Firstly, my sincere apology to you regular follower of this my blog as I know you will be expecting something else than this topic today. Nevertheless, let's just allow this to fly for now. The next Affiliate Marketing course is still very much on course; ready for delivery, You'll have it soon. Let's just relish this Facebook's new idea as part of Valentine gists.
Facebook,
in a move that acknowledges real social issues around gender identity, has
updated its site to give people more ways to express their gender. The changes
make available to users a list of roughly 50 different terms they can use to
identify themselves. Among them: "Trans," "Trans Female,"
"Trans Male," "Genderqueer," "Gender Variant" and
even "Androgynous," a term used for describing combined male and
female characteristics. In addition, users can choose among three pronouns to
be used in referring to them: "her," "him" or
"them."
Facebook has incorporated privacy controls
into the term selections. If users choose one or several of these new options,
they can use Facebook's settings to control with whom their new classification
is shared, such as 'public' or 'just friends.' The choice of pronoun, however,
is always public. If a person chooses "neutral" for the pronoun, then
instead of Facebook saying, "Wish her a happy birthday" on someone's
special day, the site will say, "Wish them a happy birthday." The new
options can be accessed from a person's "About" page, by clicking on
"Custom" in the drop-down menu for gender.
To
make the changes and decide which terms to add, Facebook worked with a group of
LGBT advocacy organizations, with the nonprofit Gay & Lesbian Advocates
& Defenders, or GLAD, leading the charge. Other groups involved in the
effort included The Trevor Project, which provides crisis and suicide
prevention services to LGBTQ youth (the "Q" stands for questioning),
and the San Francisco-based Transgender Law Center.
Facebook said it made the changes to help
people be true to themselves while using the site. "When you come to
Facebook to connect with the people, causes, and organizations you care about,
we want you to feel comfortable being your true, authentic self," the
company said Thursday in an announcement on its Diversity page. An important
part of one's sense of self, Facebook said, is the expression of gender,
especially when it extends beyond just "male" or "female."
The move shows that Facebook, a California-based company, is not afraid to take
a stand on a controversial issue. A fair number of users seemed supportive of
the changes, judging by the more than 2,000 likes generated by the announcement
shortly after it was published. Facebook has more than 1.2 billion monthly
active users. Some of Facebook's biggest competitors do not offer a similar
gender identification tool.
Twitter does not let people express their
gender. In addition to "male" and "female," Google Plus
only provides an "other" option. Advertisers on Facebook can choose
to target people by gender, but they cannot target people based on any of the
new classification terms, a company spokesman said. However, advertisers can
target them based on the pronoun they choose. The choice of one of the new
terms doesn't show up as an event on the user's timeline. Facebook's new gender
options are only available in the U.S. right now, but the company is working on
rolling them out to other countries.