Detecting an avatars gender

Exactly, Reitsuki.

Lee's idea offers an interesting alternative. Ideally, that field accepts a lot of text so you can be more than one "type", and scripts can read the field and interpret it as they wish. Ad hoc standards would emerge, and if the user doen't override it, a nice default would be "male" or 'female" based on avatar body type. (And perhaps "male furry", etc.)

Residents would be free to put whatever they want in there, or make it entirely blank.

Emily, the avatar type you choose may have nothing to do with with how you want to be treated or referred to, therefore, multiple gender discussion has a place in this discussion. Furthermore, the body form does not necessarily dictate gender. There are males who use a female body form and then attach male parts. All I'm saying is that discussion of multiple gender (including neuter) IS relevant. Your point is simply that making the avatar body type available would be useful and interesting. I agree, but it would also be abused by coders (as is obvious from some of the posts here). By "abused", I simply mean it would be taken as a statement of sexuality rather than simply body type.

So... how about we just dream up a dopey Gender Query/Response protocol? If an avatar's attachment responds with something recognizable by the querying object within some interval, then s/he's Male or Female (or MTF or FTM or anything the querying object wants to recognize) and if not, then default to Unspecified. (Could possibly just add it to LockMeister since it's become a kind of grab-bag anyway, and tends to be embedded already in some of the, uh, "distinguishing" attachments.)

Um.. I never said "Dainty" or "Macho". You did.

And if the woman doesn't want to sit in the "dainty" pose, then don't bloody use the chair!
If you don't like the pose in the chair, don't use it. Isn't that how it is now?
You're creating an argument that doesn't exist.
You're intimating that someone using the option is officiously and offensively assigning gender roles.

That's just not the case.

It was just what I thought would be a nice option for people.

Are you saying that the minority of people that would have a problem with their female AV sitting with their knees together should take precedence over the vast majority that really don't give two shits about this "issue"?

It's ridiculous.

Choice of gender in an avatar is an important choice. If you want to express yourself by being a TV/TS, robot or furry, then not only will you confuse people, you will confuse the grid. That's just how it works. No matter how much you want to deny it, in this game, somewhere out there, you are listed as either male or female. If that is offensive to you then start a campaign to get LL to add whatever gender you want to the game. This state of things parallels the real world where a transvestite is still male, even if she wants people to call her female.

If coders were to use gender as it is as an expression of sexuality then they would be misusing the data, and as a consequence their product would be inferior. Inferior products don't sell and nobody wants to use them. People would learn not to do that when coders get complaints from people (if in fact they were to get complaints, which I highly doubt).

I'm gorean. Let's say that, hypothetically, I had no sense of humor and took everything WAY too seriously on SL. I could say that I should be referred to at all times as "girl", and never referred to by name. Calling me anything other than "girl" is an affront to my sexuality (read up on gor if you don't understand this). Perhaps I would try to stir up controversy to get LL to remove commands that identify my name and instead implement a gorean identification checkbox for everybody (including non-goreans) that forces scripts to refer to goreans as "Master", "Mistress", and "girl".

That would be a ridiculous waste of time and energy, not only on my part, but it would be a waste to implement. That is exactly what the neuter / TV/TS community is doing here if they ask for LL to implement some kind of gender checkbox.

Your avatar gender is your gender. End of story. Scripts should read gender. Scripts should not read sexuality.

If you think abuses for the gender data are bad, think about the consequences for scripts reading sexuality. How many areas do you think would implement security systems that would boot gay or transexual or transgendered players automatically? How many security devices would be set to shoot homosexuals on sight?

I say make gender public but keep sexuality private (code wise, that is... socially you can scream it from the rooftops for all I care).

I think the controversy would prevent this from being an implemented feature, but that's too bad. The ability to detect whether the shape has male or female checked would be useful for a recent flying surfboard I was making--since most male avatars are slightly taller than most female, if the sitpos is right for men, it's off for women (they float above).

Of course, two boards will be made with different sitpos (sitposes?), but it would have been a trifle more elegant to have a if(llGenderDetect(agent)=="male"{sitpos=oneheight;}else{sitpos=otherheight;}

But for that, there's llGetAgentSize() which is surely more precise than a guess based on gender. It's very nice, now that llSetLinkPrimitiveParams can move the avatar around, to make the position a function of the avatar's height. (Though it's never perfect because of other shape effects--especially the ratio of leg-length to total height.)

Actually, they are not settings on your account. It's just that when you choose your first avatar, you get to pick from two choices of shapes with different settings. You can change avatars anytime you want, and make any avatar look like anything you want; it doesn't have to be male or female. And there's no way in the current system for a program to see if someone is male or female - hence this discussion.

On other systems I've used, where this stuff was more programmable than is currently possible with SL, scripts, people made up all kinds of genders in addition to male and female. For example, one gender was called "Spivak", which was some kind of neuter gender. It was programmed so that when speech/text for it was generated, it used pronouns that looked like: "E said e wants eir head shaved", instead of "He said he wants his head shaved." That system had extensive script libraries for text generation that all objects could use, and new genders could be programmed for it.

But if you're talking about clothes, for example, that's a different dimension than speech. So maybe an avatar needs more than one gender -- one for speech, one for clothing, one for finding compatible sex partners, etc. Those could all be pieces of information that could be set and read by scripts.

This doesn't seem to me like it has anything to do with sexual politics, which is what everyone appears to be getting, uh, all excited and worked up over.

The way it is now, you can override the default Sit poses for sitting on things that are not scripted. It might be nice if the chair communicated to the avatar about what pose it was planning on doing, and having the avatar either accept that or substitute its own pose. (This would be done silently, according to scripts that the avatar had on them.)

You'd need some kind of protocol for this that could describe something about the pose, so that the avatar could make decisions about it. The most trivial description of a Sit might just be the name of the pose. That might be good enough to start for some experimental purposes, but has obvious problems in the long term.

Gender is a setting on the Shape object. And I think most scripters would LOVE to have access to the values of the different settings in the Shape.