Gay advocacy group hails "milestone" move to allow social network
users to identify as gender other than male or female.
Facebook
has introduced a new option allowing users to identify themselves as a gender
other than male or female.
The basic
user profile for members in the United States now includes a customisable
category with a variety of gender identifiers, including "transgender,"
"intersex" and "fluid," the social networking company
announced on Thursday.
"There's
going to be a lot of people for whom this is going to mean nothing, but for the
few it does impact, it means the world," Facebook software engineer
Brielle Harrison, who is undergoing a gender transformation from male to
female, told the Associated Press news agency.
|
Facebook
has taken a milestone step to allow countless people to more honestly and
accurately represent themselves.
Chad
Griffin, Human Rights Campaign Foundation president
|
Facebook
said it wanted users to "feel comfortable being your true, authentic
self."
The
social networking site, which has more than 1.2bn members worldwide, said it
worked with a leading group of gay and transgender advocacy organisations to
develop the list of gender options, previously limited to male or female.
Rival
site Google+ already had an "other" option for gender.
Expansion
plans
Custom
genders are only available to those who use Facebook in US English, but the
company plans to expand the range in the future.
Facebook's
move will help support young people whose sexual identities do not conform to
traditional societal norms, the Human Rights Campaign Foundation, a US-based
gay advocacy group, told the Agence France-Presse news agency.
"Facebook
has taken a milestone step to allow countless people to more honestly and
accurately represent themselves," foundation president Chad Griffin said.
The
Williams Institute, a think-tank based in Los Angeles, estimates that at least
700,000 individuals in the United States identify as transgender, an umbrella
term that includes people who live as a gender different from the one assigned
to them at birth.
Facebook's
announcement generated some criticism from US religious group Focus on the
Family, with representative Jeff Johnston telling the AP: "It's impossible
to deny the biological reality that humanity is divided into two halves: male
and female."
Source: Aljazeera
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