Okay, but you could similarly argue that certain cis women, who have chosen to show their profile to only women, could feel uncomfortable with a non-passing trans woman interacting or surfing with them. That doesn’t mean that we should allow cis women to exclude trans women from their interaction circles. Similarly, we shouldn’t allow cis women to automatically exclude non-binary individuals (who may pass as more masculine or more feminine) when hosting or surfing. You can always take a deeper dive into a person’s profile and judge whether you would be comfortable with them.
My current personal preference (which is fluid given all these discussions) is:
- separate the gender filter feature (for hosting and surfing), the gender filter feature for hangouts, and with the gender filter feature for who one shows their profile to. (i.e. 3 separate possibilities).
- allow women to show their profile only to women (perhaps in that case excluding Non Binary individuals is okay as a checkbox option, since this will cater to a very specific population of women)
- for the people who don’t use the Hide feature, allow the hosting status to be automated so that the “Request” button doesn’t appear for the populations that they are not comfortable staying with.
- for that feature, don’t allow excluding non-binary individuals for hosting and surfing. Women can choose “Women an NB only” or “any gender” and men can choose “Men and NB only” or “any gender.” I believe that ill-intentioned people who try to abuse this situation by faking their gender would be quickly reported.
- for searching on the map, anyone can filter for any gender. Yes, that can mean that certain individuals will selectively reach out and try to harass people of a certain sex, but there can be other measures in place (profile hiding, filtering low quality messages, and inclusively-designed preferred gender options for hosting) to prevent that.
What do others think?