Facebook: Wider Gender Choice on Personal Profiles

Facebook is demonstrating its commitment to respecting the sexual and gender identities of its users by introducing the option to choose from a wider range of categories.

This news comes from the United States, where the update has already been rolled out to many personal profiles. As of today, in addition to “male” and “female“, users can select their gender from a more extensive list.

The list has been carefully compiled over the past few weeks through collaboration between the Facebook team and various American LGBT organizations.

Consequently, options such as “bisexual“, “trans man“, “trans woman“, and others have been introduced to provide more choices for users to “authentically express their identity“, as explained by a Facebook spokesperson detailing the innovation.

In addition to indicating their gender, Facebook also allows users to specify how they wish to be referred to in the system when setting this information: they can choose between masculine or feminine pronouns.

Similarly, this will affect the declension of adjectives within profile information (e.g., married as “sposata” or “sposato”).

This represents a further step towards offering greater choice for all users. It’s worth remembering that back in July 2012, also in the United States, the ability to indicate same-sex marriage or civil partnerships with new icons was introduced.

The momentum for this initiative followed the wedding of Chris Hughes (one of Facebook’s co-founders) to his partner.

Since then, according to today’s announcement, work in this direction has continued.

It is not yet possible to confirm if and when these gender choice options will be available on Italian profiles.