I recently found myself confused about how to tag post #1287147, a hyena with breasts and what might be considered a pseudo-penis. In reading through old forums I found that this is part of a larger issue which I am here summarizing for easier future reference and also proposing a novel solution for discussion among admins and users.

Summary

As you can see there is a range of opinions even among the admins. The current ruling seems to be

For real species, well known sexually dimorphic features (antlers, mane) can be taken into account but genitals trumps them.

For fictional species, lore can be taken into account but this is meant for contentious examples (charr), don't just tag all Pikachu as male just because they don't have rounded tails.

Above all tagging should be done with the typical user's searches in mind.

Solution

Right now the biggest conflict I see is the tagging of fictional species. When exactly should lore be brought in? I say we go for the whole shebang. I propose the use of canonically_male, canonically_female, etc tags.

What would this look like? post #679439 is a canonically_female ambiguous_gender. Users searching for female anthros don't have to see it. post #1104606 is a canonically_female male charr, which allows us to distinguish it from a canonically_male male charr like post #1104573.

What do you think? Honestly I don't expect we will adopt this policy, despite the benefits it's a big change and the current policy seems to be working okay. But let's have a productive discussion anyway. Please keep in mind we're all here to make e6 the best it can be.

honestly. that sounds very complicated. and very slong and long process to implent because there are so many images. does it extend to people's ocs in general? would we have tags like canonically_ambiguous? what about trans characters? could i for example tag post #1224239 as canonically_male because hes trans man?

That's a great question. One of the primary advantages to allowing canonical sex tags is that artists would be happier about the tagging of their OCs. So yes this would allow the artist to say that post #1224239 gets the canonically_male tag if they wanted.

Does it help the typical user searching for females? No. Does it hurt them? No. And is that something you would appreciate as the artist?

(There might be conflicts where a canonically_female charr OC is male according to the artist. In this case the franchise canon must trump the artist's canon.)

Number of posts to tag: 1100 charr, 600 Meowstic, maybe a few hundred OCs (at artist's request). It's not that bad really, there aren't that many heavily sexually dimorphic fictional species.

This would cause users to further ignore TWYS.
It's hard to form an unbiased opinion on what can be seen, if it's tagged as 'canonically_*'.

Ledian said:
could i for example tag post #1224239 as canonically_male because hes trans man?

Since when are trans men male? Last I checked, a trans man is a female who identifies as a man, so a character who is canonically a trans man is canonically_female.

Ledian said:
does it extend to people's ocs in general?

If they have a character sheet of some sort and depictions of that character tend to adhere to that character sheet then you probably can consider that canon for tagging purposes.

Bluedingo youre either intentionally doing this at this point because youre trying to cause trouble or youre literally just that ignorant.

Either way Im sick and tired of you intentionally doing this shit. Either to get a rise out of people for your personal jollies or you are literally just that ignorant.

Trans men are men end of discussion. They arent "just women who want to believe something". Trans men are men. You should know that its very simple.

It literally does not matter what they were defined as at birth. A trans person's identity is what they are. End of discussion. Its not fucking rocket science.

On the other topic. I thought charr already had rules.

Demesejha said:
Bluedingo youre either intentionally doing this at this point because youre trying to cause trouble or youre literally just that ignorant.

Either way Im sick and tired of you intentionally doing this shit. Either to get a rise out of people for your personal jollies or you are literally just that ignorant.

Trans men are men end of discussion. They arent "just women who want to believe something". Trans men are men. You should know that its very simple.

It literally does not matter what they were defined as at birth. A trans person's identity is what they are. End of discussion. Its not fucking rocket science.

I didn't say they weren't men. Read it properly before flipping out.

BlueDingo said:
I didn't say they weren't men. Read it properly before flipping out.

I did read it properly. Youre the one who either didnt read the purpose of the thread, locked on to one thing to cause trouble over and went for it, or literally just dont understand the topic.

You said, trans men should be tagged as "canonically_female". You are literally saying trans men should be tagged as women.

The whole reason this tag is being suggested is to allow people to tag their trans characters which is something this site still fails to do or take any even slight steps towards being good about.

So either you misunderstood the purpose or youre just here to cause mischief to get your jollies.

this whole suggestion was made to allow characters to tagged with their actual genders instead of completely restricting the tagging to current gender tagging systems but also leave the current system untouched and that way reduce arguments caused by gender tagging conflicts without damaging the current system. having to for example tag trans male characters as canonically_female is exactly the opposite of the purpose of these canonically_*gender* tags that were suggested here

Demesejha said:
You are literally saying trans men should be tagged as women.

No, I'm not. Stop trying to put words in my mouth and stop trying to attack me just because I said something you didn't like.

Demesejha said:
The whole reason this tag is being suggested is to allow people to tag their trans characters which is something this site still fails to do or take any even slight steps towards being good about.

Ledian said:
this whole suggestion was made to allow characters to tagged with their actual genders instead of completely restricting the tagging to current gender tagging systems but also leave the current system untouched and that way reduce arguments caused by gender tagging conflicts without damaging the current system. having to for example tag trans male characters as canonically_female is exactly the opposite of the purpose of these canonically_*gender* tags that were suggested here

If I'm understanding this correctly, the tag suggestion is to allow users to tag a character's actual gender regardless of what the character looks like since TWYS can lead to characters being tagged with either the wrong gender or ambiguous which rubs some people up the wrong way. We do not tag a character's gender identity, so "trans" would not be tagged even if there are clear indications of a gender transition present.

@leomole
What will be the extent of this tag's use? Will it be for instances where a character's actual gender is differs from their perceived gender (mainly the ambiguous ones), instances that definitely don't depict them as their actual gender (crossgender), or all instances of the character regardless?

Yes you are. Im not attacking you Im literally quoting you. You said that trans men should be tagged as "canonically_female" and therefore be tagged as women. I mean its literally five posts up and you said it yourself I dont know why you think Im putting words in your mouth you when youre the one who said it in the first place.

Its a simple statement of fact.

Its not "something I dont like" its something that is literally wrong. And I. Sorry you cant accept that but youre wrong. Out and out.

Demesejha said:
Yes you are. Im not attacking you Im literally quoting you. You said that trans men should be tagged as "canonically_female" and therefore be tagged as women. I mean its literally five posts up and you said it yourself I dont know why you think Im putting words in your mouth you when youre the one who said it in the first place.

Because I never said "women", I said "female". Female and women do not mean the same thing. You are accusing me of calling them women when I never called them women.

Now please do something besides whinging.

Both of you stop.

This thread is about sexual dimorphism, both real life and miscellaneous universes, and not about transgender tagging.

The transgender (or general gender) identity of a character has no bearing on our TWYS rules, and won't have any for the foreseeable future.

Regarding Ledian's inquiry:

If we were to implement Leomole's suggestion we'd still need different tags for transgender characters. His proposal would work best based purely on "biological sex", aka what the doc would need to know about to treat them adequately and not for legal purposes.

Demesejha said:
I thought charr already had rules.

Yes, under the Literature Review section you will find what I believe is the most current ruling. I'm proposing another solution, that's all.

BlueDingo said:
a character who is canonically a trans man is canonically_female.

NotMeNotYou said:
His proposal would work best based purely on "biological sex", aka what the doc would need to know about to treat them adequately and not for legal purposes.

I should clarify, my proposal is made with the intent of reducing tag wars, mostly between what the creator/lore of a character says and what we use, TWYS. In the case of charrs, this means a muscular, flat body with short horns and a fluffy tail is canonically_female but sometimes male or ambiguous under TWYS.

In the case of trans and intersex characters, this means we use TWYS to determine the basic sex tag (current practice) but the canonical sex is whatever the creator wants. If we're going to base tags off of anything other than the artist's whims we might as well just use TWYS which we already do. One of the primary goals here is to please both groups thus reducing conflict.

BlueDingo said:
What will be the extent of this tag's use? Will it be for instances where a character's actual gender is differs from their perceived gender (mainly the ambiguous ones), instances that definitely don't depict them as their actual gender (crossgender), or all instances of the character regardless?

Mainly it's for solving contentious tag wars, so yes, tagging ambiguous characters. Some artists will want the tag on all of their character's posts. That's fine too. I think it's a small price to pay to make finicky artists happy.

Crossgender is used when a character is depicted as a different sex than usual. I don't think it should interact with these canonical sex tags. Like character names, these TWYK tags should be isolated, in a sort of separate category from all the proper TWYS tags.

Ledian said:
this whole suggestion was made to allow characters to [be tagged in accordance with the lore/creator] but also leave the current system untouched and that way reduce arguments

Exactly.

leomole said:
Mainly it's for solving contentious tag wars, so yes, tagging ambiguous characters.

Tag locking already solved that problem. If there's a tag war raging, it gets locked to something and that's the end of it.

I don't see how this suggestion would make anything less contentious. There'd only be more of: "This is canonically female and I see a female, so I'm tagging it as one. Regardless of what the rest of you see."

I'd be for giving it a try.

The main issues with it would probably be, as mentioned by Genjar, that it could potentially end up encouraging some bad tagging practices. To the uninformed or average user who isn't really deep into e621 functionality/the forums/tagging know-how, these special tags could also seem to be just sort of randomly breaking the rules and cause confusion. Might lead to bad assumptions and extrapolations on their use when someone sees one of these new tags and has a thought process along the lines of the following:

"canonically_female? Neat! Well my character that looks like a male dog is actually a cat, and it's gender is actually xirthmale! I can finally tag that on e621!"

...And then you end up with canonically_feline and canonically_xirthmale tags in the system and so on from there. You'd have to decide if that's something you'd want to deal with, because it could get a bit messy.

If keeping usage only to sex/gender and disallowing the usage of totally custom/random canonically_<INSERT THING> tags, you'd probably then have to at least include some kind of canonically_other catch-all tag for those not satisfied with the standard male/female/intersex options... and then of course police the rest.

It might be workable though if some very clear and simple notes/notices about the usage of the new canonical gender tags were placed in all the relevant help locations: how to tag, tagging checklist, twys explained page, etc. The tags themselves would also probably need their own category/color in the tag list so they visibly stand out as non-standard tags.

...This is actually sounding like it would be more work and complication than I initially figured lol.

Would be super neat if we could just forget about trying to shoe-horn what are essentially layers of exceptions into the normal TWYS system, and instead just actually have multiple physical tag "layers" that shared the same literal tag definitions; Then we could just have a TWYK "Canonical" layer on top of/alongside the main TWYS layer, use pre-existing tag types on it, and use a search syntax similar to the metatag syntax to define which layer you want to search with a particular tag... especially if you could join results from both layers in one search. Like if you wanted to do a standard search for posts with females, but also include canonical males from the TWYK layer, you could then just do something like female Canonical:male and get a results page. Once something like that was in place, you could even have more than 2 layers if the need ever arose.

...of course that would have it's own set of issues as well, particularly with some of the tags defining interaction between characters like male/female etc being placed on the wrong layer, and who knows[/i] how much dev work it would take to integrate something like that into a long running pre-existing back-end like e621's that wasn't designed for it in the first place.Really sucks that this stuff doesn't just have an easy solution. We might be better off simply encouraging more uploaders/artists/character owners to just use the description field to note when their character is something other than what it appears via TWYS tags.

I'm confused why this needs tags when this can be done in the character wiki to list their canonical gender, and in the species wiki to list sexual dimorphism.

we already tag canonical gender in the existing system, we dont need redundant tags for that...

what this boils down to are idiotic exceptions like the afor mentioned charrs that violate twys but are enforced by admins, this same suggestion of canonical gender has come up a number of times before because these exceptions that make no sence at all and portray a image of favoritism towards specific fictional species exist.

You fear that new users will assume canonical gender is now acceptable on e621 incoraging bad tagging practices and cause confusion because of this well new user already do. We already have everything in place and enforce it for new users to make the assumption.

And Genjar you can only lock so much, it does not solve the problem of cause. wars that get locked just get pushed to tickets that will keep on and on disputing the decision of the staff who happened to rubber stamp their own personal opinion that may not always be objective and in accordance to twys.

rysyN said:
I'm confused why this needs tags when this can be done in the character wiki to list their canonical gender, and in the species wiki to list sexual dimorphism.

do you really think that average users ever read wikis

Ruku said:
we already tag canonical gender in the existing system, we dont need redundant tags for that...

what this boils down to are idiotic exceptions like the afor mentioned charrs that violate twys but are enforced by admins, this same suggestion of canonical gender has come up a number of times before because these exceptions that make no sence at all and portray a image of favoritism towards specific fictional species exist.

You fear that new users will assume canonical gender is now acceptable on e621 incoraging bad tagging practices and cause confusion because of this well new user already do. We already have everything in place and enforce it for new users to make the assumption.

And Genjar you can only lock so much, it does not solve the problem of cause. wars that get locked just get pushed to tickets that will keep on and on disputing the decision of the staff who happened to rubber stamp their own personal opinion that may not always be objective and in accordance to twys.

as far as i know, the charr gender tagging follows tag what you see rules like all other species, only difference is that charrs follow the feral tagging rules rather than anthro tagging rules

Ledian said:
as far as i know, the charr gender tagging follows tag what you see rules like all other species, only difference is that charrs follow the feral tagging rules rather than anthro tagging rules

There is no such thing as feral tagging rules thou(nether in practice or writen), ferals are bound by the same conditions as anthros/humanoids, genitalia or sexually dimorphic traits that for the most part are human based. This is why most feral with non exposed genitalia tend to get tagged ambiguous even if they have sexually dimorphic traits exclusive to their species. Charrs are also not feral, and why treat the Canon of charrs but not the Canon of other fictional species, you say they are within twys then why do people get punished for tagging charrs as cuntboy, that is what is actually seen often by most users, the fact a notice exist does indicate that it is just a minority that would actually truthfully see them as female. Another thing if they are treated as feral, why are all of them tagged as anthro?

Ruku said:
There is no such thing as feral tagging rules thou(nether in practice or writen), ferals are bound by the same conditions as anthros/humanoids, genitalia or sexually dimorphic traits that for the most part are human based. This is why most feral with non exposed genitalia tend to get tagged ambiguous even if they have sexually dimorphic traits exclusive to their species. Charrs are also not feral, and why treat the Canon of charrs but not the Canon of other fictional species, you say they are within twys then why do people get punished for tagging charrs as cuntboy, that is what is actually seen often by most users, the fact a notice exist does indicate that it is just a minority that would actually truthfully see them as female. Another thing if they are treated as feral, why are all of them tagged as anthro?

They only get punished if they ignore admin rulings, or have made a big mess someone has to clean up. Even then it is just neutrals, which are more of"hey don't do this thing", rather than a punishment. It's like this to keep both record and to make people actually read it instead of tossing the dmail aside claiming they didn't see it.

Ruku said:
There is no such thing as feral tagging rules thou(nether in practice or writen), ferals are bound by the same conditions as anthros/humanoids, genitalia or sexually dimorphic traits that for the most part are human based. This is why most feral with non exposed genitalia tend to get tagged ambiguous even if they have sexually dimorphic traits exclusive to their species.

Well, that's a problem.

Chaser said:
They only get punished if they ignore admin rulings, or have made a big mess someone has to clean up. Even then it is just neutrals, which are more of"hey don't do this thing", rather than a punishment. It's like this to keep both record and to make people actually read it instead of tossing the dmail aside claiming they didn't see it.

A admin ruling that allows canon tagging and disallows twys chaser.

And again no anser as to why this particular fictional species is treated differently then any other fictional species

Ruku said:
There is no such thing as feral tagging rules thou(nether in practice or writen), ferals are bound by the same conditions as anthros/humanoids, genitalia or sexually dimorphic traits that for the most part are human based. This is why most feral with non exposed genitalia tend to get tagged ambiguous even if they have sexually dimorphic traits exclusive to their species. Charrs are also not feral, and why treat the Canon of charrs but not the Canon of other fictional species, you say they are within twys then why do people get punished for tagging charrs as cuntboy, that is what is actually seen often by most users, the fact a notice exist does indicate that it is just a minority that would actually truthfully see them as female. Another thing if they are treated as feral, why are all of them tagged as anthro?

?? ferals are supposed to be tagged female if they have feminine physical traits and male if they have masculine physical traits. the "feral tagging rules" is that lack of breasts does not play big role in gender tagging. charrs are treated a bit differently because it would be almost impossible to find female charrs and the tags are supposed to make finding desired content easily. also charrs are more like semi anthros, they walk often on four legs but they can also walk on hind legs and use their front legs as hands.

Ledian said:
?? ferals are supposed to be tagged female if they have feminine physical traits and male if they have masculine physical traits. the "feral tagging rules" is that lack of breasts does not play big role in gender tagging.

again if they are feral why are they tagged anthro? And also seems nothing but trouble to both admins and users alike trying to force them in the feral tag when their bodyplan resembles that of a anthro.

contradictions, nothing but contradictions, and contradictions are what lead to confusion and then bad tagging.

And what of other fictional species that naturally lack breast?

And the ability of both quadrupedalism and bipedalism seems canon based when they are most often depicted biped, also the type of locomotion alone does not have any baring on making something feral or anthro

Ruku said:
again if they are feral why are they tagged anthro? And also seems nothing but trouble to both admins and users alike trying to force them in the feral tag when their bodyplan resembles that of a anthro.

contradictions, nothing but contradictions, and contradictions are what lead to confusion and then bad tagging.

wtf nobody is saying that they should be tagged as feral? they just follow "feral gender tagging rules" where lack of breasts does not play that big role in gender tagging.

Ledian said:
wtf nobody is saying that they should be tagged as feral? they just follow "feral gender tagging rules" where lack of breasts does not play that big role in gender tagging.

feral gender tagging rules implies they are feral ledian. your contradicting your self

Ruku said:
feral gender tagging rules implies they are feral ledian. your contradicting your self

did you fail to notice the part where i said that it would seriously make it pretty much impossible to find female charrs at all if the lack of breasts were relied heavily in gender tagging?

Ledian said:
did you fail to notice the part where i said that it would seriously make it pretty much impossible to find female charrs at all if the lack of breasts were relied heavily in gender tagging?

no i did not, it just doesnt excuse a exception, when it is only applied to charrs and not any and all fictional species who also naturally lack breasts. The problem is also confounded by the fact that not all artists draw canonically (or character owners have)female charrs without breasts, the wiki it self makes that omission.

Using canonically_(male/female) gives the impression that this tag group would serve primarily to tag charagters by their known genders regardless of TWYS. The idea is good, though, it's just that the wording is misleading.

Instead, consider how we already have masculine and feminine tags to identify when characters look more like one gender or the other by human standards. For sexual dismorphism that applies to animals or fictionnal species, anthropomorphized or not, in order to fit with that pattern and your original proposition, canonically_masculine and canonically_feminine could be used instead, which I also feel are less misleading. Maybe canonically_* is the wrong prefix to use, though, considering it may also be used for real species.

Alright, here's an illustrated version of my last post if it makes anything clearer. I'm using feral-human as my vertical scale, although the OP would probably use a more canon-human scale, but the idea is the same.

Take this image :
post #728479

Here, we have an anthro peacock, so the human traits and the animal traits are both present in somewhat equal measure. It's also probably female (although its genitals are obscured), and has clearly feminine secondary sexual characteristics (thus female). However, it also has the colorful feathers and long tail characteristic of male peacocks, which is where a tag such as canonically_masculine would be useful.

Here's a graph for the more visually-oriented.

Interesting to note : this mismatch is currently denoted with the crossgender tag.

OP's idea is to make gender tagging easier for species that don't necessarily have the same sexual characteristics we expect humans, and I think that's a good proposition. I just don't agree with his choice of words for the tags he'd be proposing.

Fifteen said:
Interesting to note : this mismatch is currently denoted with the crossgender tag.

It shouldn't be. How do we know that this is a female version of a male character when we don't even know the character's name? Also, I don't think crossgender is supposed to include OCs.