Transgender activists hail 'big advance' as Facebook expands gender options
You don’t have to be just male or female on Facebook anymore. The social media giant is adding a customizable option with about 50 different terms people can use to identify their gender, as well as three preferred pronoun choices: him, her or them.
Facebook said the changes, shared with the Associated Press before the launch on Thursday, initially cover the company’s 159 million monthly users in the US and are aimed at giving people more choices in how they describe themselves, such as androgynous, bi-gender, intersex, gender fluid or transsexual.
The software engineer who worked on this project is personally embarked on her journey of transition as a transwoman. Of course this is already giving the It's Not In The Bible crowd an attack of apoplexy.
“Of course Facebook is entitled to manage its wildly popular site as it sees fit, but here is the bottom line: it’s impossible to deny the biological reality that humanity is divided into two halves – male and female,” said Jeff Johnston, an issues analyst for Focus on the Family, an influential national religious organization based in Denver.
For this to come from a major manager of personal identity on the internet like Facebook, it is an admission that humans are just too complicated to fit snugly into the tidy little boxes that other people try to create for them.
This is what progress looks like.