For those of you who don't know, I identify as neutrois -- neither male nor female. I've been in the closet about it for several years for various reasons... mainly, the fear that saying "I don't have a gender" was a way of exercising cis privilege. Lately, though, I've gotten tired of not talking about it and pretending that I consider myself female. So this is it: I'm not.
What's the relevance of this? I deleted my old account at deviantART because I was tired of the username and embarrassed about the old crappy art I'd posted years ago. Starting over with a new account sounded pretty good. But when I went to edit my profile settings on my new account, well...
I was pretty confused at how there were only options for "Male" and "Female" in their gender dropdown box. I distinctly remembered there being some third option, which I had chosen for my previous account. A brief Google search later, I found that as of May, the "Unspecified" option had been removed. I'm sure this sounds familiar to those of you who witnessed LJ's gender fail several months ago; however, unlike Livejournal, deviantART has not backtracked on this. Despite (or maybe in spite of) the numerous user complaints, dA has not offered an explanation of any sort.
I had to wonder why, so I asked in a support request. Maybe they just hadn't considered that non-binary people used their site? Or, well, existed. It wouldn't be the first time. I got a response from a user named realitysquared, aka Daniel Sowers Jr., the site's Copyright & Etiquette Administration manager:
Thank you for contacting deviantART, I will be assisting you with your support ticket.
A relatively recent redesign of our profile setting page now requires that you designate yourself as being male or female.
If you do not wish to designate your gender and prefer to deactivate your account due to being forced to make this choice then you may do so if you choose.
Missing the point much? It's not that I do not wish to designate my gender, but that I am unable to with their current setup. I replied letting him know as much:
It's not that I "do not wish" to designate my gender. I wouldn't mind doing so, actually! But I can't with the options you offer. I am not male and I am not female. Therefore, I CANNOT designate my gender. It's as though you offered a box for users to designate their race and only listed white and black. You missed the entire point of my support request.
Surely that would get through to him, right? I mean, maybe that would help explain my position. Surely he'd just misunderstood. Right?
Well... apparently not. Mr. Sowers replied thusly:
My apologies but there are only two sexes; male and female so one should apply to you. In the unusual case that you are hermaphrodite then I would suggest that you select the one which you feel applies the best.
I don't think I should have to explain what's wrong here. First of all, despite being in such a position of authority, Mr. Sowers had no grasp of proper comma usage. And second, well, there's that lie about there only being two sexes (though I wasn't actually talking about sex to begin with, but gender). Finally, do people really still use the word "hermaphrodite"? It's one thing if an intersexed person wants to identify that way on their own (I'm not, so it's not up to me to say they can't), but binary folks really don't have that right.
In the meantime, I'd found that their profile setting to "not display" the chosen gender doesn't actually work, so I left one last angry reply:
There are not only two sexes, and neither of them applies to me. That is extremely hateful and bigoted of you to say. Why is this website called deviantArt if you only want people who fit into neat little boxes, and why are you celebrating Spirit Day if you refuse to acknowledge the existence of intersexed (the word isn't 'hermaphrodite', thanks), genderqueer, neutrois, and other non-binary users?
I'd also like to point out that your setting to "not display" a user's chosen gender does not work.
http://split-complex.deviantart.com/stats/gallery/ I have "male" chosen right now and this page refers to me with the he/him set of pronouns.
Yes. This happened on Spirit Day, of all days! At first I was baffled, but then I realized why: deviantART doesn't actually give a damn about the queer community or those kids who had killed themselves. They were just jumping on a convenient bandwagon to make themselves look all awesome and progressive.
After that, my support request was closed without further comment; attempting to re-open it did no good. By that point, I was thoroughly disgusted and tired of arguing, so I let it lie for a few days. After a while, though, I got angry again. This wasn't acceptable, and I wasn't going to stand for it. I opened three new support requests on three separate issues.
Request #110960: Question about site name
Hi, I'm just wondering why this website is called deviantArt when you don't welcome users unless they fit into the tiny, narrowly-defined boxes of either male or female. In fact, devArt used to be open to people of all genders, but as of earlier this year you've forbidden non-binary people from registering accounts, and I was just wondering why that is.
↑ This was my attempt to find out why they had made their discriminatory policy change and understand their reasoning behind it, which had not actually been explained to me.
Request #110955: Chosen gender isn't hidden even though I set it to be
Hi. In my settings, I set my chosen gender to be hidden. However, the page at
http://split-complex.deviantart.com/stats/gallery/ uses either the he/his or she/her set of pronouns, varying with which gender I've chosen. That's not "hidden".
↑ This was an attempt to at least get the problem about the stats page that I'd noticed resolved. And finally...
Request #110959: Abuse report: User realitysquared
In my previous support request at
http://support.deviantart.com/requests/102727 a staff member with the username realitysquared basically mansplained to me that "there are only two sexes", which is a lie, and off-handedly wondered if I was a "hermaphrodite", which is actually a very offensive word when applied to humans. I'd appreciate if some action could be taken about this.
↑ Having been insulted to my face by deviantART's "Copyright & Etiquette Administration Manager", I thought this warranted an abuse report. So here we go.
As of today, the bug report has not been replied to. So let's just ignore that one.
My question about why the site is called deviantART was replied to by a user named Stykera, as follows:
Hello,
Thank you for contacting deviantART. I'm sorry but you are mistaken: we do not forbid anyone from registering on the site due to their sexuality.
If you need any further assistance, please do not hesitate to contact us.
Kind regards,
Chris Price
Customer Service Representative
Talk about missing the point, right? I replied,
I'm sorry, but you've misunderstood my question. I didn't say anything about sexuality; I was talking about gender and how you only have options for "Male" and "Female" on the profile page.
Stykera's answer:
Hi,
I see you have previously discussed this same matter with us. To rephrase:
A relatively recent redesign of our profile setting page now requires that you designate yourself as being male or female.
If you do not wish to designate your gender and prefer to deactivate your account due to being forced to make this choice then you may do so if you choose.
Kind regards,
Chris Price
Customer Service Representative
Kind regards. L O L, am I right? She "saw" that I had previously discussed the matter with them, and then repeated the same bullshit answer I'd gotten before! I replied,
You have not answered my question: Why is your site called deviantART if you do not welcome deviants?
Furthermore, I do wish to designate my gender, but am unable to do so as my gender is not listed in your drop-down box. Please don't patronize me.
You'd think this would be a simple matter. But, no. After that, the request was closed without comment. I re-opened it three times asking for a response before Stykera replied,
Please, you have already had this issue addressed by at least two admins. There will be no further discussion here, and the ticket will be marked solved.
Kind regards,
Chris Price
Customer Service Representative
So that was that, and that was why I decided to go ahead and make this post. If they won't discuss it, the least I can do is let other people know that the site is being run in a bigoted manner. Am I right?
And finally, about the matter of my abuse report... A user called y2jenn replied.
Dear deviant,
We are, of course, very sorry if you feel you were mistreated in any way during your last support inquiry. That wasn't our intention. deviantART's gender choosing system is limited to the general "male or female" choices by design. We completely understand that you may not feel at home classified as either gender. But we require that all deviants choose one or the other in order to complete the registration. You are, of course, more than welcome to hide the chosen gender from public view. Please don't hesitate to let us know if you need any further assistance with this or with anything else in the future.
☼ Jenn Lee
Support Desk Representative
Bullshit. Ms. Lee had decided to make it all about their ~intent~ and about their gender drop-down box (which I'd specifically opened a separate request about), ignoring the bigoted language that Mr. Sowers had used toward me. Naturally, I replied:
"We are, of course, very sorry if you feel you were mistreated in any way during your last support inquiry. That wasn't our intention." Intent does not matter. Realitysquared point-blank told me to my face that my gender does not exist, and now you're trying to tell me the same thing with nicer language. So far I have not received an actual answer as to why you want to throw non-binary users under the bus.
"deviantART's gender choosing system is limited to the general "male or female" choices by design." So it's a feature, not a bug. =|
"But we require that all deviants choose one or the other"... isn't that a bit self-contradictory? How can you justify that? This was one of the few websites that didn't force such a choice, and then you took it away. Is that supposed to be progress? It look more like regression to me. This is 2010, not 1900.
"You are, of course, more than welcome to hide the chosen gender from public view." As a matter of fact, it's not completely hidden, but I've already filed a separate bug report about that.
"Please don't hesitate to let us know if you need any further assistance with this or with anything else in the future." If you seriously think this is a solution to my problem, I have to wonder how it is you made it to the position of Support Desk Representative. You also did not address realitysquared's offensive language -- "There are only two sexes" (which is a lie) and the usage of the word "hermaphrodite".
I would appreciate if you didn't mark this as solved until I agree that it is.
Can you guess what happened next? If you guessed "She completely ignored the complaint about realitysquared and made it about the gender options", you guessed right!
I'm sorry, but you'll need to pick one of the genders available that best suits your needs. I do see your other ticket and it will be picked up by our bug department for review. Thank you.
☼ Jenn Lee
Support Desk Representative
So, I'm done arguing with deviantART. Instead, I'm bringing the issue to the wider Internet community. Everyone has a right to know about this issue; I do think we deserve an answer from them about why they did something so stupid and discriminatory, but I doubt we're ever going to get one. (My bet? I think they did it to better focus their advertisements. Yay, sexist ad targeting! Don't you love it? I know I do!)
