Found via rm. a round-up of the latest in LJ gender!fail in which choices are now "male/female/it's personal." Checked mine, and yup, it now says "it's personal." I'm annoyed. I'm cis-gendered and not particularly invested in not revealing my gender online, and I'm still annoyed on my own behalf and furious on behalf of those who are not cis-gendered and/or prefer not to reveal their gender online nor to use a cutesy phrase to indicate this. They're supposedly returning to the "unspecified" option but haven't yet.

Seriously, LJ? Did you hear anything users were saying when this issue first came up?

In other news, there either aren't that many queer slashers or the numbers are being skewed by straight women who are claiming bisexuality for the cool cred. (What "cool cred"?) Original post in this particular branch of the discussion is now flocked, but this post by elf has some interesting commentary on that, including links to this post by fairestcat discussing the OP's assertions and follow-up directly and this post by melannen that does some number-crunching on various polls that have been made at various times about sexual orientation in fandom generally and/or slash specifically.

Are there issues in slash with homophobia, cultural misappropriation, fetishization of gay men, and probably any number of other things I'm missing? Hell, yes, and these are things that absolutely should be discussed, as uncomfortable as those discussions often get. Deciding a large swath of the people involved either don't exist or are probably lying, however, only serves to derail the discussions that could be happening and to highlight another area of epic fail.

It also echoes LJ's most current fail, in that it reinforces the binary mindset of "you must be either this or that, and if you say otherwise, you are confused/hiding something/some other idiocy."

So, yeah, apparently it's "piss on everyone's self-identification week." Or something. Oh joy.