Some means of determining Avatar gender

I'd like to be able to detect the gender of an avatar. I was working on some attachments for a frequently gender-changing friend, and was hoping to be able to script the objects to automatically detect and morph for the required configuration for each gender.

Unfortunately, I'll have to build two sets of objects and she'll have to manually switch between them.

Ok, but besides the standard "male" and "female", I'd like to have the option of leaving it blank, checking "other," or something like that. A player who chooses to do that would lose the benefit of scripted objects which customize based on avatar gender, of course.

neko

Implementing something like this has been discussed before. If we get something like this, it would "force" people to choose a gender, which is awkward for people with androgynous or asexual avatars like aliens or inanimate objects. Also, the appearence option for gender changes the types of appearence sliders you are allowed to manipulate; its nearly impossible to create the same avatar, initially created with the female sliders, with the male sliders.

Instead, you should script your objects so they open up a dialog box asking your friend for his/her gender instead of expecting the system to provide it for you.

==Chris

Yup, clicking "Male" or "Female" or "Giraffe" is a lot faster than having to detach and then reattach another object.

See, the thing is my gender-swapping friend changes genders very frequently, yet even though he/she takes alot of joy out of being fairly androgynous, expects people to always be up to date on the gender-of-the-moment, with people frequently assuming he to be a she as something of a default. This leads to alot of confusion, so I thought I'd help out with some scripting to clear things up (and hopefully get a laugh).

So my initial idea was to make him an arrow which would hover over his head, and display a big Male or Female sign to make absolutely clear to everyone what he/she was at the moment, updating itself automatically whenever it detected that the wearer's gender setting had changed.

But I can't do that, so I'm stuck making him either two signs to swap out by hand, or making one half-a-sign that, upon a voice command, swaps out the correct gender symbol. It's just not as elegant.

This also has applications for stuff like customizing dialog replies with Mr/Ms/What-the-heck-are-you-oh-well-as-long-as-your-lindens-don't-run-out-its-fine-with-me responses...

^ Sarah, that's great. I lurve stuff like this because it shows how wonderfully flexible SL can be when someone with multiple AVs really gets to shine and express themselves. Same person, different slices of a whole pie.

not going to say who this "gender-swapping" friend might be... =P but perhaps this friend tried to use a titler. and this friend diligently updated it with titles such as "currently a boy" "currently a girl" but no matter what the title said people still concluded what they wanted. so maybe this "gender swapping" friend got tired of using the titler.

but maybe this "gender-swapping" friend does want it to be thought of as "male unless otherwise expressly indicated".

a wonderful feature suggestion for a new version of SL would be a new part of the profile that indicates the current gender of the avatar shape. This of course would be mean to those who use the girl shape to achieve a smaller male shape. So perhaps another option in "appearance" would be "other" and those corresponding sliders would have nothing to do with gender like "breast size" or "package".That way non-gender avatars wont feel obligated to choose one becuase thier profile will say "female" when they were trying to achieve a smaller "male" or "other" shape.
And this new piece of the profile will change accordingly. Not that people even look in profiles as often as they should. That is evidenced because this "gender swapping" friend in question DOES have the solution listed in thier SL profile.

Personally, I would feel quite awkward having "other" listed in my profile if I create an obviously male avatar using the sliders provided by the "other" appearence option you propose.
==Chris

Zoe! You weren't supposed to find this thread

Well, I do understand with people using the gender setting to access looks not available on the other set of sliders...maybe a "gender identity" setting, with choises of male, female, neuter, or other (with a fill-in-the-blank word/phrase of ones choice) which could be settable as part of a skin/clothing set and accessable from scripts that really need to know.

I for one would feel uncomfortable or annoyed at having to fill in a blank marked "gender". I made my av semi-androgynous, and that's the way I like it. Having to sum everything up as either "male", "female", or "other" (what the heck deos that mean?) is kind of insulting; it means I have to sum up a large part of myself with one word. Giving scripts the ability to broadly characterize me is kind of annoying. Having a blank I need to fill out (even leaving it blank makes a statement!) in my profile is similarly annoying. If you can't figure out what I am, it's best if you just talk to me about it. I think the same probably goes for lots of other poeple in SL.

As far as this specific application, the gender arrow for your friend... first of all, I imagine that, unless the person is being very outgoing about their gender-swapping, it'd be kind of annoying ot have a little symbol floating over their head. Anyway, if you want ot do this for a joke, it's really simple. Create two symbols, and have the person put a copy in each of their folders for their different avatars. They won't have to make any more effort to switch the attachment, it'll just get put on with the rest of their shape, clothing, etc when they drag the folder to their av.

As far as generalized questions of determining what gender someone is so that you can appropriately use terms like "Mr., Mrs., He, She", etc... well, I think that's a bit silly. Why do you need my gender just so you can interact with me? In my scripting, I quietly but quite purposefully use "their" as a singular word to indicate a person when gender isn't an issue. I even do this in conversation. "Their" is the closest thing we have to a singular non-gendered pronoun, and it's already in use quite a lot in relaxed English. In fact, do some research, it's been in use for several hundred years as a gender-free pronoun. If that doesn't qualify it as "correct", I don't know what does.

To the people who feel uncomfortable about this, I don't really see this option as pigeonholing you into one gender or the other.

I think that most people in SL accept straightaway that a person's avatar is not necessarily a reflection of their RL self, and that quite often people use the limited options in the avatar sliders(and attachments) to represent appearances varying from "amorphous" to "alien" to 'furry" to "androgynous" to "huh?".

Currently, no matter what you appear as, the fact is that you are using a body type that is either "male" or "female". The function that is being asked for would merely detect that. For gender-swappers in SL, it wouldn't even require that you make a choice for your overall account as to whether you're male or female. If you changed body types, the script would assist your objects in accommodating for you.


I can't imagine this being used for anything other than assisting in positioning objects/attachments, or perhaps scripted objects that refer to you in the third person. I suppose that it could also be used for sampling data, if someone wanted to see what sex is more represented in-world, or who prefers a particular type of vending system, or whether guys or girls are buying your things more, but even that data would be suspect, as it only tells you what body type the avatars are using, not who the end user is.

Out of curiousity, for those people who are adamantly androgynous or non-human, can you really imagine mis-uses for a script that determines what sex you are based on the body-type you have chosen to use? You've already "chosen" a gender by using either a male or female body type, even if you adjust the sliders to make your appearance as asexual as possible. Would it truly insult you to be occasionally (mistakenly) referred to by a scripted object as "Mr." or "Ms.", based off your avatar's current chosen body type?

Alternately, should we have a third body type, "androgyn"?

What about all the people who *do* pick a gender, and want the world to reflect the choice they've made? Yeah it can be difficult to pigeonhole to a word, boiling down a complex set of history, motivations, and desires into a single word. The reason for that is it's *important*.

Some people, most people in fact, want the world to reflect those important choices they've made. I know I do, and in general that which increases the ability of other players, their scripts, and objects to react to my own choices is a good thing.

The problem is, if you just keep evading letting anyone know what you've chosen to be, how you've chosen to present yourself, then you are wandering through a world and interacting with things to whom you are pretty much just a ping on a sonar display. Position, direction and not much more.

You choose, through a set of meshes, textures, and animations to portray yourself as something, and expect me, as a player, to react to you appropriately. All I am asking for, in return, to enhance my ability to react to your presentation, is to give me some hints for those parts of myself - my scripted objects - without the ability to see.

I don't really want to pigeonhole anybody, I don't pigeonhole well myself.

Sarah, perhaps another use for QuickAttach mode, as proposed:

QuickAttach mode -- latch that gun, snatch this fun!
/13/08/38609/1.html

Hotkeys could be assigned, and while it wouldn't be as automatic as desired unless future LSL includes further ways to manually detect things on a customizable-by-avatar basis, it would certainly make things more efficient by way of batch attach macro.

I myself would like to see the distinction between male and female avatars removed, with all options available to all avatars. (Then again, I'd like to see a lot wider ranges of avatars to more easily accomodate completely non-human avatars, whether animals, robots, aliens, ents, pixies, giant mechs, or whatever).

If that were done, then one could imagine the usefulness of a free-text entry field one *could* use to identify gender or some other user-defined parameter (e.g. "robot", but I think including the floating attachment in the avatar folder makes a lot more sense in this case.

neko

The problem with making it a bunch of copies of an attachment in seperate outfit folders, is that's an extra load on the SL servers, keeping track of 10, 20, or 30 or more copies of objects , as opposed to one morphing object. That eats memory and impacts everyone.

Sure, you say, this is just one avatar and two signs, even replicated over an entire wardrobe it isn't much, but there are surely more people out there keeping seperate male and female copies of stuff, that should, with a more elegant API, not be multiply instanced.

Actually, if I recall correctly, objects are stored once and merely referenced within the inventory. You can have as many copies as you like -- the actual object isn't the same as the inventory item. Further, even if they were stored individually, the amount of space they'd take up, and the overhead required to transmit that data to the owner is so small as to be virtually imperceptible.

Right, but I know a few people who've made male avatars out of female body types, and vice versa, and their gender is quite easy to tell visually. Should they be expected to just live with being referred to by the wrong pronouns by all the objects that use av gender detection?



Hmm, iiinteresting Not that you can't make an androgyn from either body type, though.

That makes sense. It's an obvious optimization to make.

Instead of the "other" option, we need to make it the "nunyo" option as in "Nunyo damn business!"

Why not have gender options like:

1. Gender follows body type

2. Gender remains fixed (male/female/write-in?)

3. Unset

Wouldn't that make everyone relatively cheerful?

I can't see any major issues with that feature set. Sounds like it covers all the bases. Unset should be the default.