Okay, so I know it's not my turn to blog this week, but I can't help sharing this, because I think it's super-relevant to what we were talking about today with the Butler reading.
This is a blog post by someone who uses deviantART, which is a web community where artists can upload their work and share it with others for comment and critique. During the sign-up process, like many other websites, dA asks users to select their gender, either male or female. There were some transgender users who found this extremely offensive, and there was a huge blow-up about it, the details of which are outlined in the post. The fact that there was a huge outcry and debate over the distinction between gender, sex, and the various kinds of genders that people can now identify with, lead dA to change the way it let users display (or not display) their gender, as is explained in dA's CEO's blog post on the subject.
I just wanted to know what you guys thought about the subject. Did the users go too far in assuming that dA was being disrespectful? Did dA go too far in changing their sign-up interface? Or is this all just nuts?
The reason I'm going to go ahead and say that this is all nuts has to do with political correctness. I realize that checking boxes is not something most of us really enjoy doing, because it is so difficult to fully encompass who and what we are in a tiny box, but at the same time, these boxes are so insignificant in comparison to the messages we could be spreading if we didn't spend so much time being upset about checking these little boxes off. I feel like I'm rambling...but my point is that I think time is wasted squabbling over these matters when it could be devoted to something more profound.
ReplyDeleteagreed
ReplyDeleteAhem, ahem
ReplyDeleteAnd the Facebook page, of course.