Male. Female. Or Two-Spirit?

Just recently Facebook has released 56 new gender options for users to pick from. It is no longer just the typical male or female that it used to be. Some of the new options include; Agender, Female to Male,

Intersex, Two-spirit and even Neither.(Click here to see the remainder of the list) They also have made users be able to change the pronoun in which they are referred to publicly. You are now able to choose “he/his, she/her, or the gender-neutral they/their” as your options to better suit your preference.

As it was reinstated in an article by CNN, Facebook’s main drive in doing this is so that people may better express their own identity to the world. We live in a world with many different types of people and facebook directly interacts with all of them as well. As this may be a touchy topic for some people, facebook even gives the option to hide, or keep private, their specific gender selection with certain people. Constant facebook users have been in debate with facebook about making these changes and they finally delivered.

I overall think this is a really good idea. Like I stated earlier, not one person is the same and people now a days are really open about letting people know that they are different and what better way to do that besides facebook? We all look at each other’s profiles when we get a new friend request and see what they are all about and who they are. For some people this may make that task a lot easier. As I see this as a really good idea, I still don’t understand why people are limited to the only 56 options? Why not leave a blank space and allow someone to just type in what they feel their gender is? Yes this may start a new batch of problems and a bunch of people just making thing up, but isnt facebook supposed to be a way to express ourselves? If they wanted to go ahead and just leave it open to peoples interpretations of themselves I feel that there would need to be minimal regulation on what people put in the box and have some tech guy checking those out and filter through what’s appropriate and what’s not. At the same time, if they are going to start to regulate gender specifications I think someone needs to take a look into all the people posting mirror pic selfies. But that’s a whole different can of worms.