58

Facebook now has 58 gender options. How this is better than the two expected choices plus a write-in option (or the option of not providing any) may not be immediately obvious, but presumably the idea is, male or female will no longer be the default. And it will become known to many not educated in these matters (who may well be questioning such things about themselves without quite knowing what they're asking) that other possibilities are out there.

Once there are 58 options, there will be criticisms. It's simultaneously too many and too few. I've already seen, on Facebook, an objection to the absence of "butch" and "femme." Which led me, in turn, to wonder: are those gender identities in the same way as female and male? As in, wouldn't someone who identifies as one of those generally identify as a woman, and that's just gendered description above and beyond? No one's entirely feminine or masculine. There's not a name for the exact breakdown of every individual, but if someone identifies as a woman and goes by female pronouns, wouldn't "female" suffice? Wouldn't anything else, in most contexts, be potentially offensive? (As in, let's say you meet a new person, and you're recalling this event to another friend. Would you say, "I met this really cool femme woman the other day"?)

Meanwhile, it looks like there are some gratuitous repeats. Are "Cis" and "Cisgender" different? How is a "Cisgender Female" different from a "Cisgender Woman"? Is this about underage users? I take it there's justification - if an obscure one - for "trans" both with and without the asterisk, but again, how is a "Transgender Male" different from a "Transgender Man"?

And will these categories also apply for the "interested in"?

And finally, is it or is it not the proper etiquette for those of us whose gender matches what we were assigned at birth to now switch over to "Cisgender" in one form or another? On the one hand, it normalizes the possibility that one wouldn't necessarily be that, and thus avoids situations like where someone might say "a man" to mean "a white man" but "a black man" to mean "a black man," if that makes sense. Just putting "female" makes it seem, maybe, like you think there's just one authentic way to be female.

On the other, it's my understanding (in part from a commenter here, but no way to search the comments that I'm aware of) that some trans men and trans women simply identify as men and women, respectively, and aren't particularly thrilled to have a distinction made between the men and women who were assigned their genders at birth and those who were not. Meanwhile, I don't see it as particularly relevant, in most situations, that I was assigned "female" at birth. What's relevant, gender-identification-wise, is that I'm a woman.

'It's not about you' is the obvious - and perhaps appropriate - answer to this last question, but it kind of is about all of us, given the 58 options, and that if you have the option of being more or less polite, you may as well go with 'more'.