Gender vs. Biological Sex

Misnomer made an important comment about women not being able to have facial hair in SL. This led to a response I had in that thread but I moved it here. I expect it will start a debate. But, I hope some real thought could be put into this before any hasty replies are made... We ARE a growing online society with multiple facets and conceivably "advanced" cultural norms as superficiality plays a rather different role in SL than it does in FL. So, here it goes:

Misnomer, I think you've touched on a, er, touchy subject that I've talked about with several other people so far.

And I have to agree with you... but, perhaps in a more "radical in-your-face" kind of way.

Remove the gender option. There's no real reason for it. It allows one to have/not have boobs, decides the roughness of the skin, and decides how a person walks (hips or with shoulders).

In the real world, biological sex does not confine one to a specific gender. And, furthermore, there are more than just "masculine" and "feminine" genders--yet SL allows for one or the other (distinguished as "male" or "female," which technically is not "gender" at all, but rather biological sex).

I'm the biggest liberal and radical about this and I think that if SL wants to surpass the roles Western Culture has pressed on everyone we should have the Sex option removed and instead allow for sliders for: breasts, skin softness, shoulder-walking/hip-walking.

C'mon. We have aliens in SL. We have cartoon characters. Monkeys, dragons. Let's transcend the gender roles already; we're clearly beyond that and we should be able to decide how we fit in the niche of ourselves. Until we're given the option to grow ovaries and testicles in SL, we're still barbie dolls with a changable frame.

So let's allow full customization. (Or, eh, if there's people who are die-hard "there's no way I'm giving up my gender!!!" then perhaps a "Other" option is necessary. But certainly this dichotomy is not conducive to full optimization, which is what Misnomer was getting at from the start.)

I fully endorse this product and/or service.


hee hee.


But really, he's right. We need to go beyond the culture of the U.S. and open this world for the thoughts and ideas of everyone.

And so for that I also propose the following sliders!


Arm Thickness, Leg Thickness, Fingers (The number of fingers on a hand), Finger Thickness, Fur Length, Tail Size, Tail Length, Fin Shape, Horn Shape, Horn Length, Eyes (The number of eyes), Eyelids (Not everything can blink), Arms (The number of Arms), Legs (The number of Legs)


And the existing sliders for Arms, Legs, and Head should be altered so that the smallest size produces an avatar with no head, arms, or legs.

Just keep the male and female options, and then add one for either. Either would have all current sliders, from both male and female, available to apply to the AV.

Exactly what I was thinking, Loki--my suggestion was just in "other" form.

I agree, and what Loki said. One of the things that bugged me most in There was the gender divide. If you were a female you could not wear male clothes & visa versa. Well IRL there used to be laws where women couldnt wear mens clothing... did you know that? I just can't stand government opression! What the heck does it matter what one wears anyway?

Ive seen men with man breasts (remember Seinfeld's Kramer trying to sell the "Bro"? A bra for men??!!) and I've seen women with facial hair. I'm not even talking transgender or transvestite persons either. Just regular folk in the supermarket. But if you did want a bulge & boobs inworld, more power to you, you should be able to have them!

I don't think we are dealing with a sociological or political issue here, but a technical one. I agree though that the idea would be to allow such complete control over the avatar that there would be no need to have the gender switch.

My guess is though that the system relies on "default" prototypes for male and female avatars. Back in the early "treasure hunt" games I noticed that some treasures were hidden in places that no male avatar no matter how small could reach. Switching to a female avatar allowed for a smaller minimum size, just as switching to a male avatar allows for a larger maximum. But there are other combinations that are hard (if not impossible to achieve). When I tried to make my avatar (male) slightly muscular I found that I ended up with a hunch-back look. The back looked fine if all the other settings were maximized (and I find that many guys go for this "Hulk Hogan" look), but its hard to achieve anything much between "desk jockey" and "Hulk Hogan".

I also had trouble getting blonde hair. Actually very dark blond is what I was after, but the Hue, Saturation, whatever paradigm used for hair color is almost impossible for me to comprehend. RGB would be so much easier. Ever notice how few people in SL have blonde or brown hair?

I suspect that the implementation of SL imposes some constraint on what can be done with sliders and binary switches. I can't imagine, for example, a generic avatar interface that would allow for creation of humanoids, birds, and octopi (sp?) with a single interface. There are just too many variables relating not just to the shape of the avatar but to the animations that control it that the average user would be unable to cope with. The prototypes are built (I think) with another program that allows these controls and also maps animation sequences to specific body parts.

What might me a nice compromise though (if technically possible) would be a neutral gendered avatar that could at least be adjusted from the largest to smallest total size as well as the other sub components. I suspect it would take great patience to achieve the desired results, but it might be worth a try. (Keep the existing prototypes for us lazy folks though).

PS: I give up. What setting on your computer are you using to test skin softness? you must have a REALLY fancy video card! hehe

(Phew, I hate to post so much here as I'd rather there be a discussion here, but--)

If you take your average male avatar (and by the way, mine is NO alpha male, and for that I DO have the strange back problem which has been remedied only slightly by my making Dae far taller than originally intended and more muscular, etc.)--lemme start over--If you take you raverage male avatar, and switch its gender to female, you'll notice around the eyes, cheeks, etc. there impressions are smoother, more "delicate." That's what I was getting at.

Well, no one has really -disagreed-... but there hasn't been too much talk about this. No one has opinions about this topic..?

IMHO - You people are confused.

Now that's a thinker....

Cant we just have the game and not try to use it to fight our own private war of "Its ok to be ____!" <- Insert A, B, C, D, E, F....

a) Sexuality
b) Political View
c) Religion
d) 'race'
e) hate group
f) support group

Since most of the traits your asking for here are not natural, they are discrepancies their not normaly added. It is not sensical to complain that the creators did not add a 'feature' that is an expression of an abnormality (in relation to physical traits).

Also since we all move in pretty stiff ways and 'males' and 'females' share the same idle movements in game there's no real complaint to be made here. Custom animation is coming, hurry up and wait.

I disaproove of this product and or service.

I don't care... I'm a penguin.



To be honest, I'd rather have an invisible avatar with objects linked to invisible limbs than a hermaphrodite(sp). I wouldn't object to facial hair and man-boobs though.

Mac -- Maybe I'm alone in my opinion, but I didn't think that it was particularly hard to get the white-blond hair that my male AV has, though?

Gwyd -- I don't think it's a matter of beliefs so much as it'd give us an extra option for customizing AVs. Try looking at it this way: As others have noted, the 2 default types each have a set range of options, some of which overlap and some of which don't. It'd be much more freeing if we could pick and choose options from both set A and set B instead of having to lock ourselves into selecting from only one set. Think of it like a Venn diagram.

Upshot of this post: I think this discussion got tripped up by loaded concepts like gender identity, etc.

Just FYI, the walk is done via avatar animations, and there's one for the female walk and one for the male walk, so I'm guessing it would the technically challenging to have a slider effect walking.

I think a "none" gender, with all the sliders and a netural walk animation might be cool, but there's really not too much you can't do with the current customizations, you can make some pretty butch chicks and some pretty fem guys.

Fun fact: Do you know why men's shirts button on the right and women's shirts button on the left? Because traditionally women were dressed by (right-handed) servants while men dressed themselves.

mmm... the animations in SL are based on the bipedal model... changing from a biped would be infinently more complicated to animate -- especially with the coming addition of 2 person emotes.

huh? First of all I have seen women with facial hair and even more who pluck facial hair. I have also seen men with man breasts. They were living breathing humans and , yes.. natural.

The premise of SL is to be and do anything. All I'm saying is these factors (the gender divide) are limiting. It's really no big deal.

Part of what I wanted to respond to was the comment "In my honest opinion, you people are confused." What is being confused, and who are the people you are talking about?

And furthermore, in replication to what Misnomer said, SL IS a place where we can do whatever we want and be whatever we want, and shouldn't have the gender restrictions if we don't want them--and frankly, I don't see any cross-gendered persons as being "unnatural."

What is unnatural in SL? Same as what I said before--aliens, robots, giant humanoid animals--and yet, we're okay with them, right?

The proposition is to not have to select a sex in the AV process, which has been tip-toed around (as seen in the cases above,) but instead to be able to select a neutral or non-specified gender that does not confine a person to the roles of one sex/gender.

Not sharing your ideas because they're hard or unlikely to come to fruition is not a good reason. You should share your ideas if you have them.


Even if we'll never have a slider to choose the number of fingers we have, it would be cool to have one, and I will share that idea.


Also...




No we can't. These conflicts are an important part of many of our cultures and personalities. They add to the overall experience and reality of the virtual world.



Also I don't think that it's appropriate to dictate 'nature' in a virtual world created wholy from the imaginations of people, but you're free to if you want.

I for one would like to make myself into a squirrel, but I can settle for attachments if there aren't sliders for it.

IMHO those arguments do not add to the virtual world but detract. Second Life is supposed to be just that, a SECOND Life, seperate from the first. Now this detracts from my earlier arguments but frankly its more important.

Looking at this based on your statments Relee I have to agree that such defined values of male/female and their standards is not helpful to SL and I appologize. Thow I stand by my belief that while one is welcome to their opinions, when they drag their personal war into SL they are indeed detracting from the overall experiance by blurring the lines between the two.

So I concede the point when viewed in this way.

However, Misnomer, Those traits are due to hormonal imbalance and NOT Natural, lots of things that live and breath have traits forced upon them by our races missunderstanding of our own bodies and destruction of them.

I like this post - often i've wanted a completely different sort of AV that was not built with prims created by me or someone else. There's always problems with that, they shift for no apparent reason or vanish altogther ruining the desired effect.
Knowing alittle about how this stuff is done, i can understand why the male/female thing was settled on. It takes time and effort to create animations for the skeletal structures behind the bodies, so they just went with what would be the most identifiable and acceptable choices. I've often wanted to use/make a trilateral AV, but I think this would be out of the question. It would require a completely different set of walking/emote animations and frankly who would use it?
My other concept would be just a 'blank' AV. Just a spheroid with no animations at all. Something that would just be able to fly and display a texture on (glowing with a mysterious symbol, or a scrolling marque with your MOTD, etc...) Sure you can make a big sphere and attatch it, but it's not the same. It just ends up too big to cover the smallest fem AV to be desirable to me. I'm talking about a sphere about 1.5m in diameter.

I'd also like to see gender attributes made as customizable as possible, and a third category of pre-set attributes that are androgynous.

The notion that there are only two distinct genders is a social/cultural one and does not necessarily reflect the biological facts. Gender traits occur across more of a continuum; see the excellent novel Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenidies, just out in paperback, for a lot of good technical info on this, as well as a very affecting discussion of the social and psychological implications.


I think what's making you uncomfortable, Gwydeon, is that there are ways of looking at the world represented here that don't overlap with yours. But it would be a mistake to disallow them because of that. What seems like an "opinion" or a "personal war" to you, seems to me more like a valid expression of what we all are working towards, an understanding of ourselves and our place in the world.

If I have any religious or cultural biases at the moment, they tend more towards the Eastern and Buddhist, rather than the Western and Judaeo-Christian traditions in which I was raised. And from that point of view, searching for ways to reconcile the existence of opposing forces (male/female, light/dark, love/hate) is a worthy goal.

What I would wish for, both in Second Life and in real life, is a society that is inclusive rather than exclusive, and that practices tolerance of and compassion for others -- especially for those who we think might be misguided or on the wrong path.

Hormonal imbalances are naturally occuring. Puberty and menopause are times of great hormonal upheaval and are natural as breathing. No two persons are the same. That is natural. That some people develop differently than others does notmake them unnatural.



This I agree with but no doubt not in the same context as you intended. Western medicines answer to menopause for example is to provide the patient hormones they are "lacking". Well, now it is coming out that this treatment is cancer causing.

Yes, I feel that the science and medical communities try to put everyone in categories that not everyone fits in. That makes them "unnatural" or "wrong" to those persons. Who is right? We can argue to the ends of the earth. I feel that people dont fit in boxes. We are ever evolving and need open minds.

Kelwyn:
Please re-read my reply to Relee's post where I revise my general view on the gender specific part of this issue. I am conceding the point in as much, that as long as the goal is more diverse avatars, and not to alow somone to personify a steriotype and then complain about the lable they have given themselves as unfair.

Misnomer:
Hormonal imbalances happen in nature yes. However due to the fact that we are F@#$ing with nature they have gone outside of those naturaly occuring instances. (Re: Men with breasts, women with exessive facial hair - These traits occur due to bad habits / environments).

You make my point for me in regards to modern medicine finding a 'cure' that creates a new and WORSE problem.

There are 2 base sexes on this planet with few exceptions. The reason for the difference in sex is the procreation of the species. There are 2 exceptions found in 'lower' or less complex life forms: Asexual (self replication) and gender switching as seen in some fish and amphibians in times of environmental hazard to preserve the species.

Transgendered (i think thats the word, somone correct me with the term im looking for here.) individuals, who are so from birth not due to surgury, can usualy trace history back to events which have a high chance of having caused the mutation. Chemical introduction, radio wave / radiation proximity, incest, these factors all help to cause the discrepencies.

Women CAN have facial hair... its called a face tattoo. I barely remember it but I think I entered this game as a guy, then immediately switched to a woman, and being ignorant of any face tattoo feature, I kept the one I had on, which made me look a bit silly for a while

Err Gwyd, female facial hair is a common and natural occurrence, since every woman has a varying amount of male hormones, namely testosterone, which regulate things such as sex drive and amount of hair. Transexuals often undergo hormone therapy.
Stop by my country, or any mediterranean country for that matter, and observe in awe and amazement just how much hair a woman can have
Thank god my gf is half austrian
And speaking of my gf, my boobs are bigger than hers, though I prolly weigh twice as much as her so its not a big surprise
I fully support anything that will let people be more creative. Half of peeps around SL still look a little like the default avs.