Clawstripe said:
On further reflection, I probably should have said: If we collectively can't figure out the gender (other than it being non-ambiguous), then and only then does the mediating ask the source?

Sorry. I should have ed to stick in the qualifiers, as that better specifies when someone should ask and who that someone should be.

If we make it an exception to the TWYS rule, then the idea is that intervention wouldn't be necessary, since the is just going to uphold our policy. The source would never really be "asked", because they usually make it pretty clear on the source page what the gender of the character is. If the source doesn't specify the gender anywhere, then it's possible they don't have any opinion of what the gender "should" be themselves. I suppose someone could still directly ask them if they wanted to, but it probably won't be necessary.

Again, the exception would be if the character has the necessary evidence that identifies it as either one gender or another (as opposed to NO evidence, which makes it ambiguous). Overall that should be a relatively paltry amount of posts on the site, as it's mostly going to apply to images of flat-chested females or cuntboys.

123easy said:
They sorta ARE ambiguous, because you can't tell for sure if it's one or the other. Just not entirely ambiguous instead of partially ambiguous.

But is that what you want to see when you're searching for ambiguous_gender? post #460421 and post #458267 are both tagged with ambiguous_gender right now. Both have a pretty obvious vagina, but the heads are ambiguous. Would a person searching for ambiguous_gender expect to see vaginas in their face?

Right now, if we stuck a penis on those characters instead of a vagina, I have 0 doubt in my mind that they'd be tagged male and no one would be saying "it could also be a flat-chested dickgirl", because the only evidence you have to go by is that it has a penis. But for some reason the reverse isn't true; with an ambiguous face, and a vagina, people still want to say "well it COULD be a male with a vagina, or it could be a flat-chested female". What is still qualifying it as male at that point? The flat chest that we've already established isn't really reliable when it comes to tagging scalies? Does the flat-chest suddenly count as proof of male if the character has a dick, but then doesn't matter if the character has a vagina?

As I mentioned, completely relying on TWYS in such scenarios simply leads to problems. In those cases, where it's not completely clear what gender a character is, I'd rather see it tagged according to what the source says (again, as long as the necessary evidence for it is in the picture) rather than letting tag wars continue or falling back on "ambiguous_gender". I don't feel that "ambiguous_gender" should encom characters where you can clearly see their genitalia; that tends to remove a whole lot of ambiguity (as I illustrated with the vagina/dick example above).

Another good example is the tagging of feral characters, such as post #497903. No one is arguing to call that character a cuntboy, nor ambiguous_gender. Why is that, when it possesses the exact same evidence for gender as the kobold examples above?

To answer my own question a bit, anthropomorphism begins playing a role in how we perceive gender to some degree, as I mentioned in the Charr gender tagging thread about a month ago. But even then, I mentioned that "human-like facial features are what they're depending on to clue them in as to whether the character is male or female (assuming no other obvious male/female features are present on the body)", and also concluded that gender tagging for Charrs would continue to be a mess, which is hardly what we want it to be.

Thus, my proposal here to try to clear up some of these situations by simply appealing to the source when there is OBVIOUS evidence of gender, but when that evidence alone isn't completely decisive. Again, this is very much like how the exception for character names works as well. With character names, the source can be referenced for the appropriate character tag based on the evidence we have in the image, and what the source says can't conflict with what's apparent in the image. Likewise, with this proposed gender exception, the source can be the deciding factor when tagging the gender of a character, but the evidence necessary for that gender must be apparent in the image (so it's actually even more restrictive than the character name exception). They still can't say it's a herm if there's not evidence for that (both dick and vag visible), but they can say it's female/cuntboy if there's evidence for that (vagina visible, ambiguous face/body-build).

Sorry for being long-winded, I'm just trying to make it as clear as I can.