Everyone is male or female. What if you don’t consider yourself either? What if you’re a member of the LGBT community?
According to the Human Rights Campaign, 4 in 10 LGBT youth say that the community they live in is not accepting of LGBT people. Now, they have a way to escape that environment through Facebook.
Facebook is now providing multiple options for gender identity and pronoun preferences on a user’s profile. Some of the options people can choose from are “cisgender,” “transgender,” and “intersex.” Cisgender means that a person who is either a boy or a girl sees himself or herself as they are (a girl, a girl; a boy, a boy). Intersex is what people define themselves as if they are caught between a boy and a girl and have both characteristics. A transgender is a person who was originally one gender and is now in the process or already went through the process of becoming the opposite gender.
These changes will not only appear on a user’s “About Me” page but will show up throughout any other pronoun Facebook refers to. Anyone can change this by clicking “Settings” in the “About Me” section and selecting the gender options.
“I think it’s great that Facebook is doing this. It’s going to help us a lot,” said Christian Brescian, a junior and member of the LGBT community.
Technology is now affecting society greatly and because of that social networking has a huge impact on everyone. Over 500 million people use Facebook, making it one of the largest social networking sites. Knowing that a large company, such as Facebook, is progressing and changing their attitude towards the acceptance of LGBT members shows that society can also change and accept LGBT members.
This is not the first time Facebook changes to better fit the members of the LGBT community. In 2011, Facebook added two new relationship status options users can include in their online profiles: “in a civil union” and “in a domestic partnership.”
“I think all of this is great. It is going to give people an option to be themselves; it won’t confine them to one specific gender anymore,” said Kayla Hernandez, a member of the Equal Rights Alliance Club at MLEC.
