There's been something of a movement on LiveJournal for at least a year or two to enlarge the pool of gender choices, I know. -- March Rosenbluth Communication & Rhetoric student ` RPI

Date: Mon, 12 Dec 2005 09:13:32 -0500 From: "Lauren Squires" <squires@virginia.edu> Subject: [Air-l] Making gender complicated on Friendster To: air-l@listserv.aoir.org Message-ID: <web-162412456@cgatepro-4.mail.virginia.edu> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="ISO-8859-1"; format="flowed"

Hi list,

Not to keep bringing up Friendster, but I noticed something that may be of interest to people working on gender-related themes as well as social networking sites.

There's currently a bulletin board post going around Friendster that is a petition to get Friendster to add an "it's complicated" option to the gender choices (which are just "male" or "female." "It's complicated" is a recently-added option for relationship status). The bulletin board head reads "Gender-make it "complicated" on friendster." I have no idea how widespread this is - my hunch is not very, but I only have access to the bulletins of my friends, and three of them have posted it, so I'm curious if it's out there elsewhere.

1) Has anyone else seen this post or heard about it? Do we know of any similar instances of user-driven system changes toward a >2-gender norm? Has this happened before on Friendster or other networking sites? (I haven't seen it on Myspace, for instance, and I pretty much have the same friends on both sites)

2) Is "It's complicated" the best phrasing for an addition of more gender possibilities?

Interested in any and all thoughts (take a break from grading/writing papers!), Lauren

---- Lauren Squires Linguistics Program University of Virginia *** http://polyglotconspiracy.net http://sociocmc.blogspot.com