Another gender enforcement rant

[firecat]

I just tried signing up again for Second Life. The first time, quite a while back, I gave up early in the process because I couldn't find a "last name" that I liked among the offered choices. Today I got farther into the form, but I ended up not signing up, because the form required me to specify a gender.

Why the fuck does SL care about my gender identity???

Comments

[submarine-bells.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it'd be nice if the underlying engine could cope with "none of the above", but given that all of the default gender signifiers are mutable once you're actually in-world, I've not found it to be a real hassle in practice. And yes, I'm pretty obligatory-gender-enforcement-averse myself - initially when I signed up I was a bit concerned that I might wind up having to be more gendered in-world than I preferred. But once I started playing around with avatar options that are available, it became obvious to me pretty quickly that there's a lot of scope for gender-subversion with avatar-building. The fact that a binary m/f choice is coded into the world's OS is a bit irritating, but once one starts exploring what one can do with one's avatar, it doesn't really seem to limit one's options at all. Still, it'd probably be worthwhile to suggest a neuter basic option as a feature suggestion to Linden Labs, as a matter of principle. If someone hasn't already done that, I'll look into it.

[firecat]

That would be great...