Friday, February 15, 2008

Male or Female: Choose one!

Recently I got a new Myspace friend, Queering MySpace's Gender: Official Petition. This is someone who's trying get Myspace to change its requirement that everyone identify as either male or female. He/She/I-don't-know-what-pronoun-to-use has also just started up an online forum, Gender is Not Binary: Queering the Gender of Social Networking Sites, "the official discussion forum of the Queering Gender movement." I really doubt there is anyone qualified to designate it the "official" one, but I'll accept it as the site's self-identity.

But he/she/whatever has a little problem with the site (actually there is more than one--I also found a technical glitch in trying to access my Profile from at least one page): To register you are required to identify as Male or Female! It turns out this is a restriction of phpBB, the software the forum is using, but the founder never had to register, so he/she/whatever didn't know. A request has been put in to phpBB to change this.

This just shows how ubiquitous the gender binary is.

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