Along with many in the community I watched the 2.3 The Commanders Beta Livestream yesterday, and was impressed with the depth of the character creation tools.
However, there is one major issue I have, and that is the use of the word “Gender” to refer to the Commander's body type.
It would seem that Frontier are confusing physical characteristics and gender here. I'm sure you can appreciate that for the trans players of Elite, having the outward physical appearance of your character referred to as gender might be unpleasant. Gender is not what your body looks like, it is the social, cultural and behavioural expectations with which you identify.
Thisis not the first time that Frontier has misunderstood gender. In the data entries about the Guardians, Ram Tah notes “This data offers more details about the physical appearance of the Guardians, specifically regarding genders. The similarities between humans and the Guardians continue to delight me. They had two distinct genders...”. Aside from the conflation of sex and gender here, more than two genders exist (and have done for centuries), particularly outside the Western tradition. Even if one were to divide humans intotwo biological sexes, this would fail to take into account the variations of sexual characteristics found in intersex people (estimated to be as many as 1 in 1000 births). I would hope that by 3303, such a binary and biological approach to sex and gender had been outgrown in most areas of civilised space.
There are a couple of simple changes that I think could be made that could be made to the Holo-me character creation tool to make it more accurate:
If this would create delays or problems then a compromise would be to rename “Gender” in the character creator to “Sex”.
However, there is one major issue I have, and that is the use of the word “Gender” to refer to the Commander's body type.
It would seem that Frontier are confusing physical characteristics and gender here. I'm sure you can appreciate that for the trans players of Elite, having the outward physical appearance of your character referred to as gender might be unpleasant. Gender is not what your body looks like, it is the social, cultural and behavioural expectations with which you identify.
Thisis not the first time that Frontier has misunderstood gender. In the data entries about the Guardians, Ram Tah notes “This data offers more details about the physical appearance of the Guardians, specifically regarding genders. The similarities between humans and the Guardians continue to delight me. They had two distinct genders...”. Aside from the conflation of sex and gender here, more than two genders exist (and have done for centuries), particularly outside the Western tradition. Even if one were to divide humans intotwo biological sexes, this would fail to take into account the variations of sexual characteristics found in intersex people (estimated to be as many as 1 in 1000 births). I would hope that by 3303, such a binary and biological approach to sex and gender had been outgrown in most areas of civilised space.
There are a couple of simple changes that I think could be made that could be made to the Holo-me character creation tool to make it more accurate:
[*=1]Replacing “Gender” with “Body Type” and instead of “Male” and “Female” simply have “Type 1”, “Type 2” etc. This would have the added bonus of allowing for a greater variety of body shapes to be easily introduced at a later date.
[*=1]Removing “Male” and “Female” prefix from the preset titles to just be “Preset 01” etc.
If this would create delays or problems then a compromise would be to rename “Gender” in the character creator to “Sex”.
