That Can't Be Good

[tablesaw]

I'm still grappling with gender issues that do not conform to a male/female or masculine/feminine binary. I have a lot of cisgender privilege. No, that's an understatement. For all the reading and thinking I've done on ths subject, when dealing with transgender people in non-virtual situations, I am actively fighting transphobic thoughts. It's easier for me online, but knowing how little practice I have usually makes me doubt my critical thinking when it comes to these issues.

Still, in the wake of transphobia in a fandom-related dustup (link addresses the transphobia issues; if you don't know what the underlying wank is, it's not worth it to find out), I had these things in my mind today when I started watching the new episode of The Closer.

The plot features a retired detective who returns to give testimony after an old case is overturned on an unrelated issue. But upon his return to Los Angeles, it is revealed that although the detective had been known to collegues as a man, she is now living as a woman, to the naked disgust of her former partner.

Now, I know that a lot of people can't watch cringe television, like Arrested Development or The Office, but I can, and I often enjoy it. But even still, the casual abuse heaped onto Georgette from all corners, often ostensibly for humor, really sickened me. I had to turn it off before the end of act 2. There's probably a very valuable lesson at the end, but I doubt it will be worth it.

---

And then I come back to find some disturbing things about LiveJournal. synecdochic has been reading the upcoming changes to LiveJournal's code. The result of these changes (which, as of writing, are committed to go live the next time LiveJournal updates) is:

• Gender will be a mandatory field at account creation, and it will be able to appear public on one's profile. (I can't tell if people with existing gender specification will be defaulted to "nobody can see it" or "everybody can see it".) (Subsequent changelog reading indicates that the public specificity has since been removed. It is unknown whether this is to require public specificity in the future or if it will remain private.)
• >LiveJournal is removing the Unspecified option for the gender field. That's right: you get to be male or female. Period. That's it. (Source.)

(Full post.) If this is something that matters to you, you may want to set your gender to unspecified now. It appears that LJ will preserve current settings as unspecified, but it's not clear whether it'll ever be possible to unselect a gender if you don't do it now. (Source). synecdochic also suggests, "go to http://www.livejournal.com/contact/?dept=feedback and politely register your displeasure."

Update: LJ has rolled back the code, and will not be making the change. Synecdochic's entry has details and a response from LiveJournal's general manager in the United States. The response that the LJ Response Team has sent out int response to inquiries is reproduced in the comments here.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

I watched a few episodes of "Tabitha's Salon Takeover" yesterday and in one one of the workers was pretty clearly transgendered and not a single mention was made of that fact; she was just one of the workers. People like to think that reality TV is a horrible thing but I really appreciate how it has brought people who are not "the beautiful people" but "just like us" either into our homes.

[(Anonymous)]

This is not going to become LiveJournal policy. I got this response when I contacted LiveJournal directly.

Thank you for taking the time to contact us with your concerns. We understand that gender is not binary, and intend to respect that understanding for our users.

At this time, the code you reference is not live on the site, and will not become so in the future. We know that you, and many other users, have serious concerns about any requirement to specify gender, so we'd like to take a moment to explain events and our position further.

The intention of this code was to change the sign-up process to include a field for the selection of gender; that the code would completely disable the "Unspecified" option at the same time was deemed unacceptable. While the code in question had gone to our beta (testing) server, it had not gone to our production server, and will not do so due to this problem. Furthermore, we'd like to clarify that code posted to the changelog community is not always final, as such code must then go through the beta testing process and can often be changed before actual implementation.

Additionally, some erroneous information has been spread regarding the potential public display of the gender field. We would like to clarify that gender is not currently publicly displayed on the profile, nor anywhere else on the site, and there are no plans to change this behavior.

Regards,
LiveJournal Community Care Team

So this was just first-draft code, it was rejected, and they will not be requiring a choice or public display of gender. I know people are angry, but they're angry at a mistake, not a policy.

Mike Selinker

[tablesaw]

Responding to code that isn't live is like responding to a leaked policy document. People were angry at a mistake that was on its way to becoming policy. And that's a great time to be angry, in that there's a much higher chance to correct mistakes in policy before it becomes policy. It's a quantum outrage, and it's difficult to tell what effect the outrage had beause of its influence.

The upshot is: the changes have been rolled back and will not be going live, LJ avoided what could have been a huge fiasco, and the LJ response team has provided information faster and more measuredly than they've done in a very long time. Everyone has won, but that doesn't mean the outrage was misplaced at the time.