Like it says on the tin, I'm wondering if crossgender is still a valid tag, in light of the site's current policies regarding sex and gender, as it applies to TWYSNWYK.

The admins, in particular, have argued very passionately that images are to be considered on an individual basis and in a vacuum of all other content, including other images on the site which feature the same character.

I don't disagree with the merits of their case, either. Artists in the community frequently drop away, or clean out their profiles, or otherwise make external references unavailable for authoritatively tagging the contents of their images.

crossgender has been applied to 13,874 posts as of this writing, as recently as 3 hours ago. That places it somewhere slightly above the 500th most common tag.

But crossgender inherently requires the application of external knowledge. crossgender miles_prower, formerly known as tailsko, is understood to be female, because Miles is understood to be male. crossgender applejack_(mlp) is understood to be male, because Applejack is understood to be female.

Those are major franchises, of course, and it's unlikely that the characters' canonical genders will become unknown. What about less well known characters? clovis_(twokinds) is canonically male, and female depictions contribute to the crossgender tag count. So does katia_managan of Prequel. Do we accept these as well, simply because they're relatively well-known by the fandom?

If we accept this much, then I'm guessing the line still has to be drawn somewhere shy of accelo_(character), who is canonically male, and female depictions also contribute to the crossgender tag, as recently as 10 months ago.

So, is there a line to draw, or is this a bad tag that needs to go away?

Crossgender is kind of one of the few *valid* TWYK tags along with stuff like the incest tag and a few others. I think as long as the character was clearly drawn to be a gender they're not normally/canonically than the tag should be applied.
But if it's a character (such as the character the resent argument was about) where the character is canonically extremely feminine male but drawn in such a way that it's impossible to tell that it's not a female character the crossgender tag should not apply.

and if the character constantly shifts between genders based on the artist's whim, the tag should not apply there either.

darryus said:
Crossgender is kind of one of the few *valid* TWYK tags along with stuff like the incest tag and a few others. I think as long as the character was clearly drawn to be a gender they're not normally/canonically than the tag should be applied.
But if it's a character (such as the character the resent argument was about) where the character is canonically extremely feminine male but drawn in such a way that it's impossible to tell that it's not a female character the crossgender tag should not apply.

and if the character constantly shifts between genders based on the artist's whim, the tag should not apply there either.

I expected this would come up quickly, but I do want to divorce this conversation from the other one. It's true the other conversation sparked my thinking about this. I would have liked to hold off on it, but I think it's an interesting question, possibly an important one, and my nature is that I'm not likely to remember it for more than a few days on my own. Hence, I must post sooner, rather than later when tempers have hopefully cooled.

I can't speak for all incest images, but the ones I can immediately recall with clarity actually do convey the incestuous nature of their depicted acts or relationships through visual clues, primarily characters bearing a strong resemblance to each other, and secondarily through setting and background elements suggesting a family home. In one case, there's dialogue between the characters which unambiguously spells out their relationship. (Edit: Actually, with a little more thought, I can think of an entire series of images which depended on character dialogue to spell out the incest.)

I also feel that a special case for feminine males or masculine women would fall into the category of "too hard for average taggers, and likely to create more problem than it solves."

While I'm not exactly happy about crossgender's (lack of) relation to TWYS,
I do think:

a) it is attempting to solve something that is a real problem in terms of the current system, ie. effectively searching and blacklisting stuff, rather than mere disagreement on what is correct.

b) It is not that vulnerable to social/political manipulation (one of the things that TWYS acts to curtail), because the number of reference points are large enough to make that difficult.

If you want to define what qualifies as crossgender, I'd suggest the defining factor is a body of work which

a) Is sufficiently large (200+ posts, say)
b) Spans multiple artists (such that if half of them got all their work taken down, there would still be a large enough set to clearly establish trend C)
c) Contains a preponderance of one gender (the 'original' artist drawing them usually as the same gender is not enough; if you remove all of a single artist's posts from the list, the results should still demonstrate the same clear preponderance)

That's a rough guess. Accelo may actually fall inside that set.

Incest is a somewhat different case IMO, as determining what is 'canon' is not so easy (detecting gender is easier than distinguishing 'characters who look similar' from 'characters who are immediately related'. There are no reliable visual markers for the latter.). IMO the justification for that tag is weaker.

I agree with darryus' point about ambiguity, providing that 'canonical' is defined in terms of the above criteria ABC rather than in terms of the work of a single artist.

ikdind said:
I can't speak for all incest images, but the ones I can immediately recall with clarity actually do convey the incestuous nature of their depicted acts or relationships through visual clues, primarily characters bearing a strong resemblance to each other, and secondarily through setting and background elements suggesting a family home.

If those were the only criteria, there'd be a lot more posts tagged as incest. For instance, most lions from The Lion King look similar, regardless of canon relations. While Mufasa and Scar hardly look like siblings. There's plenty of other examples too, such as Maid Marian and Robin Hood from the Disney version, who look similar enough to be siblings.

Hence the reliance on outside information when tagging something like incest: the tag just wouldn't work without it. Same goes for crossgender.

ikdind said:
I expected this would come up quickly, but I do want to divorce this conversation from the other one. It's true the other conversation sparked my thinking about this. I would have liked to hold off on it, but I think it's an interesting question, possibly an important one, and my nature is that I'm not likely to remember it for more than a few days on my own. Hence, I must post sooner, rather than later when tempers have hopefully cooled.

I was just using it as an example that was still fresh in everyone's minds.

I can't speak for all incest images, but the ones I can immediately recall with clarity actually do convey the incestuous nature of their depicted acts or relationships through visual clues, primarily characters bearing a strong resemblance to each other, and secondarily through setting and background elements suggesting a family home. In one case, there's dialogue between the characters which unambiguously spells out their relationship.

I feel like the quintessential example against this is something like Gumball where there are characters who are are siblings that aren't even the same species, yet these still get the incest tag because they're still canonically related.

Also there's a few other tags where artist's intention is somewhat taken into account. If I'm not mistaken character tags can work like this, the character that the artist was attempting to portray in their is the character that gets tagged.

I really don't like incest's TWYK stuff. At the very least, leave it off of species content. For example, Latias and Latios, if they don't have any character tags, I'd say should never have the incest tag even if the artist says they're siblings.

Furrin_Gok said:
I really don't like incest's TWYK stuff. At the very least, leave it off of species content. For example, Latias and Latios, if they don't have any character tags, I'd say should never have the incest tag even if the artist says they're siblings.

Are Latios and Latias even canonically related? I don't think Dex entries say anything about that.

What about crossgender for Latios and Latias, they're both always male and female respectively, do you think a male Latias should be tagged as crossgender?

darryus said:
Are Latios and Latias even canonically related? I don't think Dex entries say anything about that.

What about crossgender for these Latios and Latias, they're both always male and female respectively, do you think a male Latias should be tagged as crossgender?

Latias's Emerald pokedex entry:

They make a small herd of only several members. They rarely make contact with people or other Pokémon. They disappear if they sense enemies.

While the two from the movie were specifically brother and sister, there are flocks of them.

ikdind said:
Is crossgender still valid?

Yes. Character names and by extension incest are exceptions to TWYS. Character species can also draw from provided information rather than TWYS.

savageorange said:
While I'm not exactly happy about crossgender's (lack of) relation to TWYS,
I do think:

a) it is attempting to solve something that is a real problem in terms of the current system, ie. effectively searching and blacklisting stuff, rather than mere disagreement on what is correct.

b) It is not that vulnerable to social/political manipulation (one of the things that TWYS acts to curtail), because the number of reference points are large enough to make that difficult.

I can agree with point 'a', that it is a useful tag, certainly. I'd worry that point 'b' only appears correct because arguments center around what sex a character is tagged with to begin with, and the individuals are tilting at that particular windmill rather than asserting that a character of sex 'X' tagged as sex 'Y' ought to be correctly tagged 'crossgender' as a result.

savageorange said:
If you want to define what qualifies as crossgender, I'd suggest the defining factor is a body of work which

a) Is sufficiently large (200+ posts, say)
b) Spans multiple artists (such that if half of them got all their work taken down, there would still be a large enough set to clearly establish trend C)
c) Contains a preponderance of one gender (the 'original' artist drawing them usually as the same gender is not enough; if you remove all of a single artist's posts from the list, the results should still demonstrate the same clear preponderance)

That's a rough guess. Accelo may actually fall inside that set.

This strikes me as weird, because it means a character's correct tagging practices can flip-flop once a character has reached a certain level of proliferation, which is only going to create more work for the admins to go back and fix locked tags once a post reaches the threshold where one sex is considered canonical.

leomole said:
Yes. Character names and by extension incest are exceptions to TWYS. Character species can also draw from provided information rather than TWYS.

If that's the case for crossgender, then I suppose the discussion is largely moot. The wiki entry for crossgender is unclear on this point, and to what extent it allows TWYK into an image.

ikdind said:
I'd worry that point 'b' only appears correct because arguments center around what sex a character is tagged with to begin with, and the individuals are tilting at that particular windmill rather than asserting that a character of sex 'X' tagged as sex 'Y' ought to be correctly tagged 'crossgender' as a result.

B wasn't intended specifically as a reference to existing taggings (which it seems to me would be obviously circular), just 'a set of images that we can agree depict X character'

Probably it would need to be in reference to a set of images that were on some booru, though, on account of needing to be reasonably sure that the images really are of the same character.

This strikes me as weird, because it means a character's correct tagging practices can flip-flop once a character has reached a certain level of proliferation, which is only going to create more work for the admins to go back and fix locked tags once a post reaches the threshold where one sex is considered canonical.

So you mean, at one point, crossgender is not valid, and then it is?
Even if different criteria were used, isn't it unavoidable, since establishing a canon requires some kind of 'sufficient body of evidence'?

Like, if an artist draws 10 images of $CHARACTER, all depicted with the same gender. If they were the only artist that will ever draw that character, then it would be fine to assume that you now know how to tag 'crossgender' for that character. Maybe. (because characters changing gender as they are developed is hardly unheard of).

But we can't really make the assumption that they are the only artist that will draw that character. Maybe if the artist has drawn 200 images of character, same gender, and there's still hardly any images by other artists? I guess at that point we could record 'canon gender' in the character's wiki page and it wouldn't matter if all those images were destroyed. If they'd drawn varying genders, it seems correct to look at the N newest images and see whether there is a clear majority gender in that.

But maybe I'm misunderstanding you, since you said "locked tags" -- it seems to me that any transition would involve one locked tag:
"crossgender" being disallowed, vs "crossgender" being allowed. And that would only be on posts in which crossgender was actually in dispute.

The alternative looks to me like it would be 'if canon changes, then all images with the previous canon gender must be tagged crossgender, and all images with the currently canon gender must have crossgender removed'

That leaves the question of how often canon gender actually changes -- if it's not very often (eg. 1 in 50 characters), I guess that would be OK.

savageorange said:
So you mean, at one point, crossgender is not valid, and then it is?
Even if different criteria were used, isn't it unavoidable, since establishing a canon requires some kind of 'sufficient body of evidence'?

Like, if an artist draws 10 images of $CHARACTER, all depicted with the same gender. If they were the only artist that will ever draw that character, then it would be fine to assume that you now know how to tag 'crossgender' for that character. Maybe. (because characters changing gender as they are developed is hardly unheard of).

Well, the implication from your set of rules is that some character, let's say Katia Managan, starts out as a nobody. Prequel, page 1, maybe a baker's dozen of people even know the webcomic exists, full-on TWYSNWYK policy. Someone says "I like that character, but I wish she were male", and draws a male version of Katia. Tagged male, but under your suggested rules, can't be tagged crossgender because there isn't a large enough body of work to support a canonical gender. TWYSNWYK. If there's a tag war, because "but canon", tags get locked.

Fast forward. Katia has accrued lots of fans, lots of fan art, from multiple artists, and let's say some of those artists have been drawing male Katia, causing tag wars, getting tags locked, because "but canon". Katia's 200th image gets posted, and there's a preponderance of one gender over the other. Now the gender is canon? Now we start a tag project to go back and find all the Katia crossgender work? Except the admins would have to be the ones to fix any locked instances of the tag, unless there's an auto-expiry on the locked tags.

Just seems like a weird and arbitrary policy, is all, when we could possibly crowdsource canonical material for reference in an e621 wiki entry or something, instead, and maybe do a better job of getting it right before whatever threshold we choose as canonical "critical mass".

savageorange said:
But maybe I'm misunderstanding you, since you said "locked tags" -- it seems to me that any transition would involve one locked tag:
"crossgender" being disallowed, vs "crossgender" being allowed. And that would only be on posts in which crossgender was actually in dispute.

Well, yes. Locked "tags" as in "the crossgender tag on multiple posts."

savageorange said:
The alternative looks to me like it would be 'if canon changes, then all images with the previous canon gender must be tagged crossgender, and all images with the currently canon gender must have crossgender removed'

That leaves the question of how often canon gender actually changes -- if it's not very often (eg. 1 in 50 characters), I guess that would be OK.

It seems like canon changes a character's gender only very rarely, but it does happen. Sometimes comics will have a transformation. For instance, Mike from TwoKinds has canonically been through a gender-swap, albeit temporarily.

ikdind said:
Just seems like a weird and arbitrary policy, is all, when we could possibly crowdsource canonical material for reference in an e621 wiki entry or something, instead, and maybe do a better job of getting it right before whatever threshold we choose as canonical "critical mass".

Well, there's nothing wrong with that. It would probably work right (ie. result in no significant number of false positives) most of the time, assuming wiki vandalism is kept under control.

I was aiming to hit 'nearly all of the time', but I admit it has the fault of having to go back and add tags.

savageorange said:
Well, there's nothing wrong with that. It would probably work right (ie. result in no significant number of false positives) most of the time, assuming wiki vandalism is kept under control.

Aye, well, I'm not sure if the wiki pages are considered a valid source for this kind of info. Some of the recent incidents aren't really great examples, since there was clear hostility and contempt involved.

So I guess it just goes back to: I'm unclear on what the site's policies are here. There's been so much hardline TWYSNWYK, especially recently, that I'm not sure crossgender could even be a valid tag anymore. Maybe that's just short tempers because of too much tag-warring and windmill-tilting, and I'm reading too much into it. I'm certainly good at over-analyzing.