Facebook has added a customizable option with about 50 different terms people can use to identify their gender as well as three preferred pronoun choices: him, her or them.
WBUR reached out to Cameron Partridge, a transgender chaplain at Boston University, who emailed back this response to the news:
"I am heartened to learn of Facebook’s shift. I see it as significant in at least two ways. First, it affirms that there are indeed many people whose genders do not conform to binary ideas of male and female. I know a number of people — particularly young adults, including college students — who identify as bigender, genderqueer, or gender fluid, and more. So many parts of the world fail to reflect, and even actively undermine, this core part of their reality. And then second, the major significance of Facebook’s move shows us how forms of all sorts — the various ways in which the world “sorts” us into basic categories — can have a major, concrete impact on our day to day reality."
Click through to read the rest of Rev. Patridge's response.