[Air-l] Making gender complicated on Friendster

[March Rosenbluth]

There's been something of a movement on LiveJournal for at least a year or two to enlarge the pool of gender choices, I know.

-- March Rosenbluth
    Communication & Rhetoric student
`  RPI

> Date: Mon, 12 Dec 2005 09:13:32 -0500
> From: "Lauren Squires" <squires at virginia.edu>
> Subject: [Air-l] Making gender complicated on Friendster
> To: air-l at listserv.aoir.org
> Message-ID: <web-162412456 at cgatepro-4.mail.virginia.edu>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="ISO-8859-1"; format="flowed"
>
> Hi list,
>
> Not to keep bringing up Friendster, but I noticed something that may be of
> interest to people working on gender-related themes as well as social
> networking sites.
>
> There's currently a bulletin board post going around Friendster that is a
> petition to get Friendster to add an "it's complicated" option to the gender
> choices (which are just "male" or "female."  "It's complicated" is a
> recently-added option for relationship status).  The bulletin board head
> reads "Gender-make it "complicated" on friendster."  I have no idea how
> widespread this is - my hunch is not very, but I only have access to the
> bulletins of my friends, and three of them have posted it, so I'm curious if
> it's out there elsewhere.
>
> 1) Has anyone else seen this post or heard about it?  Do we know of any
> similar instances of user-driven system changes toward a >2-gender norm?
>  Has this happened before on Friendster or other networking sites? (I
> haven't seen it on Myspace, for instance, and I pretty much have the same
> friends on both sites)
>
> 2) Is "It's complicated" the best phrasing for an addition of more gender
> possibilities?
>
> Interested in any and all thoughts (take a break from grading/writing
> papers!),
> Lauren
>
> ----
> Lauren Squires
> Linguistics Program
> University of Virginia
> ***
> http://polyglotconspiracy.net
> http://sociocmc.blogspot.com