be valid
If they however identify as a gynomorph but are tagged as female, then the lore tag would be valid
Lore tags have nothing to do with "what's going on under there"

donovan_dmc said:
Lore tags have nothing to do with "what's going on under there"

They do and don't. male_(lore), female_(lore), etc, are for both when a character's sex "in lore" doesn't match what they get tagged through TWYS, and what they identify as. e.g. an androgynous fully clothed character being tagged ambiguous_gender, but the artist/creator says they're supposed to have a penis with no breasts or vulva, they would be tagged male_(lore) irrespective of their gender identity. This is how the tags were originally pitched, and how we've been told to use them, as one of the main points was to help cut down on mistagging herm for characters that don't have a visible vulva and we can instead tag them herm_(lore) with female, male, or gynomorph as appropriate. However, the wikis were written to also say that these lore tags apply based on how the character identifies, irrespective of any genitalia that may or may not be visible. e.g. a character with a visible vulva and breasts, and visibly no penis, being tagged female, but the creator says they identify as a herm, gets tagged herm_(lore).

I've brought up before how this makes the tags pull double-duty, essentially making them pointless since they not only don't say anything about what's visible, but we can't infer what it means about a character.

donovan_dmc said:
Lore tags are based on whatever the character identifies as, if they're a trans woman and identify as female, then gynomorph (lore) would not be valid
If they however identify as a gynomorph but are tagged as female, then the lore tag would be valid
Lore tags have nothing to do with "what's going on under there"

If they are purely based on identity and not body, then the more obscure lore tags should have double-digit usage at most, since vanishingly few creators ever specify their characters gender identity is a "andromorph". Even if a few such cases exist, we don't have lore tags for any nonbinary identities, even ones that are far more common than that. So why should we have one for that niche identity?

Further, currently those tags are applied in the way Wanni and Watsit said: indiscriminately to thousands of characters based on what the tagger assumes is "going on under there", often without the author ever specifying such. It would be an enormous effort to undo what they've done.

watsit said:
e.g. an androgynous character being tagged ambiguous_gender, but the artist/creator says they're supposed to have a penis with no breasts or vulva, they would be tagged male_(lore) irrespective of their gender identity that we may or may not know

So even if we know a character's identity is nonbinary, and their dick isn't visible, they are still supposed to get male_(lore) stuck on them if we know they have a dick?

We literally can't avoid getting misgendered at all, even in the stupid lore system people promised would help with that. Awesome.

listlesssky said:
So even if we know a character's identity is nonbinary, and their dick isn't visible, they are still supposed to get male_(lore) stuck on them if we know they have a dick?

Like I said, we're being told two different things about these tags. On the one hand, we're told they apply based on identity irrespective of what genitalia or physical characteristics they're meant to have. And on the other, we're told they apply based on what genitalia or physical characteristics they're meant to have.

In the latter case, it wouldn't be about a character's gender, but physical sexual characteristics. So a nonbinary character would be tagged nonbinary_(lore) for people to know they identify as NB, but would also be tagged male_(lore), female_(lore), or whatever else based on their sexual characteristics if known, so people will know what to expect to see from the character when they're in some level of undress in other images. A character owner can also not specify what genitalia they have if they don't want that to be a thing for people to care about, and male_(lore), female_(lore), etc, wouldn't be tagged.

listlesssky said:
So even if we know a character's identity is nonbinary, and their dick isn't visible, they are still supposed to get male_(lore) stuck on them if we know they have a dick?

We literally can't avoid getting misgendered at all, even in the stupid lore system people promised would help with that. Awesome.

Tagging on this site is mostly, and mainly focused on visible traits.

Things like gender identity are like, within the same realm as things like personality, both arent really something that falls under the site's tagging as far as my knowledge about this site goes. This isn't the same as an oc ref sheet or other site's tagging like fur affinity's. Hope I didn't make the conversation worse because I'm not that knowledgable.

watsit said:
So people will know what to expect to see from the character when they're in some level of undress in other images. A character owner can also not specify what genitalia they have if they don't want that to be a thing for people to care about, and male_(lore), female_(lore), etc, wouldn't be tagged.

Why would you need to preemptively know the genitals of a character in a sfw work, to the point it overrides an artist's desire to have their gender labelled correctly in the lore? If you don't want to see a given kind of genitals, you should already have them blacklisted. "Simply never show your character in any sexual situations or all sfw art of them will be tagged male too" is not reasonable.

dinbyy said:
Tagging on this site is mostly, and mainly focused on visible traits.

Normal tags are, but we're talking about 'lore' tags which are not. People claimed they would help with the issue of trans characters getting tagged with genders they don't identify as. Apparently that was just bs, though.

listlesssky said:
Why would you need to preemptively know the genitals of a character in a sfw work, to the point it overrides an artist's desire to have their gender labelled correctly in the lore?

Setting aside the dual-meaning ambiguity with the tags, it wouldn't be labeling their gender, but their known physical sexual characteristics when they're different from what we see. A character being a trans man or a trans woman (or trans in general, or nonbinary, or any other gender identity tag the site adds in the future) would be tagged as such regardless, and no one here's arguing against that.

listlesssky said:
If you don't want to see a given kind of genitals, you should already have them blacklisted.

Someone may not mind what kind of genitals they have, but just like to know what to expect in other posts with the character. Even if someone doesn't have a preference for the genitals the character has, that doesn't necessarily mean they want to blacklist art of the character when they happen to be visible.

watsit said:
Setting aside the dual-meaning ambiguity with the tags, it wouldn't be labeling their gender, but their known physical sexual characteristics when they're different from what we see. A character being a trans man or a trans woman (or trans in general, or nonbinary, or any other gender identity tag the site adds in the future) would be tagged as such regardless, and no one here's arguing against that.

People with nonbinary or trans woman characters and especially sonas do not want to be referred to as "male". Even if you claim it means something special other than gender in this context. I don't know why this is so hard to understand. That is a word that, by all normal definitions, describes a gender they are not, a box they get shoved into their entire life. Instead of tagging sfw nonbinary characters with a dick "male_(lore)", why not just use "penis_(lore)" if it really is just referring to sexual anatomy and not gender?

We just barely tolerate being tagged 'male' in normal tags for the sake of preserving TWYS. But there's no excuse for it in the lore tags. "I'm curious about their genitals" is not a sufficient excuse to not respect their wishes, because you can satisfy that curiosity by just clicking on the character's main tag.

listlesssky said:
Instead of tagging sfw nonbinary characters with a dick "male_(lore)", why not just use "penis_(lore)" if it really is just referring to sexual anatomy and not gender?

Same reason we tag characters male/female/etc to begin with, instead of just using penis, vulva, etc. It says more about what a character has and doesn't have in their totality than individual tags can convey. What set of tags could someone use that would be largely equivalent to male? "penis -vulva -breasts" wouldn't work since that would exclude most male posts also have a female or intersex character. Even if we had no_vulva and no_breasts tags to say a given character doesn't have a vulva or breasts, "penis no_vulva no_breasts" wouldn't work if we can't see they have no vulva or breasts, it would also match "gynomorph andromorph" or "gynomorph ambiguous_gender" posts without a male character.

listlesssky said:
Instead of tagging sfw nonbinary characters with a dick "male_(lore)", why not just use "penis_(lore)" if it really is just referring to sexual anatomy and not gender?

This.. this isn't how lore tags work? How has this gotten so off the rails? Lore tags should never be forced on a character if that isn't their identity

They are specifically independent of anything in the post, minus the exception of if what's depicted in the post and tagged on the post matches the character's identity, to avoid doubling up on tags

watsit said:
Same reason we tag characters male/female/etc to begin with, instead of just using penis, vulva, etc. It says more about what a character has and doesn't have in their totality than individual tags can convey. What set of tags could someone use that would be largely equivalent to male? "penis -vulva -breasts" wouldn't work since that would exclude most male posts also have a female or intersex character. Even if we had no_vulva and no_breasts tags to say a given character doesn't have a vulva or breasts, "penis no_vulva no_breasts" wouldn't work if we can't see they have no vulva or breasts, it would also match "gynomorph andromorph" or "gynomorph ambiguous_gender" posts without a male character.

I don't think that answers the question about lore tags really, though I'm also fairly sure lore tags are entirely up to the artist and independent of visible or known traits.

watsit said:
Same reason we tag characters male/female/etc to begin with, instead of just using penis, vulva, etc.

This doesn't answer why it's necessary to convey this in the lore tags of a sfw post with no visible genitals or anatomy though. As I said, if people are curious the rest of the art of the character is one single click away. One less click in a fairly specific situation is less important than not forcibly misgendering every nonbinary character on the site.

donovan_dmc said:
This.. this isn't how lore tags work? How has this gotten so off the rails? Lore tags should never be forced on a character if that isn't their identity

They are specifically independent of anything in the post, minus the exception of if what's depicted in the post and tagged on the post matches the character's identity, to avoid doubling up on tags

Tell that to Watsit, not me. They're the one insisting sfw art of nonbinary characters who canonically have a dick should be labelled male_(lore) against the artists wishes.

donovan_dmc said:
This.. this isn't how lore tags work? How has this gotten so off the rails? Lore tags should never be forced on a character if that isn't their identity

They are specifically independent of anything in the post, minus the exception of if what's depicted in the post and tagged on the post matches the character's identity, to avoid doubling up on tags

lore isn't just identity. I mean, we'd still tag canonically biologically related characters with the proper family relationship tags even if the characters had, like, dissociated or been disowned or whatever.

also, the gender categories, gynomorph/andromorph/herm/maleherm especially, aren't really meant to be identities in the first place they're categorisations of gender presentation.

dfn-451 said:
lore isn't just identity. I mean, we'd still tag canonically biologically related characters with the proper family relationship tags even if the characters had, like, dissociated or been disowned or whatever.

also, the gender categories, gynomorph/andromorph/herm/maleherm especially, aren't really meant to be identities in the first place they're categorisations of gender presentation.

There are absolutely characters out there that identify as those, but regardless taking a system meant to satisfy character owners who have in their eyes had an incorrect label forced on their character and ruining it by forcing yet another incorrect label on that character doesn't really help anyone

If they want to just call their character nonbinary and nothing else in the lore tags let them, what does it matter
The other option is actively going against their wishes in a category meant to represent their wishes

dfn-451 said:
also, the gender categories, gynomorph/andromorph/herm/maleherm especially, aren't really meant to be identities in the first place they're categorisations of gender presentation.

These are the ones that give me pause and make me think Watsit might (unfortunately) be right. Or perhaps was right regarding some earlier iteration of the lore system. As I said above these are really not genders that anyone self-identifies as, they're body types. Their existence doesn't make sense if lore gender tags are just for gender identity. But the lore tag pages say they are indeed just for gender identity.

It really does seem like there is some level of administrative mixup on this. For my part, I do 100% support gender lore tags just being used for identity. If you're going to forcibly misgender nonbinary people as 'male' the sake of genital rules in TWYS, at least have the decency to not slap 'male' on the lore tags of sfw nonbinary characters where genitals don't even matter.

As the lore tags stand currently, it's a bit of a mix. Lore tags can be used for when a character has genitals not visible on the current page (like a character who's artist-canonically a maleherm but only visible as a male), but also for the gender identity of a character according to an artist (who in the vast majority of cases is just going to agree with the character owner). Though, that's a mess, since it means you could have a single character tagged herm_(lore) male_(lore) female, based on unseen genitals, gender identity, and visible characteristics. I'm not sure if that's correct, but it does seem to be how they're generally used.

scth said:
but also for the gender identity of a character according to an artist (who in the vast majority of cases is just going to agree with the character owner).

Lore is applied in a list of priority, see the trans (lore) wiki, the others are outdated

listlesssky said:
Physical traits like body type do not imply gender for the purposes of lore tags, the lore pages themself say this repeatedly.

The lore pages say physical traits visible in the post don't influence lore tags, not physical traits in the character owner/artist's conception of the character that aren't depicted in the post. In this sense it is true saying like I did that these traits are "hidden" in the image is sort of inaccurate, they don't exist in the image at all but in the character owner/artist's mind.

listlesssky said:
This is the crux of the issue: Being a gynomorph is a body type relating to physical traits, not a gender.
And the gender tagging page says "Lore tags should only be used when the general category tags do not accurately describe the character's gender.", nothing about physical traits.

This creates a contradiction.

In the rare event of an artist explicitly specifying a character's gender as 'gynomorph' this lore tag would be appropriate.
But I have yet to see such a thing in all my years browsing, and we don't have tags for any other obscure or nontraditional genders except the general 'nonbinary' one.

I agree terms like gynomorph and andromorph are used more in the sense of a body type than a gender identity. But it seems disingenuous to me to say these terms don't convey anything at all about a character's gender. A character may have its gender identity correctly tagged under TWYS or lore tags yet if it is canonically an andromorph or gynormorph and such isn't depicted I think there is a real sense in which we are missing something about its gender presentation that may warrant a lore tag to satisfy said character's owner. An example that comes to mind is terra_(terrathewizard), which is canonically andromorph but frequently tagged as male under TWYS. I believe the character is currently considered nonbinary which admittedly is missing from some of the posts depicting it but I'd rather be able to convey not only the character's gender identity but also intersex characteristics through lore tags to better put character owners at ease here than getting rid of those to avoid what may be common but often harmless mistagging that is in principle solvable.

wanni said:

I agree terms like gynomorph and andromorph are used more in the sense of a body type than a gender identity. But it seems disingenuous to me to say these terms don't convey anything at all about a character's gender. A character may have its gender identity correctly tagged under TWYS or lore tags yet if it is canonically an andromorph or gynormorph and such isn't depicted I think there is a real sense in which we are missing something about its gender presentation that may warrant a lore tag to satisfy said character's owner. An example that comes to mind is terra_(terrathewizard), which is canonically andromorph but frequently tagged as male under TWYS. I believe the character is currently considered nonbinary which admittedly is missing from some of the posts depicting it but I'd rather be able to convey not only the character's gender identity but also intersex characteristics through lore tags to better put character owners at ease here than getting rid of those to avoid what may be common but often harmless mistagging that is in principle solvable.

I see the issue: You don't want the lore tags to just convey gender identity but also body type, which you refer to as "gender presentation" despite that not being what that means.

Gender presentation is about what clothes and other gender signifers like makeup they wear, and typically just means things not physically part of their body. What gender are they presenting themselves as to the world?

Body type (male, female, gynomorph, intersex, etc) has nothing to do with gender identity or presentation, a character with any identity or any presentation may have any body type.

Tagging based on body type makes sense in TWYS with the main tags. But with the lore tags it's useless. If a character's body type is not visible, why is it necessary to tag? As mentioned, anyone curious about that can go see nsfw of that character displaying it in one click.

This is the exaxt opposite of what character owners want. How many times do we have to say "don't give our nonbinary characters lore tags calling them male or female or gynomorph or whatever based on what bits they have"? Many of us already pulled our art based on them getting called those things in TWYS. Even if that is a 'necessary evil' in the main tags, misgendering us in the non-TWYS lore tags to label body types that aren't even visible in a post is not necessary at all, and burns the one olive branch extended to us.

Also as SCTH said: There is also currently no distinction between the use of male_(lore) and other body type lore tags as a body type vs as a gender. If a character has both nonbinary and male lore tags, does that mean they self-identify as both, like some nonbinary people do? Or is one a gender and the other a body type? If a character in sfw art self-identifies as both male and nonbinary, and has a hidden gynomorph body under their clothes, should they get all three lore tags? It's completely unclear right now.

listlesssky said:
I see the issue: You don't want the lore tags to just convey gender identity but also body type, which you refer to as "gender presentation" despite that not being what that means.

Gender presentation is about what clothes and other gender signifers like makeup they wear, and typically just means things not physically part of their body. What gender are they presenting themselves as to the world?

Body type (male, female, gynomorph, intersex, etc) has nothing to do with gender identity or presentation, a character with any identity or any presentation may have any body type.

Tagging based on body type makes sense in TWYS with the main tags. But with the lore tags it's useless. If a character's body type is not visible, why is it necessary to tag? As mentioned, anyone curious about that can go see nsfw of that character displaying it in one click.

Gender presentation may have been a bad choice of terminology by me then. While I agree no particular body type implicates in any gender identity what I'm saying is that particular physical traits may still have gendered connotations. If you think there is absolutely nothing gendered about a penis at all, despite the fact its presence or absence doesn't allows us to deduce anything about someone's identity, I can only imagine that this view would sound unusual to most.

I don't think it is ever mandatory to add any lore tags, they are added according to the wishes of the artists and then character owners. In particular I see lore tags like andromorph, maleherm, etc as meant to give visibility to a character's intersex status that would otherwise not be conveyed by TWYS.

listlesssky said:
This is the exaxt opposite of what character owners want. How many times do we have to say "don't give our nonbinary characters lore tags calling them male or female or gynomorph or whatever based on what bits they have"? Many of us already pulled our art based on them getting called those things in TWYS. Even if that is a 'necessary evil' in the main tags, misgendering us in the non-TWYS lore tags to label body types that aren't even visible in a post is not necessary at all, and burns the one olive branch extended to us.

This sounds just like mistagging to me. If the artist doesn't wants the lore tag to be there it shouldn't be applied.

listlesssky said:
Tagging based on body type makes sense in TWYS with the main tags. But with the lore tags it's useless. If a character's body type is not visible, why is it necessary to tag? As mentioned, anyone curious about that can go see nsfw of that character displaying it in one click.
now.

The issue there is it does nothing for the upload you're looking at though. Most people aren't going to go through a tag just to find that information. They'll assume and move on. Plus different versions of a character can exist, so seeing something like an ambiguous_gender character be explicitly presented as male in another picture doesn't necessarily indicate anything.

Also, body type/lore can change the context of an image. That matters for some people. Like two men kissing or having sex vs a man and a woman.

wanni said:
I don't think it is ever mandatory to add any lore tags, they are added according to the wishes of the artists and then character owners. In particular I see lore tags like andromorph, maleherm, etc as meant to give visibility to a character's intersex status that would otherwise not be conveyed by TWYS.

This sounds just like mistagging to me. If the artist doesn't wants the lore tag to be there it shouldn't be applied.

By this logic, 90% of those tags are misused then because i've essentially never seen an artist explicitly call their trans woman character a 'gynomorph', yet gynomorph_(lore) is arbitrarily added to a massive amount of works with trans_woman_(lore), even if we don't know whether she's actually one (since she could be post-op). Likewise, enormous amounts of nonbinary_(lore) characters have male_(lore) or female_(lore) attached to them based purely on whether the tagger thinks (correctly or not) that they have a dick or pussy, despite the artist or owner never calling them male or female explicitly.

There's a ton of contradictions that result from this dual-usage of these lore tags:

- What happens if a nonbinary character in a sfw art piece canonically has a dick (and therefore should have male_(lore) according to you), but the author doesn't want them to have that tag because they consider it misgendering (and therefore they shouldn't have male_(lore) according to you)?

- What happens if an artist does want a nonbinary character to have both male_(lore) and nonbinary_(lore) because their gender identity includes both, despite their body type being female? Should they get all three lore tags? How would anyone know which tag refers to their body and which to their gender?

A single lore tag simply cannot serve a dual-purpose of being both body-type tags and self-identity gender tag at the same time. If the former is absolutely necessary (and I do not think it is, since non-lore tags already fulfill their purpose), they should be split into separate tags.

popoto said:
Also, body type/lore can change the context of an image. That matters for some people. Like two men kissing or having sex vs a man and a woman.

This is already covered by the non-lore male/female tags, which still follow TWYS and are still applied to sfw art of nonbinary characters. That's why using a nonbinary lore tag and a male/female/etc body type lore tag at the same time is redundant, they already must have a male/female body type non-lore tag.

watsit said:
They do and don't. male_(lore), female_(lore), etc, are for both when a character's sex "in lore" doesn't match what they get tagged through TWYS, and what they identify as. e.g. an androgynous fully clothed character being tagged ambiguous_gender, but the artist/creator says they're supposed to have a penis with no breasts or vulva, they would be tagged male_(lore) irrespective of their gender identity. This is how the tags were originally pitched, and how we've been told to use them, as one of the main points was to help cut down on mistagging herm for characters that don't have a visible vulva and we can instead tag them herm_(lore) with female, male, or gynomorph as appropriate. However, the wikis were written to also say that these lore tags apply based on how the character identifies, irrespective of any genitalia that may or may not be visible. e.g. a character with a visible vulva and breasts, and visibly no penis, being tagged female, but the creator says they identify as a herm, gets tagged herm_(lore).

I've brought up before how this makes the tags pull double-duty, essentially making them pointless since they not only don't say anything about what's visible, but we can't infer what it means about a character.

If this is so, the wiki pages for the lore tags need to be rewritten to make it clearer what their intended use is. They shouldn't be serving multiple functions.

listlesssky said:
By this logic, 90% of those tags are misused then because i've essentially never seen an artist explicitly call their trans woman character a 'gynomorph', yet gynomorph_(lore) is arbitrarily added to a massive amount of works with trans_woman_(lore), even if we don't know whether she's actually one (since she could be post-op). Likewise, enormous amounts of nonbinary_(lore) characters have male_(lore) or female_(lore) attached to them based purely on whether the tagger thinks (correctly or not) that they have a dick or pussy, despite the artist or owner never calling them male or female explicitly.

I don't think an artist has to explicitly call a character a gynomorph for the lore tag to be applicable. The artist having a ref sheet or a history of posts depicting said character like that seems enough to assume this is how they see the character by default. Though if the artist states a wish to have the lore tag removed this should be followed.

Instances of nonbinary characters also tagged male or female by lore don't seem to reach even 400 posts, and this is not even discounting when the tags refer to different characters. While these should be fixed when appropriate it seems far from an alarming issue.

listlesssky said:
There's a ton of contradictions that result from this dual-usage of these lore tags:

- What happens if a nonbinary character in a sfw art piece canonically has a dick (and therefore should have male_(lore) according to you), but the author doesn't want them to have that tag because they consider it misgendering (and therefore they shouldn't have male_(lore) according to you)?

- What happens if an artist does want a nonbinary character to have both male_(lore) and nonbinary_(lore) because their gender identity includes both, despite their body type being female? Should they get all three lore tags? How would anyone know which tag refers to their body and which to their gender?

A single lore tag simply cannot serve a dual-purpose of being both body-type tags and self-identity gender tag at the same time. If the former is absolutely necessary (and I do not think it is, since non-lore tags already fulfill their purpose), they should be split into separate tags.

If an artist doesn't wants a lore tag in their post it simply shouldn't be there. Though if the artist has a history of depicting the character in some way like with a gynomorph body type it seems understandable that users will assume adding the tag is fine.

If an artist feels like it would be appropriate to have 3 lore tags referring to the same character they are free to do so. It would be confusing but seems like an extremely rare edge case in an otherwise decent system.

^ doesn't that just come back to 'the dual usage causes confusion, then'?
Your examples here mix together ¹'the empirical reality of how the artist typically depicts the body of the character' (gynomorph, in this case) with ²'the way the character is asserted to identify themself'.

(this kind of mixup exists within how people talk about identity in general, IMO. So avoiding it may be difficult.)

The wiki definition given seems to indicate only the second definition is what gender-related lore tags are intended to tag, and only when the proposed lore tag conflicts with the TWYS tag.

I see why the first type of description is desirable for searching, though its status would be similar to 'crossgender' -- 'not exactly TWYS, and not exactly lore either'.
I can sort of agree with listlesssky's idea to split them, but it's hard to make a strong case for — I think we mostly want to avoid creating tags with such ambiguous status.

(plus, if we are talking about observing 'how the artist typically draws the character' -- isn't that information that should be the same for every post featuring the character, and so really belongs on a wiki entry? Better post / wiki integration feels like a saner way to address this particular want.
In contrast the 'tiered canons: artist > character_owner > "canon"' system on the page linked by Donovan clearly can result in the 'correct lore tagging' varying between posts with the same character tag.)

wanni said:
if the artist has a history of depicting the character in some way like with a gynomorph body type it seems understandable that users will assume adding the tag is fine.

Even setting aside for the moment the debate about the confusing dual-use nature of the tags: Is this assumption even true?

A character having what you would call a 'gynomorph' body type does not tell you their creator is fine with that word. Most trans women just want to be called women (shocker, I know), not microcategorized with obscure medical terms. If you were to actually ask them, I am not convinced many would say yes. If they were actually comfortable with it, it wouldn't be vanishingly rare for them to describe their own characters with it. Given that, I don't feel like assuming it's fine until proven otherwise is ethical.

Doubly so with mixing the nonbinary lore tag with the male/female lore tag. Like, if you actually asked "hey can I tag all the sfw art of your nonbinary character with male_(lore) because they have a dick" most are going to say "hell no, what?". You're misgendering by-default and tasking the artists with going and cleaning it up.

wanni said:
While these should be fixed when appropriate it seems far from an alarming issue.

Sure there aren't that many right now, but there's also not many lore tagged characters period right now. Hell, less than 1% of works have any gender or body type related lore tag. The system is relatively new, and confusion caused by the contradictory double-use of these tags as both gender identities and body types will only increase as adoption of it grows, so it's important to straighten it out now.

As mentioned before, it's also about extending an olive branch.
"Yeah idc what your character's actual gender is, TWYS says they're male because they have a dick" is already a very sore point with trans creators. Lore tags are a way to amend that a bit, showing the audience their actual gender.

Given this, it's insane to go "Actually we still tag your sfw nonbinary characters as male_(lore) to show everyone they have a dick unless you personally step in and remove it from all of them. Why did we do this? Just in case someone is curious idk. No it's not misgendering I swear, because in this context male_(lore) just refers to their body type, not their gender, despite it also being used as a gender tag in other contexts. It's super clear, trust me bro."

No tag should have two totally contradictory uses, and the policy should not be to misgender nonbinary characters by-default unless there is an extremely good reason like with TWYS.

listlesssky said:
Given this, it's insane to go "Actually we still tag your sfw nonbinary characters as male_(lore) to show everyone they have a dick unless you personally step in and remove it from all of them.

If a tag isn't valid, then a tag isn't valid. They don't personally have to remove it. Just don't remove it if it is valid.

listlesssky said:
Why did we do this? Just in case someone is curious idk. No it's not misgendering I swear, because in this context male_(lore) just refers to their body type, not their gender, despite it also being used as a gender tag in other contexts. It's super clear, trust me bro."

Mischaracterising what people are saying doesn't create an endearing argument. The people acknowledging that these lore tags have a dual meaning as "the physical sexual characteristics a character has, when we can't see them" and "a character's gender identity" are also acknowledging this is a problem. We agree a tag shouldn't have two different meanings (no tag should, lore or not). But we can't just switch it be one meaning exclusively since the other meaning is also useful/desirable, and current uses are a mix of the two. It will require coming up with new tags to have separate tags for separate meanings, as well as going through the existing uses to figure out which one it meant.

watsit said:
If a tag isn't valid, then a tag isn't valid. They don't personally have to remove it. Just don't remove it if it is valid.

What you're saying here disagrees with what wanni said, which is to remove those body type tags if (and only if) the artist says to regardless of whether it technically applies.

watsit said:
The people acknowledging that these lore tags have a dual meaning as "the physical sexual characteristics a character has, when we can't see them" and "a character's gender identity" are also acknowledging this is a problem.

You are not acknowledging that misgendering is a problem, though. And my point with that excerpt is that you have not provided a compelling reason for the former usage pattern to exist that isn't already fulfilled by the non-gender tags, certainly not a reason worth pissing off every trans artist by misgendering all their characters a second time in the very category claimed to help avoid that. Simple curiosity could be sated in a million other ways that do not have such adverse effects.

listlesssky said:
What you're saying here disagrees with what wanni said, which is to remove those body type tags if (and only if) the artist says to regardless of whether it technically applies.

Ultimately tags apply based on their definition (either explicitly as the wiki says, or through a general consensus among people who put in the effort of managing tags (who should also update any erroneous wikis when they're found)), not mere say-so of a user. When it comes to lore tags for indicating gender identity, of course the say-so of the creator is used since that's how gender identity works for fictional characters, and is how they've always been intended to work for trans_(lore), nonbinary_(lore), etc. But it's not universal for all lore tags, for example if a character owner says two siblings are related through adoption (i.e. not blood-related), then incest_(lore) wouldn't apply to them having sex no matter how much the artist or character owner says the tag applies, because that tag is specifically for blood-related family (there are other tags like pseudo_incest_(lore) for adoptive and other non-blood family pairings). The tags being TWYK instead of TWYS doesn't change that tags are used based on their definition, only that we can use external information to satisfy that definition. The dual-meaning of the male_(lore), herm_(lore), etc, tags, is where the problem comes in here, and is something I've complained about in other threads.

listlesssky said:
You are not acknowledging that misgendering is a problem, though.

Not explicitly perhaps, but the underlying cause leading to misgendering is what's being acknowledged, and is something we want to fix all the same.

listlesssky said:
And my point with that excerpt is that you have not provided a compelling reason for the former usage pattern to exist that isn't already fulfilled by the non-gender tags

I explained in this comment why we have tags for a character's physical sexual characteristics as a whole, instead of through individual tags like penis, vulva, etc. I also explained some of the thinking that went into these tags being made in the first place, with the example of herm characters being mistagged as herm when you couldn't see their vulva, tags like herm_(lore) would function to give viewers information about their genital makeup when TWYS would cause them to be tagged gynomorph or female or ambiguous_gender depending on what was visible (the same for male/male_(lore), female/female_(lore), andromorph/female_(lore), etc). You even made a comment later on saying These are the ones that give me pause and make me think Watsit might (unfortunately) be right.

watsit said:
Ultimately tags apply based on their definition

I agree completely, I think what wanni said does lead to a stark contradiction.

watsit said:
Not explicitly perhaps, but the underlying cause leading to misgendering is what's being acknowledged, and is something we want to fix all the same.

Fixing the underlying cause (dual use tags) does not automatically fix misgendering depending on what fix is selected. For example splitting male_(lore) into male_gender_(lore) and male_body_(lore), would still result in nonbinary characters having the term male slapped on them in the lore tags. (It would also be a massive mess in general...)

watsit said:
I also explained some of the thinking that went into these tags being made in the first place, with the example of herm characters being mistagged as herm when you couldn't see their vulva, tags like herm_(lore) would function to give viewers information about their genital makeup when TWYS would cause them to be tagged gynomorph or female or ambiguous_gender depending on what was visible (the same for male/male_(lore), female/female_(lore), andromorph/female_(lore), etc).

Information that exists primarily to ensure proper tagging would be more appropriate on their character page than as a tag itself, wouldn't it? TWYS resulting in varied output in niche cases depending on what body parts are visible is a natural consequence of the system working as intended. If trans women have to suck it up and deal with being tagged "male gynomorphs" due to their genitals, you'll survive a canon-herm being tagged gynomorph due to their lack of visible genitals.

Crudely clarifying whether every herm or nb character has a dick or not even in situations where it doesn't matter by slapping on lore tags is not worth the cost of further alienating trans artists and their allies by misgendering all their characters a second time in the lore category.

watsit said:
You even made a comment later on saying These are the ones that give me pause and make me think Watsit might (unfortunately) be right.

I was saying you were right that tagging body types was likely an intended use of the male/female/etc lore tags, at least at some point, meaning there were two clashing intended uses. I was not saying that I consider that use necessary or relevant.

Dropping the body type usage and simply using these tags as their wiki page specifies is by far the best resolution method.

listlesssky said:
I agree completely, I think what wanni said does lead to a stark contradiction.

Fixing the underlying cause (dual use tags) does not automatically fix misgendering depending on what fix is selected. For example splitting male_(lore) into male_gender_(lore) and male_body_(lore), would still result in nonbinary characters having the term male slapped on them in the lore tags. (It would also be a massive mess in general...)

Information that exists primarily to ensure proper tagging would be more appropriate on their character page than as a tag itself, wouldn't it? TWYS resulting in varied output in niche cases depending on what body parts are visible is a natural consequence of the system working as intended. If trans women have to suck it up and deal with being tagged "male gynomorphs" due to their genitals, you'll survive a canon-herm being tagged gynomorph due to their lack of visible genitals.

These are not comparable cases — using the non-lore tags male gynomorph, if clearly referring to the the same character, (eg. in solo) is absolutely, unambiguously a mistag. Per character, exactly one tag in this category is correct (though exactly which tag is correct may be a subject of debate) -- intersex being the sole exception, which people should, in any case, never apply directly.

Whereas a herm_(lore) being tagged gynomorph if the relevant body part is not visible is unambiguously correct.

I was saying you were right that tagging body types was likely an intended use of the male/female/etc lore tags, at least at some point, meaning there were two clashing intended uses. I was not saying that I consider that use necessary or relevant.

The mods are somewhat obligated to consider it relevant, even if they don't consider it necessary. The desire to search based on such information is clearly present. Curtailing such usage via moderator action is limited by:

• People actually noticing and reporting those who habitually mistag in this way (which I think we can agree, if they sympathize with this usage of the tags in question, they will be less likely to report it)
• Moderator time and energy.

And the situation with that is like this IMO: We have good moderators, but not that many of them, and people on average don't seem to care either way about lore tags.

So I'm not optimistic about the effectiveness of a 'just say no' approach.

I believe the relatively small moderation staff is one reason why mods generally try to co-opt / redirect 'popular mistaggings that appear to have some logical intent behind them' into other tags or some alternative effort.

savageorange said:
Per character, exactly one tag in this category is correct[...]

the sole exception being cases of TF sequence posts that explicitly show the character in more than one gender.

dfn-451 said:
the sole exception being cases of TF.

Okay, if I say 'exactly one tag in this category per sub-image is correct', would you agree with that?

I presume you're referring to 'transformation sequence' images in which the before, between, and after are shown all in the one overall image, ie . the standard 'a tag could apply to any given sub-image' complication.

(EDIT:or possibly s/sub-image/animation frame/ , given a TF animation, I guess.)

savageorange said:
Curtailing such usage via moderator action is limited by mod time and energy

There are only a few hundred instances of each gender lore tag where they are used to tag body type like this, it should not be that troublesome.
The effort to properly apply and validate these body type tags in the way that they want across nearly all sfw nonbinary characters would be orders of magnitude greater than the effort to remove the cases where it's used like this.

Alternative solutions have moderation strain as well, both direct and indirect. Going with a resolution that results in forcing the male/female lore label on sfw trans and nonbinary characters against the artists wishes will result in another wave of DNPs from them and their allies as word gets out, which is itself another strain on moderation resources.

listlesssky said:
There are only a few hundred instances of each gender lore tag where they are used to tag body type like this, it should not be that troublesome.
The effort to properly apply and validate these body type tags in the way that they want across nearly all sfw nonbinary characters would be orders of magnitude greater than the effort to remove the cases where it's used like this.

I take your point on the tagging count.

I also agree about the amount of effort to tag in such a way comprehensively, though I'd add:
We hardly ever manage to tag comprehensively, that doesn't appear to stop people from adopting pet tagging projects of marginal value.

savageorange said:
people adopting pet tagging projects of marginal value.

Honestly, if they were the only issue then none of this would matter. The real crux of the problem is the dual-use nature of the male and female lore tags as both body type and gender tags needs an adminstrative resolution no matter how it's cut. And utimately, there are only really two ways that resolution can go:

- Enforce the current lore page descriptions, ending the use of male/female lore tags for body types: This would require knocking the body type tag off those couple hundred posts, as well as off new ones if it is misused in the future.
This would make trans artists happy but the handful of people using those lore tags as body type indicators sad.

- Overhaul the system (either by splitting the tags or adding entirely new ones) to formally recognize male and female body type lore tags on the wiki pages in some form, allowing them to be placed on sfw art of trans and nb characters despite the artists wishes.
This will still require going through those couple hundred posts and updating them to the new system.
It is also burning the "lore tags can help with misgendering" olive branch by slapping a 'male' or 'female' body lore tag on all their sfw nb or trans characters based on what genitals they have.
Pissing off trans artists and their friends who this site is already on very thin ice with will likely trigger more DNP requests.

Both solutions are flawed, it really comes down to whether a few people who want body type lore tags are higher priority than respecting the wishes of trans artists or not.

I don't know where you're getting the couple hundred number - male_(lore) alone has 22k uses, of which any could be problematic (and it could be extremely difficult to tell which in some cases). You seem to be purely focusing on the trans/nb ones, but that's far from the majority of cases where lore tags are used purely for body type, without asking a character owner. Perhaps that's only different in those cases, but relying on trans or non binary being tagged relies on someone knowing that about the character, or it being mentioned at the source.

I agree that in the cases where a gender preference is listed, by a character owner or artist, that just that preference should be used.

scth said:
Perhaps that's only different in those cases, but relying on trans or non binary being tagged relies on someone knowing that about the character, or it being mentioned at the source.

I would expect that if someone knows enough about a character to be applying male_(lore) based on a non-visible body type, then they likely also know if the character is nonbinary or not. Exceptions that slip through the cracks would likely be rare, and can be fixed as they're noticed.

scth said:
I agree that in the cases where a gender preference is listed, by a character owner or artist, that just that preference should be used.

Of course gender identities should, since identity depends purely on authorial word. The question is whether body type lore tags that ignore gender should, since body types don't.

As mentioned by Watsit, letting artists have the final say in all lore tags is untenable. The example they stated with the incest lore tag illustrates the issue well: If something is incest by definition, but the artist arbitrarily removes the tag anyway for personal reasons, then people who don't want to see incest will not have it filtered out.

Further, letting artists decide if body type lore tags are allowed on their work is unviable whether it's opt-in or opt-out:

- If it's 'opt-out', requiring artists explicit order to remove, it puts the burden on artists to go knock those tags off all their characters manually. And the tags could easily be re-added later by someone who doesn't know the artist's opinion on the matter.

- If it's 'opt-in' the system might as well not even exist, because basically 0 trans or nb character's artists are going to approve giving them a male or female lore label if directly asked, even if you pinky promise it's just about body type and not gender in this specific context.

Basically any form of a body type lore tag system is inherently irreconcilable with their desire to not be misgendered via being labelled male or female.

listlesssky said:
I would expect that if someone knows enough about a character to be applying male_(lore) based on a non-visible body type, then they likely also know if the character is nonbinary or not.

Not really. It's easy to look at a character in other art and see that any time their body type is fully determinable it's male, then tagging male_(lore) on posts is a reasonable step where they're tagged ambiguous_gender or something else (e.g. a femboy being tagged female because you can't see their penis/bulge or lack of breasts and they have a very feminine appearance). In contrast, knowing a character to be nonbinary requires knowing the creator said that about the character, which is not necessarily as easy to find out (it may not be said often, and/or it's mostly mentioned in the post descriptions that aren't copied here, requiring people to look through the sources of posts with the character to see what's said about them).

listlesssky said:
Basically any form of a body type lore tag system is inherently irreconcilable with their desire to not be misgendered, and imo this is enough of a reason for it to not exist.

The current body type non-lore tag system does this too already, so should it also not exist? The only difference with the lore version is that we can tag based on what we know the character to physically be like, rather than what we see the character to physically be like.

The way I see it, the issue isn't with tagging the body types themselves (lore or not), after all the creator is willingly making their character with these physical sexual attributes and telling/showing us what they are (and we consider what anyone or anything looks like to be very important, as this site is focused on visual art), but the issue ends up being that the terms/names used for these pertinent attributes have gendered implications. This is part of the reason why the trans and nonbinary lore tags were added (and possibly more in the future), to express a character's known identity separately from their physical body. If there were reasonable terms to refer to a character's physical sexual attributes that don't imply a gender, I'm sure they could be considered, but I don't think society is at a point yet where such terms exist yet, unfortunately.

savageorange said:
^ doesn't that just come back to 'the dual usage causes confusion, then'?
Your examples here mix together ¹'the empirical reality of how the artist typically depicts the body of the character' (gynomorph, in this case) with ²'the way the character is asserted to identify themself'.

Considering gynomorph is more commonly used in the sense of a body type I assumed my meaning was clear enough. But I agree even in the clearer cases there is still some ambiguity in how we use these terms that may need to be addressed somehow.

listlesssky said:
Even setting aside for the moment the debate about the confusing dual-use nature of the tags: Is this assumption even true?

A character having what you would call a 'gynomorph' body type does not tell you their creator is fine with that word. Most trans women just want to be called women (shocker, I know), not microcategorized with obscure medical terms. If you were to actually ask them, I am not convinced many would say yes. If they were actually comfortable with it, it wouldn't be vanishingly rare for them to describe their own characters with it. Given that, I don't feel like assuming it's fine until proven otherwise is ethical.

Doubly so with mixing the nonbinary lore tag with the male/female lore tag. Like, if you actually asked "hey can I tag all the sfw art of your nonbinary character with male_(lore) because they have a dick" most are going to say "hell no, what?". You're misgendering by-default and tasking the artists with going and cleaning it up.

My point was that people will tend to assume it is fine to add the lore tag, not that it actually is fine to do so as I don't expect them to go out of their way to look for any statement by the artist about how to address their character. I imagine that at least one such statement would exist if the artist has any strong feelings about the topic but In the lack of any statement I would say it is fine to add the tags. If I see a character consistently depicted as an andromorph I would be fine with adding andromorph_(lore) to sfw depictions of it with no other information available. I'm open to hear if this is a bad approach if others think so.

listlesssky said:
As mentioned before, it's also about extending an olive branch.
"Yeah idc what your character's actual gender is, TWYS says they're male because they have a dick" is already a very sore point with trans creators. Lore tags are a way to amend that a bit, showing the audience their actual gender.

Given this, it's insane to go "Actually we still tag your sfw nonbinary characters as male_(lore) to show everyone they have a dick unless you personally step in and remove it from all of them. Why did we do this? Just in case someone is curious idk. No it's not misgendering I swear, because in this context male_(lore) just refers to their body type, not their gender, despite it also being used as a gender tag in other contexts. It's super clear, trust me bro."

I mean, the artist doesn't needs to step in here, just having any public statement about how to address their character somewhere is enough. And even then I'd say male_(lore) is more commonly used in the sense of an identity than a body type. Good judgment tells me adding male_(lore) to a character already tagged with nonbinary_(lore) and ambiguous_gender can create more confusion than anything else and so I wouldn't go out of my way to do that. I could see a case to add an intersex lore tag to a character already tagged with nonbinary_(lore) and ambiguous_gender since the usual complaint is of their intersex traits being glossed over however.
This leads back into the ambiguity of the lore tags but again my intent with adding them would be mainly giving visibility to intersex characters and not potentially misgendering known nonbinary characters. Still my intent is not a rule so I can see where your worries come from.

watsit said:
The current body type non-lore tag system does this too already, so should it also not exist? The only difference with the lore version is that we can tag based on what we know the character to physically be like, rather than what we see the character to physically be like.

The core of my view is that this difference is enough to tip the scale on relevance. The non-lore system is already a reason many trans artists and allies pull their works from the site. For those who didn't pull them, it's considered a necessary evil that's begrudgingly tolerated because changing it would be far too hard at this point, and knowing what genitals and body type a character has in a picture with those elements is important. But knowing those things in a picture that doesn't include any of those parts is a step too far into unnecessarity, pouring oil on the fire for marginal curation gains.

watsit said:
The way I see it, the issue isn't with tagging the body types themselves (lore or not), after all the creator is willingly making their character with these physical sexual attributes and telling/showing us what they are ... the issue ends up being that the terms/names used for these pertinent attributes have gendered implications.

Most nonbinary people do not think of our body as male or female in the first place, just as 'a body' that may or may not have certain traits like a dick. Most trans women just think of themselves as having a female body, potentially one with a dick if they aren't post-op. If you called a nonbinary person or trans woman 'male bodied' irl then saying they would not be happy with you is quite an understatement, especially if they've had significant body changes due to HRT or surgery.

watsit said:
This is part of the reason why the trans and nonbinary lore tags were added (and possibly more in the future), to express a character's known identity separately from their physical body. If there were reasonable terms to refer to a character's physical sexual attributes that don't imply a gender, I'm sure they could be considered, but I don't think society is at a point yet where such terms exist yet, unfortunately.

This is a purely theoretical topic since the current gender tagging system is set in stone, any change to it would be impractical.
But i'll bite anyway because I find the idea interesting to map out:
It is not possible to make a TWYS system that avoids ever labelling a single nonbinary character male/female, but you can make one that is far better the current system (which misgenders every nb character like that) without needing any uninvented terms, and it basically just takes one modification to the current gender system.

---

(Again: I am not actually proposing this because redoing the whole gender system now would be insane! Just demonstrating how such a system is possible.)

Right now the site uses the "genitals? -> breasts? -> body type?" hierarchy to tag male/female/gyno/etc, where body type isn't used the way it's been used in this thread (as shorthand for whether characters have breasts, a dick, etc). Instead it a holistic judgment based on how the character looks and presents themselves, factoring in visible gendered aspects other than genitals and breasts (ex. eyelashes, lipstick, muscle distribution, hips, etc).

In another world, the order of these traits in the chart could've easily been altered.
For example, the ordering "body type? -> genitals? -> breasts?" creates a situation where a character's holistic look is the primary factor considered first when tagging male/female/etc.
The advantage of this is that it largely nullifies the cases where gender identity doesn't match tagged gender, since most characters that identify as a gender choose a general presentation that matches it.
In such a system the tagging of cis non-intersex characters is essentially unaltered.
"male/female/ambiguous_gender +/- penis/vulva +/- breasts" would let you include or exclude essentially any kind of character that is currently sorted into any category of the current gender system, eliminating the need for many specialized gender tags like gynomorph or male_herm in the process.
Compare to the current system where in order to return results with exclusively one gender (ex. 'male'), one must do the cumbersome 'male -female -gynomorph -andromorph -herm -maleherm -intersex'

It'd also be more respectful. A trans woman with a very feminine body type, breasts, and a dick would just be 'female breasts penis'. An androgynous character with a dick and no breasts would just be 'ambiguous_gender penis -breasts'. Or, it could be expanded to include androgynous as a fourth 'real' gender term and leave ambiguous_gender as a fallback case.

Either way, this limits the nonbinary characters being misgendered to purely those whose holistic presentation looks strongly gendered as male or female. Nonbinary people who present this way very frequently identify as both male/female and nonbinary anyway, so not all of them would be a fail-case. Likewise, in SFW art clothes provide ample space to visually signal androgyny so there would be far fewer fail-cases than the current system. Art of nonbinary characters with their whole body visible and no obvious indicators of androgyny would still be largely tagged male or female under this priority system, but that's a necessary sacrifice that is by-definition unavoidable in any TWYS system: since nonbinary characters can look like anything there is no sight-based system you could use to correctly categorize every single one of them. Being perfect isn't possible, but being more accurate than the current system absolutely is.

---

But of course, debating whether such a system would be superior is pointless because it's far too late to change something this fundamental about how gender is tagged. My point is simply to demonstrate that such a system is fully possible, and does not require terms that haven't been invented yet. All we can do is live with the current system that misgenders every nonbinary character instead of just some of them, and avoid making the situation worse by shoving it into places it isn't strictly needed for basic operations, like the lore tags.

wanni said:

I don't expect them to go out of their way to look for any statement by the artist about how to address their character. I imagine that at least one such statement would exist if the artist has any strong feelings about the topic but In the lack of any statement I would say it is fine to add the tags.

...

I mean, the artist doesn't needs to step in here, just having any public statement about how to address their character somewhere is enough.

But if you don't expect people to go out of their way to look for statements, then artists putting out a statement wouldn't change anything since basically nobody would see it (especially if they primarily use a feed based site like twitter where it'll be buried rapidly).
This once again leaves the onus on artists to go knock the tag off all their characters perpetually.
And leaving this up to the artist at all still suffers from the issue Watsit mentioned where their wishes conflict with what a piece actually contains or implies, causing inconsistency.

wanni said:
Good judgment tells me adding male_(lore) to a character already tagged with nonbinary_(lore) and ambiguous_gender can create more confusion than anything else and so I wouldn't go out of my way to do that
...
Still my intent is not a rule so I can see where your worries come from.

I'm not worried about your intent at all, i'm worried that others have expressed they do not agree with that interpretation of how to use the tag in the first place, stating they think male/female/etc lore tags should be used to indicate the body type of nonbinary characters.

The fact there is no consensus on how to use that set of lore tags even among those who think they should exist is a point against their existence imo.

listlesssky said:
But if you don't expect people to go out of their way to look for statements, then artists putting out a statement wouldn't change anything since basically nobody would see it (especially if they primarily use a feed based site like twitter where it'll be buried rapidly).
This once again leaves the onus on artists to go knock the tag off all their characters perpetually.
And leaving this up to the artist at all still suffers from the issue Watsit mentioned where their wishes conflict with what a piece actually contains or implies, causing inconsistency.

I don't expect the average user to go out of their way for that but I do think the more attentive users will find these statements. They could be in a pinned post, a ref sheet, post tags or an FA profile to not be so easily buried away. But if the artist leaves no reasonable way for others to learn of their wishes it seems odd for them to complain about the violation of said wishes.

listlesssky said:
I'm not worried about your intent at all, i'm worried that others have expressed they do not agree with that interpretation of how to use the tag in the first place, stating they think male/female/etc lore tags should be used to indicate the body type of nonbinary characters.

The fact there is no consensus on how to use that set of lore tags even among those who think they should exist is a point against their existence imo.

People already admitted there is some ambiguity in the interpretation of the lore tags that may need to be addressed with something like a wiki rewrite. I don't see the male and female lore tags getting removed since they can often be used for benign elucidative uses but more like having their usage conditions more specified.

wanni said:

I don't expect the average user to go out of their way for that but I do think the more attentive users will find these statements. They could be in a pinned post, a ref sheet, post tags or an FA profile to not be so easily buried away. But if the artist leaves no reasonable way for others to learn of their wishes it seems odd for them to complain about the violation of said wishes.

If by your own admission the average user won't seek those out, that means it will be misapplied the majority of the time.

And again: Go ask some artists if they're fine having their nonbinary character given the male_(lore) tag. Assuming they're fine with it until proven otherwise is insane when the overwhelming majority of nonbinary people do not want to be called male in any context and barely tolerate the non-lore version.

And again (again): All of this is irrelevant because lore tags still can't be left purely up to the artists for the reasons Watsit said.

wanni said:
People already admitted there is some ambiguity in the interpretation of the lore tags that may need to be addressed with something like a wiki rewrite. I don't see the male and female lore tags getting removed.

The ambiguity was originally "Should they be used for gender identity or body type?"

Recent messages have introduced a second schism of "If they are used for body type, should they also be applied to nonbinary characters?"

Which led to a third schism of "Should artists have the final say on all lore tabs?"

Which lead to the fourth schism of "If artists should have the final say on lore tabs, then given how most trans and nb artists feel about misgendering, should lore tags that misgender their characters be opt-in or opt-out?"

Simply declaring their current wiki descriptions the full definition of those tags ends all four debates instantly, and does so in a way that respects trans artists.

listlesssky said:
If by your own admission the average user won't seek those out, that means it will be misapplied the majority of the time.

And again: Go ask some artists if they're fine having their nonbinary character given the male_(lore) tag. Assuming they're fine with it until proven otherwise is insane when the overwhelming majority of nonbinary people do not want to be called male in any context and barely tolerate the non-lore version.

And again (again): All of this is irrelevant because lore tags still can't be left purely up to the artists for the reasons Watsit said.

Considering the average user barely edits tags I'm not sure this would be any worse than any other mistagging prone content.
I already said I wouldn't add male_(lore) or female_(lore) to a nonbinary_(lore) character due to the first two also being used often in the sense of an identity, though I see less of a problem with the intersex lore tags. Not adding a tag even if it were valid is almost never a misdeed so it sounds like the prudent choice when in doubt.

Compare to the current system where in order to return results with exclusively one gender (ex. 'male'), one must do the cumbersome 'male -female -gynomorph -andromorph -herm -maleherm -intersex'

• This is true specifically for all such tags that imply intersex (== gynomorph andromorph herm maleherm).
• For male or female, you can use a simpler query like this: male -female -intersex
• intersex itself is only an umbrella term and any results that would be returned from a theoretical 'intersex only' query can be expected to be mistags.

Simply declaring their current wiki descriptions the full definition of those tags ends all four debates instantly, and does so in a way that respects trans artists.

.. providing that this declaration were to be both in a news banner and in the wiki page itself, IMO.

This may also require follow-up when people create 'work-around' tags. I may overestimate the popularity of the 'body-type' usage; IMO that would be the main determining factor of whether that problem would come up.

wanni said:
I already said I wouldn't add male_(lore) or female_(lore) to a nonbinary_(lore) character

Like I said it's not that I don't trust you, but clearly Watsit and probably others clearly disagree with you and think those need to be tagged.
We just can't have ambiguous guidelines, much less ambiguous guidelines on the usage of tags that themselves have double-meanings.

savageorange said:
.. providing that this declaration were to be both in a news banner and in the wiki page itself, IMO.

Eh? I mean, the usage style that would be getting deprecated (using those gender tags as body-type tags) isn't stated as a valid use anywhere in the gender tag guidelines nor the wiki pages.
I can't imagine many users even know about that usage unless they're very in the know anyway, and they're not that widely used, so it probably wouldn't need to be a big deal.

savageorange said:
This may also require follow-up when people create 'work-around' tags.

I thought creating lore tags required special permissions?

But either way, the core issues are the dual-use of the current tags and the misgendering.
If body-type tags don't misgender characters and have a clear separation from gender tags then they wouldn't cause any issues.

Hell, we'd need to do renaming and cleanup anyway because a couple lore tags are not genders at all and can only refer to body types defined by physical traits like 'gynomorph' and 'herm'*, yet their wiki pages call them genders and insist they don't factor in physical traits.

IMO there's two main ways it could be done, both of which involve adding a suffix to denote whether a given lore tag is about body type or gender:

Maybe the question of how to handle these double-use lore tags should be a different thread formally raising the issue tbh,
since the consensus here seems to be that the double-use tags are an issue and that wasn't really the focus of the original question in this one.

*_{Yes, in theory someone could self-identify their gender as 'gynomorph' or 'herm' instead of just calling their body that.
But I have yet to ever see it used this way, and there aren't tags for any other micro-gender labels like bigender, genderfluid, etc, so there probably shouldn't be gynomorph_gender or herm_gender lore tags.}

listlesssky said:
I mean, the usage style that would be getting deprecated (using those gender tags as body-type tags) isn't stated as a valid use anywhere in the gender tag guidelines nor the wiki pages.

That is stated as a valid use in the wikis:

gynomorph_(lore) says:
Tag for characters that are deemed to be or identify as gynomorph by the artist, regardless of the physical or biological sex they are depicted as in the post.

Note the "or", not "and". Characters that are deemed to be gynomorph for tagging purposes, for example, means they are deemed to have breasts, a penis, and no vulva. The "physical or biological sex they are depicted as in the post" is talking about the TWYS guidelines for the visible elements depicted, that is you don't need to see a penis or breasts in the post to tag gynomorph_(lore) like you would for tagging gynomorph. It is saying that the tag applies when the character is otherwise intended to be a gynomorph for tagging, when they can't be tagged it by TWYS (as well as when they identify as a gynomorph, which wasn't part of the discussion leading up to these lore tags being added). The same wording is used for male_(lore) and others.

In either case, it's not "body type", per se, but physical sexual characteristics. That's an important distinction because, for example, a character with male physical sexual characteristics can also have a feminine body type, which is what femboy covers. So 'masculine/feminine_body_(lore)' as mentioned later in your suggestion could be easily confused for tomboys, femboys, etc, irrespective of their physical sexual characteristics (and we don't have terms for herms, maleherms, andromorphs, and gynomorphs that would fit here).

watsit said:
The wiki

It does say the qualification is "characters that are deemed to be or identify as gynomorph by the artist"
I think I see the issue. You seem to have interpreted that as:

• (deemed to be) or (identify as a gynomorph by the artist)

instead of

• deemed to (be or identify as) a gynomorph by the artist

But the first is not grammatically correct. "Identify" should be "identified", and the "deemed to be" clause is incomplete: it should be "deemed to be gynomorph".
The latter is grammatically correct because both "deemed to be gynomorph by the artist" and "deemed to identify as gynomorph by the artist" are both grammatically correct.

It also puts all judgment on the artist, which leaves no room for your interpretation of the wiki guidelines.

watsit said:
In either case, it's not "body type", per se, but physical sexual characteristics

I'm using "body type" here to mean exactly that, not general gendered aesthetic or vibes.

The wiki uses contradictory terms for what you mentioned, referring to it as 'gender expression' and 'presentation' in a number of places including on the femboy page, which also mentions "body type" to say that only body types sans breasts qualify for it.

"Physical sexual characteristics" does not exactly roll of the tongue nor is it easily shortened to fit into a tag suffix, and calling it 'sex' is not only inaccurate (gynomorph isn't a sex in and of itself, it's a specific combination of sexual characteristics) but it's also basically just as misgendering as the current system.

watsit said:
and we don't have terms for herms, maleherms, andromorphs, and gynomorphs that would fit here

We don't need them, as I said those already describe body types. None of them describe a gender which means their application isn't misgendering anyone, and they don't need a _gender version because they don't suffer the dual-definition issue due to being both a gender and body type.

listlesssky said:
Eh? I mean, the usage style that would be getting deprecated (using those gender tags as body-type tags) isn't stated as a valid use anywhere in the gender tag guidelines nor the wiki pages.
I can't imagine many users even know about that usage unless they're very in the know anyway, and they're not that widely used, so it probably wouldn't need to be a big deal.

My thought process was:

• It would be good to have it explicitly in the wiki, both for the clarity of anyone who bothers to look it up, and to, in advance, discredit any claims that mod actions on the subject are biased or arbitrary. IIRC we have other such explicit 'This is not to be used for X or Y scenarios' disclaimers on other disputed/controversial tags.
• The kind of people who are doing it out of sloppiness or wilful ignorance will not read the wiki, though, hence making an announcement makes it harder for them to excuse their own behaviour. Admittedly whether this is necessary depends on how many taggers are involved -- I acknowledge that you don't think there are many.
• There are also people who ignore announcements. They are beyond help in this matter, I guess.

savageorange said:

• There are also people who ignore announcements. They are beyond help in this matter, I guess.

news banners, which are really the only type of announcements the site has show up on every page of the site so they're pretty hard to ignore
How widespread they will be seen also means they shouldn't be used for small things
Changes in how things are tagged is a VERY small thing

• less than 10% of the site has ever edited a post (forum #463461)
• the top 10 users are responsible for 27.5% of all post changes (forum #463044)
• the next 40 users make up 17.2% (forum #463044)
• 50 people are responsible for almost 50% of all edits (44.7%)

I'd take a good bet on that top 50 being avid forum users, and I'd also bet on anyone that has more than a handfull of edited posts under their belt at least know the forums exist, so something here has a decent chance to get seen by them
I know I wouldn't want to invite all of the thousands of users a day into the forums via a news banner, that sounds like an absolute shitfest

listlesssky said:
It does say the qualification is "characters that are deemed to be or identify as gynomorph by the artist"
I think I see the issue. You seem to have interpreted that as:

• (deemed to be) or (identify as a gynomorph by the artist)

instead of

• deemed to (be or identify as) a gynomorph by the artist

But the first is not grammatically correct. "Identify" should be "identified", and the "deemed to be" clause is incomplete: it should be "deemed to be gynomorph".
The latter is grammatically correct because both "deemed to be gynomorph by the artist" and "deemed to identify as gynomorph by the artist" are both grammatically correct.

I think we're on the same page with the latter being more correct. In this case, "deemed to be a gynomorph by the artist" means the character has the appropriate bits to be tagged gynomorph if they were visible, which is different from the character identifying as a gynomorph (giving two options: "deemed to be" or "identify as" a gynomorph by the artist).

listlesssky said:
It also puts all judgment on the artist, which leaves no room for your interpretation of the wiki guidelines.

The artist's intent is applicable to TWYK (and lore tags more specifically), which I never disagreed with. "The artist says <this> about the character, lore tags defined to apply to <this> should be tagged" is how TWYK and lore tags work. But that's different from "the artist says this lore tag doesn't apply even when the information given by that same artist matches the tag", which isn't what the wiki says.

listlesssky said:
The wiki uses contradictory terms for what you mentioned, referring to it as 'gender expression' and 'presentation' in a number of places including on the femboy page, which also mentions "body type" to say that only body types sans breasts qualify for it.

femboy is a bit more broad than just "feminine body, penis, no vulva, no breasts", yes. It does include it though, which I was using to illustrate the point of a character's "body type" being different from their "sexual physical characteristics".

listlesssky said:
"Physical sexual characteristics" does not exactly roll of the tongue nor is it easily shortened to fit into a tag suffix, and calling it 'sex' is not only inaccurate (gynomorph isn't a sex in and of itself, it's a specific combination of sexual characteristics) but it's also basically just as misgendering as the current system.

Which is why we still use the words we do, because there isn't anything else that can work reasonably well and they get the point across the vast majority of the time.

listlesssky said:
We don't need them, as I said those already describe body types. None of them describe a gender which means their application isn't misgendering anyone, and they don't need a _gender version because they don't suffer the dual-definition issue due to being both a gender and body type.

You said earlier:

listlesssky said:
Yes, in theory someone could self-identify their gender as 'gynomorph' or 'herm' instead of just calling their body that.

We are dealing with art and fiction here, there's absolutely nothing stopping a character from identifying as a herm or gynomorph if that's what the creator wants. Even outside of fiction, I don't think there's anything stopping anyone from identifying that way, even if we aren't aware of someone who does.

In either case, this would create a problem if we left gynomorph_(lore), herm_(lore), andromorph_(lore), and maleherm_(lore) as referring to the physical body (the TWYK counterparts to the TWYS gynomorph, herm, andromorph, and maleherm tags), while male_(lore) and female_(lore) refer to gender identity (not the TWYK counterparts to the TWYS male and female tags, not referring to their physical body). When there's a pattern with related tags like this, breaking that pattern will lead to inadvertent mistagging and confusion.

donovan_dmc said:

• the top 10 users are responsible for 27.5% of all post changes (forum #463044)
• the next 40 users make up 17.2% (forum #463044)
• 50 people are responsible for almost 50% of all edits (44.7%)

Interesting. I probably read those stats before in the link you gave, .. and promptly forgot them ;) But even given my theory 'tagging here runs on a combination of highly obsessive behaviour and boredom', I would have never guessed the distribution was that extreme.

watsit said:
Which is why we still use the words we do, because there isn't anything else that can work reasonably well and they get the point across the vast majority of the time.

Yeah, i'm just trying to establish a general terminology for the sake of this conversation because like I said, the wiki is very inconsistent about the terms used for all this.
I think body type = collection of physical sexual traits (ex. TWYS nonlore male/female/gynomorph/etc) is simple though, and makes it very clear we're talking about their physical sexual traits and not their general aesthetic or their self-identified gender.

watsit said:
We are dealing with art and fiction here, there's absolutely nothing stopping a character from identifying as a herm or gynomorph if that's what the creator wants. Even outside of fiction, I don't think there's anything stopping anyone from identifying that way, even if we aren't aware of someone who does.

I addressed this earlier. People can in theory identify as 'gynomorph gender' instead of just calling their body gynomorph, but vanishingly few do even in fiction.
Bigender, genderfluid, etc are all far more common gender identities, and none of them have a dedicated lore tag, so 'gynomorph_gender' shouldn't get one either.

watsit said:
In either case, this would create a problem if we left gynomorph_(lore), herm_(lore), andromorph_(lore), and maleherm_(lore) as referring to the physical body while male_(lore) and female_(lore) refer to gender identity (not the TWYK counterparts to the TWYS male and female tags, not referring to their physical body). When there's a pattern with related tags like this, breaking that pattern will lead to inadvertent mistagging and confusion.

I agree, that'd be pretty confusing. That's why I proposed adding a _body or _gender suffix to all those tags in both proposals, and making sure body and gender tags don't use the same word.

Ex. with the first proposal I mentioned:

• male_(lore) becomes male_body_(lore) mirroring the non-lore 'male', and a new tag is added for man_gender_(lore)
• female_(lore) becomes female_body_(lore) mirroring the non-lore 'female', and a new tag is added for woman_gender_(lore)
• nonbinary_(lore) becomes nonbinary_gender_(lore), no tag is added for nonbinary_body_(lore) since there's no such thing
• gynomorph_(lore) becomes gynomorph_body_(lore), and since there's no common gender counterpart (as discussed above) no tag is added for gynomorph_gender_(lore)
• herm_(lore) becomes herm_body_(lore), fitting the pattern, and again since there's no common gender counterpart no gender tag is added for it
• same for male_herm and intersex

This achieves most of the goals:

• Completely eliminates the dual-use issue
• Keeps the definition of 'male = a physical body type not a gender' consistent across the archive
• Makes the gender vs body type tags distinct and clear in their different meanings

It doesn't perfectly solve misgendering, but doing so is impossible without redoing the entire gender tag system from the ground up. And saying a nonbinary person has a male_body is still much better than the current system of saying they are 'male_(lore)' without any specifier making it clear it's unrelated to gender. This also adds flexibility, since if concerns still remain the tags could be renamed later to minimize that even further.

listlesssky said:
Ex. with the first proposal I mentioned:

• male_(lore) becomes male_body_(lore) mirroring the non-lore 'male', and a new tag is added for man_gender_(lore)
• female_(lore) becomes female_body_(lore) mirroring the non-lore 'female', and a new tag is added for woman_gender_(lore)
• nonbinary_(lore) becomes nonbinary_gender_(lore), no tag is added for nonbinary_body_(lore) since there's no such thing
• gynomorph_(lore) becomes gynomorph_body_(lore), and since there's no common gender counterpart (as discussed above) no tag is added for gynomorph_gender_(lore)
• herm_(lore) becomes herm_body_(lore), fitting the pattern, and again since there's no common gender counterpart no gender tag is added for it
• same for male_herm and intersex

Not unreasonable, I suppose. Not too keen on the *_body suffix since it's about the genitalia and breasts (or lack thereof) more than the body as a whole, but maybe something else can be thought of. In either case, then the question becomes when these *_gender_(lore) tags apply. Currently, male_(lore) should not be tagged for a character when male is (regardless if it's for their physical body or gender identity), and would make sense for male_body_(lore) to be the same. But should man_gender_(lore) apply when the character is tagged male already? Should man_gender_(lore) be tagged if the character is also tagged male_body_(lore)?

In the case that a character should be tagged man_gender_(lore) only when they aren't tagged male_body_(lore)/male, isn't that already what trans_man_(lore) basically is? If not, should man_gender_(lore) apply when the character is already tagged trans_man_(lore)?

watsit said:
Not too keen on the *_body suffix since it's about the genitalia and breasts (or lack thereof) more than the body as a whole, but maybe something else can be thought of.

Sure, if people have other proposals for the names of any of these tags i'd love to hear them! I like 'body' one because it makes it clear that it's specifically talking about physical characteristics and not gender, avoiding confusion while mitigating the misgendering issue. But i'm sure there's other words that could convey something similar.

watsit said:
But should man_gender_(lore) apply when the character is tagged male already?
Should man_gender_(lore) be tagged if the character is also tagged male_body_(lore)?

Yes, there is no way to solve the dual-use situation without allowing that.
If 'male' or 'male_body_(lore)' precluded 'man_gender_(lore)', then that body tag would be taking on a dual-use of being both a gender and a body type depending on context, which is exactly the problem we're trying to avoid in the first place!

Lore tags are never mandatory, so it's not like there'd need to be some huge campaign to retroactively add it to all 5 million cis characters or something.
But any attempt to compress tags via 'assume body = gender unless stated otherwise' is turning that body tag into a dual-use tag in the process, so we just can't do it.

There are also nonbinary characters that identify as multiple genders.
For example, a male-bodied nonbinary person who identifies as both nonbinary and a man would need all three tags to convey this unambiguously.

It also has the nice side effect of fixing a criticism i've seen claiming the "assume male = cis man unless proven otherwise with a lore tag at the bottom of the page" system is unequal, since now all genders are in the lore tags and non-lore tags don't imply anything but body type.