From Twitter 11-04-2010

[vejiicakes]

• 08:20:11: RT transfinite: Dear non-gender-binary-identified people: You don't exist. Kind regards, - DeviantArt.
• 11:31:51: Of the things you've wanted in life, you've only been really sure of one of them. Stop being insecure and go for it. #tweetyour16yearoldself
• 15:22:05: Dude this movie Illegal Tender is awesome. Fierce mama-and-son team shootout with

Comments

[viloki9]

While I think DeviantArt handled their customer support very poorly, I'm pretty sure that they're forcing you to choose a gender because their ads requires a gender input, or else it'll break the page. Sorry but non-sex specified people don't matter to advertising and writing code to deal with non-specified will probably piss off deviantArt's advertisers because, you know:

people who give you money > people who use your services for free or for a fraction of a fraction of how much the company burns per day.

As an programmer, I know that you can't show nothing because if the advertisers come by, play with your site, see nothing, they'll be pissed and sue you for violating contract. You can't show both because it'll double count in the advertising tracker and the advertisers will be pissed. The other alternative is to default to one sex or the other.

Anyways, it looks like they added an 'Other' field -very quickly, might I add-, so it's likely that internally: Other == 'gender that comprises of most of our userbase'

[vejiicakes]

I don't think the issue was necessarily the "why" of the gender binary input though. I think the biggest point of contention here was the customer service (which we both agree was poor).

Other people have piped up that, "Hey, I've worked in customer support, and we don't even write the policies for this sort of thing, but there were SO MANY other ways these people could have dealt with this issue that didn't involve saying things like 'THERE ARE ONLY TWO SEXES' and so on."

(At least that's where I think the biggest point of contention was. I'm totally sympathetic to the fact that because of advertisers, etc, various social networking sites and places like DevArt are required to get people to use information in such a way as to allow advertisements to get at them. I think MOST people got that. It was the way it was handled that was the most rage-inducing.)