New Gender Options for Facebook Users

You don’t just have to be male or female on Facebook anymore.

The social media giant is adding a customizable option with about 50 different terms people can use to identify their gender as well as preferred pronoun choices: him, her or them.

The changes took effect on Thursday, impacting Facebook’s 159,000 monthly users in the United States.

As reported by the Associated Press:

“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,” said Facebook software engineer Brielle Harrison, who worked on the project and is herself undergoing gender transformation, from male to female. On Thursday, while watchdogging the software for any problems, she said she was also changing her Facebook identity from Female to TransWoman.

“All too often transgender people like myself and other gender nonconforming people are given this binary option, do you want to be male or female? What is your gender? And it’s kind of disheartening because none of those let us tell others who we really are,” she said. “This really changes that, and for the first time I get to go to the site and specify to all the people I know what my gender is.”

You can watch a news clip from Associated Press, below:

You must be logged in to post a comment Login