Gender futility\u00a0has come into the news a lot recently with celebrities such as Miley Cyrus and Lena Dunham\u00a0coming out as Gender Fluid.\u00a0despite\u00a0this gender, fluidity\u00a0is something that the general\u00a0public know very little about. The lack of knowledge in the general public means that for people who are gender fluid can find it hard to gain understanding and find others like them. This is where online communities come in, these people use online communities to find other like them and understand more about themselves.<\/p>\n
Tumblr is one of the most popular online destinations for members of the gender fluid community. These blogs range from individuals who are gender fluid to pages with multiple admins dedicated to answering\u00a0questions from other users. One such page genderfluid support<\/a> has 11 individual admins who all use the blog to answer\u00a0other users questions often helping and guiding other gender fluid people, but also providing information for those who aren’t gender fluid as well, hopefully educating people. When browsing through this blog I also found a gender definitions page which lists all the definitions of gender fluidity<\/a>, When looking through this list I realised that I was completely unaware of most of the definitions listed, which shows how important these online communities are in getting the message out there as well as helping others in the community.Searching through Tumblr\u00a0I saw so many people sharing their own stories, this topic is so little discussed in the mainstream media but on tumblr\u00a0the community was huge.<\/p>\n Youtube was another social networking site where I found a large community of people of non-binary genders. Users putting up videos telling their gender identity\u00a0stories,\u00a0for example, GiGi Georgous,\u00a0who I have talked about in a previous blog, came out as a transgendered woman and then a lesbian this video <\/a>has around two million views and confused many people. This is because of the confusion in mainstream society\u00a0between gender identity and sexuality, they are two separate things as GiGi explains in the video. Sexuality is who you’re attracted to and gender identity is who you are. This video has nearly 20,000 comments while reading through these comments I realised that users were actually communicating with each other,\u00a0mostly people were asking questions or misusing terminology at which point the gender fluid community would step in either to defend, educate or both. The non-binary gender community on youtube is huge, however, most of this community are viewers and commenters rather than content creators. Despite this is have found the community to be very vocal, and as youtube and online content become more and more mainstream it could mean that soon gender fluidity will be come part of mainstream culture.<\/p>\n Another part of this online community that is fascinating\u00a0is how far they have come. When I joined facebook in 2008 you only had three gender options, male, female or rather not say. Now in 2016, there are 58 gender options available on facebook. This is huge not only for people who are gender fluid but transgender people as well, many members of the community find socitetal binary genders very restricting and “rather not say” was boarderline offensive, however in a short space of time the community has made itself heard and things are changing. It could take a while for main stream socitey to catch up as the face paced nature of the internet does mean that it is usually ahead of the game. Howver as social media becomes an ever more important and almost essential part of our lives we could see the sociteal view change on gender sooner than we think.<\/p>\n Overall its clear that there is a huge community of people using online communications to talk about their gender identity, however, mainstream society still hasn’t got the understanding or education to understand people of non-binary gender. Although with the growing importance that social media and electronic communication has on out lives we could see non-binary genders become part of mainstream society this has already been shown by facebooks adoption of 58 genders into their gender options so it could happen even sooner than anticipate.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Gender futility\u00a0has come into the news a lot recently with celebrities such as Miley Cyrus and Lena Dunham\u00a0coming out as Gender Fluid.\u00a0despite\u00a0this gender, fluidity\u00a0is something that the general\u00a0public know very little about. The lack of knowledge in the general public means that for people who are gender fluid can find it hard to gain understanding…<\/p>\n