Twitter doesn't know I'm a girl.
Today, I discovered, in what is a fairly Icky Move, that if your twitter account doesn't have a gender selected in the options, Twitter will select one for you. It does this based on its observations of your behaviour apparently, though what observations or behaviours, I do not know.
On my Original Recipe Me account, which has been around much longer, I am fairly certain I have never identified my gender. I just went and checked the slightly over 400 tweets I've not deleted in various purges (which i stopped doing a while back because I decided that ICBF) and not a single one do I say anything to identify my gender explicitly. I say a few things that sort of imply female in replies but not heavily. It's possible I said something in one of the deleted tweets, but I doubt it. In fact, online I pretty studiously used gender neutral language when talking about myself for years prior to reaching my understanding.
Twitter decided that account belonged to a guy.
My LRP twitter account, which has fewer tweets, and has only existed for a relatively brief time so far (but does have a much higher percentage of "public" tweets) is, according to Twitter, of Unknown gender.
That's kinda hilarious to me. The account where I carefully avoided discussing or revealing my gender, they picked something for. They got it wrong, but so did most everyone else for thirty years, so I'm not blaming them for that. The account I created specifically to discuss my nature as a trans girl, and use pretty much exclusively to talk about my gender, that one, they're not sure about.
I don't know what algorithm they use to determine what gender they give to their users, but looking for tweets about being a girl doesn't seem to be part of it.
Honestly, I think they must mine other sites with that username. It's possible, on some other sites, I had ticked a male box under my initial signup, since some of them were created well back before "leave this unspecified" was an option, and some probably before I realised I preferred not to say. But I definitely never told twitter one way or another.
Anyway, that whole thing is somewhat gross. There have been, so far, two saving graces.
The first, is that I have seen some "Assigned Male At Twitter" jokes, and I appreciate those.
The second, is that the options they provide for selecting a gender if you're not keen on the one they have given to you, are Male, Female, and "Other" which is a blank field for you to write whatever you want in.
So they might be doing a bunch of research into how best to market to people who identify as "Fuck You Twitter" in the near future.
(In all seriousness though, the option to write in your own is more progressive than most any other site I've seen, and way way better than what I expected. I'm not criticising them for that, just for their "if you don't pick one we'll snoop about and pick one for you" stance.)
I should, I suppose, end this with a link to my twitter account, as well as mention that my blog is being crossposted on Tumblr
Both links should be over to the right of the post under "Where to find me"
<3
~LRP
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