Define your own gender on Facebook alternative Diaspora

By Contributing Writer on Thursday, December 30, 2010 - 21:11

[Editor’s Note: This article was written by the team of ‘Gaelick’, an award-winning Irish website for LGBT news.]

Does that screen make you crazy? If so, there are a lot of people who agree with you. Since the summer of 2008, you have been required to indicate that you are either male or female. And while the good people at Facebook say you may keep it off your profile, the pronouns it uses to refer to you will be decided by which one you choose. Facebook say the requirement is entirely motivated by a desire for good grammar.

The real reason for it is probably for Facebook Ads — the company’s targeted advertising service. We cannot be allowed to forget, of course, that the users of Facebook are not Facebook’s customers. The advertisers are the customers. We are actually the product.

And the advertisers don’t want unspecified or complicated products. They want to target advertisements for pink snuggies to women and hunting knives to men. So, Facebook have largely ignored the pleas from the queer community to allow people to choose no gender, ‘transgender’ or ‘other’ or to simply define their own.

Enter Diaspora (what is Diaspora?). Diaspora is an open-source, privacy-conscious Facebook alternative. It’s still in alpha, so you can’t just sign up, but I have a few invites left if anyone wants to have a poke around. Just leave a comment [here].

The emphasis with Diaspora is on making sure that you are fully in control of your own information. You can fully delete your profile. When you accept someone as a contact, you immediately put them into ‘aspects’ or groups. That makes it even easier to control who sees what.

You can even host your own ‘pod’ on a server you control, which means that your information is never anyone else’s property.

The big news, for a lot of people, is that you can write in your own gender. There is no drop down, or check box. They haven’t even put in male or female as options. Everyone will write in what they want, if they want to write anything at all. So there will be males, females, women, men, boys, girls, bois, trans, queers, futches, butches, genderqueer dykes, pangender, androgyne, third gender, and anything else you can think of. You can write in 'unicorn' if that makes you happy.