It was brought to my attention that languages change.
We currently have the tags:
hermsshemalesA suggestion was to change them to words with less negative connotation (I didn’t know):
intersextransgendersBut changing herms (plural noun) to intersex (adjective) would change it from sounding like an attraction and instead turn it into a character attribute.
And you can’t nounificate (that is now a real word!) it to intersexes, right?
Help a Swede out here! 
Intersex is both a singular noun and an adjective in English and Intersexes is the correct plural noun, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen it used in common practice. So intersexes would be the same-tense substitute for herms.
Yeah, to the point I’ve never seen it.
We can certainly change that, though it’s a thing that does shift on occasion.
I know there’s a couple people who have shifted to using intersex to describing their characters in other places.
I know that the terms currently in use are ones that have been pretty common on MUCKs for decades at this point, but there are definitely people out there who consider things like shemale or cuntboy to be slurs. I’m in favor of at least adding intersex and transgender as tags asap (afab and amab, “assigned female at birth” and “assigned male at birth” might also be useful as well!).
I’d prefer those to be added and in place for a bit before we talk about removing tags, because that will be a different can of worms, I think. There will definitely be people that would be unhappy with removing such tags.
I think Intersex and Transgender would be reasonable tags to add. I would recommend we also for the time being keep ‘herms’, because that’s something fairly specific in the MUCK community with some longstanding use.
Transgender is a term popping up more than I was expecting in people’s character descriptions; I think that’s a bit of a generational shift from the older MUCK crowd.
I think ‘Shemales’ is both out of date as a term and better covered by ‘Intersex’ as a encompassing terminology. That one I recommend dropping.
That’s the sticky part of it. Some people consider those terms slurs, some consider it their identity. I recall the e621 tag disputes around this. Unless there is a strong response otherwise, I would -tend- towards serving both communities instead.
For some reason it didn’t post this and I’m sort of duping Chia now. 
I’m sorry, but for as long as I’ve lived, the terms have been used as self identifiers, even by the people who were born with the actually physical body deformations. It’s not a slur. That’s a matter of their own personal opinion, and should not be thrust upon staff or other people within the community. Ever.
Part of the problem with replacing ‘herm’ with ‘intersex’ is that they don’t mean the same thing, especially in a fantasy setting.
A human with complete or partial male and female sexual organs is very unusual and I certainly understand wanting to be careful and not upset someone. ‘intersex’ is the word I would use (if they didn’t have a preference and make it known). Technically ‘intersex’ means a mismatch between the external and internal genitalia.
However, a Zi Ri from the World Tree RPG has both male and female functional bits, and the entire race is that way. (For that matter, quite a few invertebrate creatures in Real Life are that way, and hermaphrodite is the word used for it.)
Unfortunately there isn’t really an agreed-upon term in English for ‘shemale’ or ‘cuntboy’ (and I hate that word, but don’t have a better suggestion) for folks from settings where those are ‘normal’. Whatever ‘normal’ means.
I suppose you could put ‘penis-biased’ and ‘vagina-biased’ and ‘boobs plz’ as tags, but it’s unfortunately a situation where there’s not really a ‘right word’.
I hate the term too. 
Transman is frequently used/accepted!
Hey HEY. Zi Ri have -two sets- of each, thank you very much. (because the actual functional set is incredibly painful to use for vague lore reasons. 
)
@Puma
I don’t want to ‘well actually’, but that’s not correct. Transmen are not the same as the community whose characters are ‘cuntboy’ identified. Transmen are ‘afab’ transitioning to male. A ‘cuntboy’ is the male form with female bits. The -presentation- may be similar but they are not exactly the same.
I referenced the e621 tag war about this above. The current ‘inoffensive term’ for a “cuntboy” style character is “andromorph” on there, separate from a trans male. The equivelant female bodied/male genital character type on there is classically a “dickgirl” and is now “gynomorph”. This… perhaps displays the complexity of this situation.
(Yes, I did ‘well actually’ Windy about Zi Ri, but I’m an… enthusiast of adorable dragons.)
Look, I knew about Zi Ri, but the topic is complicated enough already. And be glad I didn’t bring The Soft Ones / The Hard Ones into it!
Also as an aside, a conversation on this topic with an artist led to the fairly hilariously inappropriate ‘Dong Daughter’ movie poster series.
Yeah, you’re right. I was trying to bring a little humor to this (fairly serious but also fairly complicated) thread.
I see someone replying that probably has good perspective on this subject, though. So I want to hear that.
Well I had a lot written but I’m on my phone and @Talon keeps taking the words out of my mouth as I’m proofreading them…
Aw. I’m sorry, Xetem. Did I ditto your points exactly? If not I’d like to hear from you, you’re close to this discussion.
Yea pretty much exactly 
. My main points were that an andromorph and a transman aren’t the same and explaining E6’s somewhat controversial, yet agreeable to me, stance.
Thanks. I just didn’t want to feel like I was speaking -for- you.
Speaking as our community’s most visible cuthromorboy, do you have a preference in what we should do here? That’s not the only determining factor since over the years I’ve seen strong viewpoints from the cis female, trans and ‘cboy’ communities but it’s worth an ask.
(on the other hand if you’re cool with the e621 standard I suggest we use that since it… seems to not make anyone too angry these days.)
I personally am fine with the e621 methodology. And from what I gather from others of similar character circumstance it seems to be at least mostly accepted at this point.
if you prefer ‘shemales’ then I’d prefer you write that out yourself as a custom tag. Maybe keep default tags the common respected language for transgenders? The e621 solution was to include everything but… I don’t want a tag list a mile long. The system as is already inclusive to any identity you have or wish to seek out. Wouldn’t mind dropping herm and intersex to just include males, females, and transgenders? There’s no way we can include all desired species and gender without creating an endless tag list guys.
Edit: Looking at e621. 4 intersex. male and female… If we just include mtf and ftm crossgender… that’s 8… too many? Maybe not.
I believe we should be adding intersexed and transgendered as official tags… not removing other tags which others may self-identify their own creations as.
It’s worth noting (not that I don’t think anyone in the thread knows this, but I think it’s drifted) that we’re talking about tags, i.e. preferences here and not self-identification, which is in a freeform text field and people can express themselves how they want. (Within the limits of polite, respectful behavior, of course.)
Do we want to have positive/negative flags for every form of gender expression, I guess is the question. That’s thorny in itself, but not badly so.