llGetGender()

Heh, I think I inadvertently started the ball rolling on gender within Second Life. The only 'gender' in SL is stored in the avatar shape for basic male/female shapes. There's no way to detect it as it's all only used client side. However gender came up at Andrew & Simon Linden's office hour the other day, and Andrew seemed pretty indifferent about the whole concept until I pointed out some possible uses for it such as furniture that seats an avatar differently based on gender, or marketing tools that change tactics/signage based on the gender of the viewer, etc. All of a sudden Andrew lit up and seemed intrigued by it all, and began thinking out loud about how gender could be stored server side so that LSL functions could retrieve an avatar's gender. He seemed to think that it would be fairly quick and easy to incorporate, and seemed pretty anxious actually to start work on it. So, if we wind up with some gender related functions in the near future, I'll take all the credit!

well good, while you've got his ear, maybe you'd like to suggest an override with 3 states instead of two... the third being "not available" and make it default. not out of political correctness, there's a multitude of reasons to set it, non-humans, gender ambiguous, personal privacy, etc ad nauseam. Tie it to the shape so that it can be set even in no mod, and let users control their experience.

ETA:
and FFS make sure it isn't tied to a number, so that the politically correct crowd doesn't get up in arms about first/last/positive/negative/less/more/etc... return a text string

/me sees the advent of weapons targeting female avatars, dance poles that pay male avatars more than females, etc. and is SOOOOO glad to see SL inching closer to reality.

Not so much.

Can we do a scripted color-match on the skin an avatar is wearing and discriminate against blacks too?

(forgive me for my lack of enthusiasm. You see, I've been female my whole life and it has perhaps warped my perspective a bit.)

there are people that will want it, both for good and bad reasons.... but I doubt you'll see much discrimination against people flagged female in SL... where most of the boys are girls too =P

besides, we already have lingual/national/racial discrimination and I hate to be left out of the regular bias'. I'd feel out of place (ref: llGetAgentLanguage and idiots autobanning thereby, there was a wonderful thread about it months back in RA)

I've seen this come up over and over again, and people always talk about privacy (my gender is NOYB) or about discrimination and lots of other issues. But the one reason I want it is to PUT YOUR FEET ON THE GROUND! When I 'sit' an avatar in the "stand" pose, I'd like to position it at llGetAgentSize(av).z/2 meters above the ground. This works for male avatars, but female avatars have a different center of gravity, and their feet land too high. I want to detect gender to fix this, but it has not been possible!

Good stuff! One more thing for them to "store" non-visibly in the code of a profile! LOL here we go again

To be honest, I don't understand what the whole problem is. It's not as if it will tell anyone a person's true gender, just the gender of the av..which, presumably SHOULD be an attribute either garnered from the shape or changeable by the avatar themself. This is nothing more than someone looking at you is it?

There will be more blame than credit with that one .

RLV has a command to query the gender (although technically all that does is return the value of the AvatarSex debug setting which isn't properly set all of the time). In RLVa I originally had it return just the gender of the shape which led to quite a bit of feedback since it's not too uncommon for the gender of the shape to clash with the gender of the avie.

People really do want to be able to set it independently of their shape which means it needs to be a separate UI element like "Agent Language" (which has an opt-out as well).

Also consider the impact of getting it wrong: if someone ends up using it to change between female/male pronouns and ends up saying "he" when it should have been saying "she" or vice versa then some will just chuckle but others aren't going to be particularly amused and think negatively of the creator. And then you have people (or "things" who aren't going to be happy with either of the two and want their own subculture specific "pronouns" used so you can't win.

---

That would be enough not to want it if that's your idea of what it's good for.

LOL, see, and I mentioned this to Andrew when he mentioned 'male' and 'female' at the meeting. I laughed and said "Go say that in the forums and watch all hell break loose." (such as it did in this thread!). Void, I already covered that 3rd state with Andrew explaining that alot of residents dont consider themselves male or female, so trust me I already covered that for those who find themselves outside the realm of simply 'male' or 'female'.

Also, I don't quite see the big deal. As was previously stated, it will not reflect the actual gender, simply what the user sets it to. And Kitty, as far as marketing goes, what I meant by that is say there's a sign that rotates images. It could switch from guns, cars, motorcycles, etc for males, and start showing shoes, bling, dresses, etc, for females.

I was actually surprised the first time gender came up in the forums and all hell broke loose. Personally, I'm a male in RL, and I don't honestly care who knows. People who see me in RL come to that conclusion rather quickly, and I present myself in SL as a male as well. Beyond that, I don't think much of it. Seeing all the residents up in arms over it in SL has enlightened me to the fact that some people have an issue with being pigeon holed into one group or the other. Also, I know that some people are born physically with one gender, and mentally with the other, and so I can understand the difficulty it presents to them when gender needs to be specified. Still, I am in agreement that an 'Other' or 'Not Specified' category should be included with any LSL gender functions that come down the pike.

Credit or blame, I take it either way...lol. I think ultimately it will add functionality to SL, so I'm a proponent for getting these functions as long as that 3rd state is there for those who need it.

My male alt is based on the female mesh option. For him, the function would be sure to fail. (^_^)y

I think Blacks are a bit safer these days - the latest trends seem to discriminate more based on origin and/or religion -- the Mexicans, the Asians, the Muslims, etc... Therefore, we need a script function that will provide that info to us.

Gender is a float, mine is 0.4
What

that would be why I specifically mentioned tying it to shape, and allowing it to be set outside of mod permissions. it allows perfect user control, and per avatar switchability, WITHOUT having to change it manually or separately.

it also allows fuller options for defaults on items that are multi user interactive, simplifying things like which person leads in a couples dance, etc. when the outcomes are different actions.

@height:
it's much more accurate not equating height/center-mass to gender, and instead grabbing their height vs their sim position (hip joint) to get center of mass.

I do understand the gender debate, especially in light of things like certain platforms that made you PROVE your gender, but also for a multitude of other reasons. with user control, it's a nice feature, without it, I can almost guarantee an uproar, if only because it'll limit peoples expression, creativity, and privacy.

I'm only indeterminate in name. Emerald jiggles my bits to prove it (apparently). I was recently working on complex building AO and this would have made it so much easier. (It didn't matter what you clicked on the building had just the one animator for each AV and had a menu of all the sit-positions throughout the building). One of the questions the AO had to ask was 'which animation set do you prefer...'

I'm just curious... which would be less, and which would be more (and all the cries of sexism that go with any choice) =)

(that may be a little too much resolution for most people to parse, and a lot less than some would want)

Right, well, a small percentage of people would choose, for whatever reason, the 'wrong' choice (disregarding the actual gender), and for those folks, it would fail. It should be clear that the setting is for in world scripted items to determine how one wants to be treated in terms of those scripted items (like seating a male or female pose), rather than a carved-in-stone 'this is my gender' value. Like Void stated, it shouldn't necessarily be tied to shape. What if someone wants to have 'male' gender who dresses like a woman, hence, has a female base shape. If I make it to the next meeting with Andrew and Simon, and this subject comes up, then I'll be sure to bring up not tying gender to shape.

As far as all the people complaining about abuse of a function like llGetGender(), I just don't get it. Any function can be abused, just like any power can be abused. One can generate electricity with nuclear power, or vaporize a city. The fact that some will probably abuse such a function as llGetGender() is stupid to point out. I can just as easily abuse someone with llSay() or llDetectedKey() or llGetInventory(), you name it, any function that gets or sets or outputs data (which is ALL of them) can be used in an abusive manner. So, I don't really see the point in pointing out what's obvious, and I don't see how that should be a deterrent for creation of said function, as if that were the case, then there shouldn't be any functions, events, states, or scripting at all because any function, state or event can contribute to abuse. Maybe we shouldn't have llAddToBanList() because people can abuse that to wrongfully ban someone from an estate automatically. See what I mean, any function at all can be used in an abusive way.

So, if you want to contribute to the thread, feel free, but if you want to simply troll because a new function comes down the pike that YOU don't like for whatever issues you're carrying, then just keep quiet about it because this is the scripting forum, not resident answers.

actually I'm saying DO tie it to the shape (file), but as an independent switch from the mesh choice if that makes better sense.


I disagree with your line of thinking, I think it is important to look at ways new items might be abused, both socially, and technically; weigh that against what functionality will be added, and see if we can't minimize any fallout from any of the predictable negatives. I think user discretion helps that.


I don't think it's fair to characterize noting RL equivalents of possible problems as trolling...

to make the point of a setting independent from mesh but tied to shape (so that it's easy to swap with each avatar) you might mention that all those males that prefer female avs may want to set a declaration that isn't consistent with that mesh, so they can see advertisements that they are more interested in, as a for instance. or even set a female or not available flag if their interests are different than the stereotypes....

me personally, I'll probably never set female on any thing that gives me a choice... because I'm apt to kill the next bastard that tries to sell me a pink plastic overpriced cutesy piece of crap tech item. probably by forcing said item down their throat.... sideways. (with exception for an AR15 detailed out in powerpuff girls because irony is yummy)

1.0 is male
I don't see sexism because it's not clear whether 1.0 means "more value" or "far from normal" (:

You hit the nail on the head of the whole issue there: we will always require a negative for a positive, an up for a down, a left for a right as soon as our thoughts attempt to balance a distinction of any kind. I'm sure digital technology is made in the image of our thinking processes: everything the 'puter processes boils down to the question of whether it is a 0 or a 1? And which is off and which is on or positive or negative really? Technically neither choice is one thing or the other but we *need* to distinguish the alternatives in order to get our brains around how the 'puter works. At the same time the 'puter itself cannot care less.

This boolean switch is there as soon as the issue of gender is raised. It is what makes gender a political issue from the word 'go'.

Or is that 'stop'?

llGetGender will only be useful if it's accompanied by llGetAgenda.

My business partner and I would certainly find some way of detecting gender really useful for our BDSM furniture (and, indeed, for some of the vampire stuff she does, too). Obviously the important question is whether you're a dominant or submissive (or biter/bitten) but we do have male and female versions of particular animations and animation sets, and it would be really nice if we could make thrones that knew if the dominant sitting on them was supposed to be male or female and if the avatar on poseball 3 was one of his or her boys or girls, because some of the anim combinations just don't make sense if the actors' apparent gender is wrong.

I guess if we had access to that sort of feature, I'd make it an option that the toys could try to detect gender rather than rely on it, but I think it's one a lot of people would turn on, at least from the feedback we get.

I'm not sure I'd go quite to that extent in reduction (that feels as artificial as reducing everything to ten because that's our base number system), but I do agree that as a society we all consider our positions relative to others, and place a dualistic value on the relationship of those positions like better/worse or higher/lower but there is also "the same as", "opposite of", and even not applicable. which we have models for in computer logic (logical comparisons, type mismatches, etc)

for me the whole thing is just meta discussion, as long as it works and provides useful options (rather than removing them) and isn't onerous to set or use, I don't care if they declare the possible returns to be "squack", "snort", and "whistle" let alone numbers.

@Day Oh:
computers like clear definitions, even if it's just "not one of these". I don't think most people would be clear enough on definitions of intermediate levels between 0.0 and 1.0, even if you expanded it to a rotation. and even then for every person you can find that could agree on a fractional range, I could probably find another that would insist they belong at -.3 or 7.8 or sqrt( -1 ).... not that I think it's a simple thing. just simple to be able to agree on the definitions even if they amount to no/yes/no-comment

I don't see anything wrong with the idea feeling 'artificial': thought is the first act of creation, the first thing we make as opposed to produce by natural course of being alive, so there is an element of artificiality about everything people say or do - even when we may be doing or saying whatever it is unconsciously. All the same, I wouldn't want to get involved in decimal thinking. I imagine only a hive mind could successfully formulate thought around ten alternatives for every notion. Far too complex for me.


I agree. In fact my previous post wasn't a specific response to your 1.0 example but more to do with the issues raised by even a breath of the word 'gender'. There is an ongoing problem in discussion whereby we are virtually compelled to prioritise everything in favour of one sex or the other - even if it is only a point of view. I think of it in terms of gravity: eventually you are going to come down on one side or the other. An element of 'give and take' seems to be the most that even the best discussions can manage.

Although I like the idea of the function in principle and certainly as Innuala proposes to use it, I just don't think folk will exploit it usefully. Maybe it would have a chance if 'neutral' were set as the default. Otherwise the prevalence of pink and blue poseballs in SL and all the RL bullsh!t that should go without mention here is my argument that the juggling match of gender is just too much for the many to even give it a second thought.

The viewer does equality checks against SEX_MALE so 1 for male would make sense.

That means female is 0... which comes before 1... women come before men which makes us more important so I can live with that .

Guys wouldn't feel left out either because 1 is "bigger" than 0 and "bigger is better" is a stereotypical male trait.

Everyone's happy .

We really need llGetRace() so we can tell betweeen human, neko & furry
Maybe llGetReligion() too?