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weirdoslam said:
Absolutely no one will take you seriously in the slightest if your entire contribution to a civil discussion - a discussion intended to actually help the reputation and depiction of a niche minority - is to be an offended shrieking child at every little thing.
If you cannot contribute something valid, stop talking -- and no, not because you're trans. Because you, as a person, are obnoxious.
(to preface: Me trans and intersex)
I'm jumping in specificially to talk about the "hermaphrodite" tag, and to clear some misconceptions about it. Because I have seen some talk about it here.
1. There's nothing wrong in it if it is not used related to intersex people. The word "herm" really cannot be used related to the real people, because that condition does not happen IRL with humans. This is the important part.
In real life it's used in relation to the other parts of animal kingdom. Many taxonomic groups of animals (mostly invertebrates) do not have separate sexes. For example, the great majority of tunicates, pulmonate snails, opisthobranch snails, earthworms and slugs are hermaphrodites
2. The thing is, scientifically it means the person has both set of organs, that are functional – and yes, that doesn't happen with real people. This is the thing that you should be mindful of.
But it DOES happen in the art. It's the point of fantasy. For example, chakats are an entire species/race that's hermaphroditic. And their fictional procreation matches the scientific term.
That's it. You should have be mindful of these distinctions.
That's all. The change in itself... I don't know what to say. I'm not sure about it.
NotMeNotYou said:
There's still many characters on here that represent people, so I can definitely see why they would prefer less vulgar terms.
The problem with that logic is, next we'll allow overthrowing TWYS, or the lesser evil of legacy tags
@FurryMcFuzzball We're not getting rid of TWYS.
SnowWolf said:
A lot of things which I am snipping so this post isn't forever big
I do definitely get what you're saying. I stand by my position that I'm not willing to let it affect my stance on the issue, but I am aware of how Herculean the task would be. Frankly, to do it perfectly at this point would probably require a new website.
I think the last point I'd like to make is just... honestly, sometimes things are worth doing poorly if you can't do them well. You can't go back and retroactively retag every image, but you could maybe still change the guidelines for tagging *future* images. introduce new tags, new policies. Keep the old tags searchable so people can find old images, and tell the community that if there's particular images they don't want lost to time, they should move to retag it. Essentially letting go of the past to improve the future, without abandoning that past altogether.
But I've no doubt that suggestion has flaws. It was just off the top of my head. My point is that, while the grand sweeping changes that, in my view, would be ideal may be impossible, it's still worthwhile to take what steps you can. The past should not constrain the future just because it cannot be altered.
As an endnote before I go to bed: thank you for hearing me out. I was, honestly, not expecting there to be any meaningful consideration of what I had to say. I was expecting mostly what the majority of this thread seems to have been, disingenuous questions intended purely to justify one's own unflinching views. I'm obviously not expecting my words to start a revolution, but I am genuinely happy to have been heard. I can leave hopeful that I at least sparked some thoughts, which is really all one can ask for in discussions like these. Debates don't change minds. Minds change themselves. Debates can simply provide that spark to encourage reflection. So yeah, thank you. It was refreshing.
I don't like it.
It still disallows trans characters to be tagged as trans unless they're "visibly trans".
God forbid one bring up Reggie.
KCDodger said:
I don't like it.It still disallows trans characters to be tagged as trans unless they're "visibly trans".
God forbid one bring up Reggie.
You're not seriously suggesting that Reggie is trans and not just an incredibly girly male, are you?
KCDodger said:
I don't like it.It still disallows trans characters to be tagged as trans unless they're "visibly trans".
God forbid one bring up Reggie.
No, we do not tag transgender. Nor do we tag the male gender. It would be like tagging autism. Nothing wrong with autism, we just choose not to include that kind of facts in tags.
FurryMcFuzzball said:
It finally happened, we caved to the changed a tag that wasn't inherently offensive because too many people complained.
"As a member of the dominant culture, I'm not offended, therefore it was never a problem. People need to stop being so sensitive!"
More seriously, I think the change as described is a step in the right direction, and I think admin deserves some credit for trying to improve the site. Most of all, I deeply appreciate them including transgender people in the discussion. Thank you.
Imagine going to a glorified porn site and getting pissed off at "muh vulgar terms". It almost makes about as much sense as removing the "cum" tag and absorbing it into "bodily fluids". Anyway, this thread went exactly where something like this would go.
fatdoggeh said:
I mean gender isn't a visually discernable thing at all. If you just care about being as accurate as possible why not just completely change the tags so you just tag what genitals you see. "Dick" and "boobs" are visually discernable.And since I know the response to this will be "the tags are about sex, not gender" 1: dickgirl isn't a sex. If the issue is purely that you want a tag for characters who don't appear to be either binary sex, just use intersex. It's what the word means. and 2: Sex is also not visually discernable! Unless the art includes a zoom in on the character's chromosomes you can't know what their sex at birth was. There is a wide range of ways being intersex can affect your body, and there's trans people who are indistinguishable from cis people.
That's the thing though, we don't tag real people, we tag fantasy people. Specifically mostly fantasy people that aren't even human, or have never been human. It's entirely possible, and mostly happens, for these fantasy people to go against what's possible in real life. Be it true hermaphrodites, people actually born with impossible chromosome expressions (intersex people usually don't look like female bombshells with massive dicks that go up to their knees), or just people using magic to change bodyparts entirely and still have them be functional. The only way we can have an objective tagging system is by trying to classify what's actually in the image.
And that's definitely where the problems start no matter what system you chose.
If you allow word of god you have to deal with the fact that "god" is a living being and might retcon information, lose information (page getting deleted or similar), people trying to speak for god and getting it wrong, etc.
If you don't allow word of god and instead follow death of the author you get to deal with the problems that the transition from brain to (digital) paper is never going to be perfect. This starts at the fact that there's usually things happening outside the image (stories of things leading up to the picture and things happening after), that we only get a 2D slice of a scene that is technically 3D, that art doesn't need to follow any guidelines/science, and that you have to try and classify things as a neutral outsider, which can be extremely hard.
We chose to go with the latter, not because we like oppressing people and pushing our agenda on art, but because no other page exists that even attempts to have a coherent tagging system that tags from the point of the viewer. But even we still have to simplify and streamline certain areas in order to actually have something functional.
However, while tag what you see is not going to go anywhere as long as I am in power, I still want lore tags as soon as the database supports them in a clean and concise manner. We don't have an ETA, we don't know how the implementation will look, but as long as I am the head of this project I will continue to push for it. And once lore tags are actually a thing tags for not visible things, like transgender, can be tagged and searched for.
In the mean time there is a workaround: All descriptions are indexed and can be searched for. If you write in the description field of your character(s) that they're, for example, transmale then every user can search description:transmale and find all submissions that have the word "transmale" in the description. This is one of the reasons why we try to encourage using the description field for these things.
Also, thank you for staying civil. We're all aware this is literally just a new coat of paint instead of a full rework, but we really can't change everything at once even if we wanted to. This change alone will take at least 2 hours of actual work to do, with over 130 aliases and implications needing to be manually changed, then all the wiki pages need to be transferred and updated to including the new terminology.
It would never have occurred to me that "dickgirl" and "cuntboy" could be offensive to real people. Personally, I think everyone should stop taking this all so seriously.
But in the end I think this change is just fine, since some people do seem to care. As long as there are aliases, since some of the newer tags can be quite hard to memorize or type.
And I have to applaud the admins for attempting to make the site better for everyone.
Neki said:
It would never have occurred to me that "dickgirl" and "cuntboy" could be offensive to real people. Personally, I think everyone should stop taking this all so seriously.
These days, people will be offended by the least offensive things, just for the sake of being offended. It's a funny world we're living inn right now, but what you're gonna do about it.
randomguy85 said:
These days, people will be offended by the least offensive things, just for the sake of being offended. It's a funny world we're living inn right now, but what you're gonna do about it.
Interesting how me and pretty much every single trans person who I know (and I know many since I intentionally move a lot in trans circles) consider these terms insulting and dehumanizing, and yet apparently we are just being offended for the sake of being offended. Not to mention that I have personally had people call me as cuntboy multiple times with the intention of insulting me. Like maybe actually talk with trans people once in a while, and maybe do not assume that your own personal perception of the situation is the ultimate truth.
I like this change. I think it cleans some vulgarity out of the tags and the fact the aliases will continue to function will keep tagging easy as it already was.
I see a lot of arguing about the change not going far enough though.
So I'll just say: the tags are for searching images and they represent visual elements within those images.
That's all there is to it, really, it's not an attack on anyone, their identity, or their character. The tags are just what an image looks like and they're there so people can search for or blacklist images effectively.
Preface: I'm a transgirl. I have plenty of transgirl friends. None of them. NONE of them are offended by dgirl and cboy.
So you changed dickgirl, which is to imply: Girl with dick.
And cuntboy, which is to imply: Boy with twat.
To:
Gynomorph, which means: Boy with femme features.
Andromorph, which means: Girl with masc features.
Great, you completely misunderstand the words and their connotations.
Trans women on this site are listed largely as "dickgirl" which now by your terms you're just outing them as men. Come the fuck on.
Hmm... Interesting change. My main concern with it is that there is potential for trans characters (especially those with visibly_trans) to get tagged in ways that are still potentially offensive. What prevents a FtM character from getting andromorph- a tag for females with male characteristics? I understand that one of the root causes of this problem is the fact that someone’s gender identity cannot be visibly discerned, but tagging these male-identifying characters with terms that explicitly refer to them as female seems insensitive. While this change improves the issue of vulgarity (something I don’t think anyone was actually upset about), I think this it will only further alienate trans users.
Concerns aside, I want to thank @SnowWolf for their well-composed and thoughtful responses to this heated topic.
Meh, as long as I can use the old tags and the snowflakes stop complaining I guess.
Although, looking at this thread, people are still offended. Give an inch, want a mile, and all that.
So whatevs, guess it can only help the site by curbing people's complaining
KCDodger said:
I don't like it.It still disallows trans characters to be tagged as trans unless they're "visibly trans".
God forbid one bring up Reggie.
Yeah let's not, white knighting fans is what made him leave the site
CamKitty said:
Meh, as long as I can use the old tags and the snowflakes stop complaining I guess.Although, looking at this thread, people are still offended. Give an inch, want a mile, and all that.
So whatevs, guess it can only help the site by curbing people's complaining
So insightful. Are you so adamant in defending the status quo in all issues or just those that don’t affect you?
AShadyZebra said:
So insightful. Are you so adamant in defending the status quo in all issues or just those that don’t affect you?
Got anything better to say then insults?
CamKitty said:
Meh, as long as I can use the old tags and the snowflakes stop complaining I guess.Although, looking at this thread, people are still offended. Give an inch, want a mile, and all that.
So whatevs, guess it can only help the site by curbing people's complaining
Yeah let's not, white knighting fans is what made him leave the site
I've been down this road enough times to say this: never give in because the type of people who make these complaints are never satisfied.
This isn't about "offense" about a "vulgar term". This is about getting power. Seriously, the site has been around for years and only now people are complaining about the tags? Yeah, seems fucking legit.
Untamed said:
You're not seriously suggesting that Reggie is trans and not just an incredibly girly male, are you?
No, jesus christ.
I was bringing him up as an example of how terribly flawed and inconsistent the tagging system is. It's crazy that a character can be tagged several different things in the same set of images. NOT what I said.
But let's put that aside.
Lyxolf said:
Preface: I'm a transgirl. I have plenty of transgirl friends. None of them. NONE of them are offended by dgirl and cboy.So you changed dickgirl, which is to imply: Girl with dick.
And cuntboy, which is to imply: Boy with twat.To:
Gynomorph, which means: Boy with femme features.
Andromorph, which means: Girl with masc features.Great, you completely misunderstand the words and their connotations.
Trans women on this site are listed largely as "dickgirl" which now by your terms you're just outing them as men. Come the fuck on.
Basically! There's a few reasons I withdrew my character here. The lack of sensitivity towards transfolk is a big one.
CamKitty said:
snowflakes
Oh don't even.
hiekkapillu said:
Interesting how me and pretty much every single trans person who I know (and I know many since I intentionally move a lot in trans circles) consider these terms insulting and dehumanizing, and yet apparently we are just being offended for the sake of being offended. Not to mention that I have personally had people call me as cuntboy multiple times with the intention of insulting me. Like maybe actually talk with trans people once in a while, and maybe do not assume that your own personal perception of the situation is the ultimate truth.
Preach.
hiekkapillu said:
Interesting how me and pretty much every single trans person who I know (and I know many since I intentionally move a lot in trans circles) consider these terms insulting and dehumanizing, and yet apparently we are just being offended for the sake of being offended. Not to mention that I have personally had people call me as cuntboy multiple times with the intention of insulting me. Like maybe actually talk with trans people once in a while, and maybe do not assume that your own personal perception of the situation is the ultimate truth.
Right, now explain to me why <1% of the population should be able to tell everyone else what terms they should and should not be able to use?
TheTundraTerror said:
I've been down this road enough times to say this: never give in because the type of people who make these complaints are never satisfied.This isn't about "offense" about a "vulgar term". This is about getting power. Seriously, the site has been around for years and only now people are complaining about the tags? Yeah, seems fucking legit.
This is like saying gay advocacy for marital rights only became more vocal because gay people just want power. The truth is that, until recently, they couldn’t demand rights without being skewered (figuratively or literally). The only “power” trans people want is the ability to be treated with dignity. Issues surrounding how they’re treated have become more prevalent because they only recently gained enough acceptance that they can defend themselves on a public platform.
Lyxolf said:
Preface: I'm a transgirl. I have plenty of transgirl friends. None of them. NONE of them are offended by dgirl and cboy.So you changed dickgirl, which is to imply: Girl with dick.
And cuntboy, which is to imply: Boy with twat.To:
Gynomorph, which means: Boy with femme features.
Andromorph, which means: Girl with masc features.Great, you completely misunderstand the words and their connotations.
Trans women on this site are listed largely as "dickgirl" which now by your terms you're just outing them as men. Come the fuck on.
Gynomorph and Andromorph are being used correctly, the root of the word is more interested in the ability of the subject to father or bear children. Which is why a gynomorph has male genitalia but a heavily feminine body, and an andromorph is opposite with female genitalia and a heavily masculine body.
This ties back into the fact that we don't tag thegender, but only the visible configuration of the body.
@CamKitty: @TheTundraTerror: Don't try to start fights, please.
Honestly, TWYS is extremely biased in its enforcement, and this is largely a lateral step. This is why trans and trans friendly people are upset.
You claim that because you can't see a character's 'gender' that you can't tag them as their gender identity or expression as trans.
But you can't really 'see' a cisgender character's 'gender' any more than you can trans! It's no less a 'lore' tag. But you have no problem tagging cisgender people based on that 'lore'.
And you have no problem mis-tagging trans people despite allowing lore for cisgender people. It's this double standard that is making a lot of people upset.
If you really wanted to do TWYS, if you really wanted to reduce all this down to just what you want to see you would do only literally genital tags, and you would use intersex to ONLY mean people who were legitimately intersex (having multiple genitalia), not people who had breasts (or too small of them) or a beard or eyelashes or whatever.
The problem is that you're fine having lore for some characters.. and ignoring it with others. And a large part of this is that, if you're cisgender, your own gender identity and expression is so 'presumed' by society that you just kind of.. forget noticing it. You presume that 'lore' is some obvious inherent normal.
It's similar to how straight people, and etc.; you just kind of forget that a lot of things are catering silently to them, to where you're just presumed 'normal' and everything else is, by definition 'abnormal'.
But literally ALL gender tags are lore tags.
And the idea that all lore tags are bad is kind of ridiculous as well! A lot of essential tags, like the name and often species of the character are pretty much only definable by lore!
The problem with strict TWYS is that a lot of you guys are seeing whatever the hell you want to see in a lot of pictures.
You suggest using secondary and tertiary secondary sexual characteristics but these are so ill defined in both art and reality that pretty much no two people have the same idea of what to tag a lot of the time.
People will sit here and tag characters as female that are in masculine outfits because they have eyelashes. Funny enough sometimes if they're outside of that outfit they're male, but inside of it they're female, even if they have a bulge too, because of eyelashes or face paint.
Even if all you wanted was tags that were useful for fetish masturbation, they're not even great for that!
The cis-female and cis-male tags, for instance could easily be paired with blacklists tags. You want to see penises unless they're on trans women? Sure thing, if you have that tag to do that. Combine them in one blacklist listing so they block when both are in the same image.
You can't really do that now.
While I'm wholly in favor of such a change, I was kinda hoping the masculine_intersex/feminine_intersex pair would be the final decision considering it would set a framework for other similar tag groups, whereas andromorph and gynomorph are single words.
I believe masculine_intersex/feminine_intersex were also the prefered choice last time that discussion came up (see forum #211398, for instance), so what were the reasons for this to be the administration's final decision?
DamienG said:
Honestly, TWYS is extremely biased in its enforcement, and this is largely a lateral step. This is why trans and trans friendly people are upset.You claim that because you can't see a character's 'gender' that you can't tag them as their gender identity or expression as trans.
But you can't really 'see' a cisgender character's 'gender' any more than you can trans! It's no less a 'lore' tag. But you have no problem tagging cisgender people based on that 'lore'.
And you have no problem mis-tagging trans people despite allowing lore for cisgender people. It's this double standard that is making a lot of people upset.
If you really wanted to do TWYS, if you really wanted to reduce all this down to just what you want to see you would do only literally genital tags, and you would use intersex to ONLY mean people who were legitimately intersex (having multiple genitalia), not people who had breasts (or too small of them) or a beard or eyelashes or whatever.
The problem is that you're fine having lore for some characters.. and ignoring it with others. And a large part of this is that, if you're cisgender, your own gender identity and expression is so 'presumed' by society that you just kind of.. forget noticing it. You presume that 'lore' is some obvious inherent normal.
It's similar to how straight people, and etc.; you just kind of forget that a lot of things are catering silently to them, to where you're just presumed 'normal' and everything else is, by definition 'abnormal'.
But literally ALL gender tags are lore tags.
And the idea that all lore tags are bad is kind of ridiculous as well! A lot of essential tags, like the name and often species of the character are pretty much only definable by lore!
The problem with strict TWYS is that a lot of you guys are seeing whatever the hell you want to see in a lot of pictures.
You suggest using secondary and tertiary secondary sexual characteristics but these are so ill defined in both art and reality that pretty much no two people have the same idea of what to tag a lot of the time.
People will sit here and tag characters as female that are in masculine outfits because they have eyelashes. Funny enough sometimes if they're outside of that outfit they're male, but inside of it they're female, even if they have a bulge too, because of eyelashes or face paint.
Even if all you wanted was tags that were useful for fetish masturbation, they're not even great for that!
The cis-female and cis-male tags, for instance could easily be paired with blacklists tags. You want to see penises unless they're on trans women? Sure thing, if you have that tag to do that. Combine them in one blacklist listing so they block when both are in the same image.
You can't really do that now.
I'm just bringing it up if you didn't know, but it's 100% acceptable and encouraged to put the gender of the character of an image in the post description and wiki of the character. TWYS isn't cataloguing characters into lore groups but visual ques, it's a site admitted imperfect system, which purpose is to group characters into either masculine / ambiguous / feminine. Which in said grouping it does well. And works in most cases.
Ambiguous being when it's legitimately impossible to say a character looks more masculine or feminine, and it only works for characters without visual genitalia.
Than of course there is the mixed cues tags which are currently the ones talking about being implemented.
This would be a whole lot less absurd if literally anyone, anywhere, *ever* will search for gynomorph or andromorph. But they won't -- these are bogus made up newspeak tags that exist only to try and appease -- nobody will ever actually use them.
And I would be remiss if I don't point out the irony of NMNY's profile picture next to a paragraph about why "dickgirl" is too vulger on a furry porn site. I've been around e621 for more than 10 years and have seen a lot of political correctness and snowflake syndrome come and go and it pretty much all boils down to taking this stuff *way* too damn seriously.
But go ahead and change the tags. Then in six months when the goalposts have moved again to "now delete the dickgirl alias, for its existence doth offendeth me" the shitstorm can kick off again.
SnowWolf
Admin28 days ago
Thank you for that. I really appreciate that <3
It is.
100% truth, it is. It's a problem. but there are nearly 2 million posts. we are an old website. over a decade old! I'm pretty dang old, and the last decade has brought some AMAZING social progress for LGBT+... I remember when gay marriage in america seemed like a distant dream. it's pretty awesome. But... this website is old and was built with older ideas.
The old adage about old dogs not learning new tricks is wrong... but there is..... a tremendous amount of work involved to change some thigns on the website. Every couple months someone comes along and says that X is a problem, but the problem's easy to fix, just do Y. the problem is, sometimes Y is something that basically goes against every rule on the website. Sometimes their solution wouldn't actually sold the problem that they're seeing. Sometimes their solution would create a whole other problem. Sometimes, it's a good idea.... but it's a CRAZY amount of work.
Like... y'know, maybe it would be a good idea to tag female_bear and male_bear and transmale_bear etc.... but that means we'd need to retag every single picture on the website. There are 2 million posts here. I"m not going to do the math right now, but 2 million is a LOT. We have trouble getting penises tagged on every post with a dick, nevermind retagging every single individual picture on the website.
So even if tagging "female_rottweiler" is a great idea... it is... literally impossible to do that. if I could tag every image in 1 second, perfectly and accurately, and gave up all distractions like eating and sleeping, it would take me over 23 days. but I need to sleep, and while a lot of pictures are quick to tag (I mean, most of the pictures in male solo tiger are probably male_tigers ... but not all of them) there are going to be HEAPS of pictures where you have to stop and try and figure out... which one is the collie? what gender is that goat? The tags say there's a bird here somewhere, but where are they?
It would... literally take, like, a year.
The system is bad. but there's not much we can do about it because the system is BUILT. and gosh, I wish we could change it, but, like... that is a crazy amount of time and effort.
Well, we could just, like... tag things from here on forward... but then, that's compromising the system. why have female_squid, if female+squid works better? and if everyone is used to using female+squid because it works better, then female_squid might never get tagged.
It's messy and it's hard.
Yet, others have told me that they do not WANT to be grouped in with the 'fetish characters'. There's no hive mind. it'd make things easier if there was :c
We acknowledge you. we care about you!
but, like... this change is so large that it's not just a case of "we're lazy" ... it's a case of literally not having the man power to do broad sweeping changes to the entirety of the website.
we can and are willing to do smaller scale changes... see also, we're here today trying to move away from some very crude slang. We may chose to make additional changes in the future. I know there are several ideas that have been discussed, but we are moving carefully.
but ultimatly, no one is forced to be here. If it is upsetting to you, to the point that you cna't tolerate it, then please go. I don't say it to be cruel, just... no one should feel the need to expose themselves to something that makes them uncomfortable.