"SimSoon;c-18224371" wrote:
"LSM36;d-1006211" wrote:
1. Just treat the Female and Male as they are. Sex assigned at birth or in this case CAS. If possible add Intersex representation.
Huh, that's not how I use the gender markers. (...i use them as gender markers)
Well the symbols mean male♂️ and female ♀️ with this for intersex⚧️. They're biological sex symbols. To be fair though they get called gender symbols even if you Google it, but then they are defined as the symbols for biological sex. The issue there is conflating sex and gender. The terms for these were coined in a time when no one was acknowledging the difference. But it's literally talking about humans as species splitting them into a binary based on presentation of their primary and secondary sexual characteristics.
Gender is a social construct, but also one that people have to decide for themselves regardless of what they are assigned at birth. It's about who you are inside, and how you want to interact in the world. A cis person wants to interact with the world in the way that people assume someone with their sex would. At least in presentation. Other than cis-people there are many other types of people out there, and gender can be an incredibly important tool to reflect what's already going on inside. It both is what you already are, and is a reflection/presentation of that for the world to be able to see and understand.
I can't remember if they still refer to sims as man and woman in CAS, I don't think they do anymore. But from the beginning, seeing those symbols, I thought female and male, and then after that gender. (Even when I didn't fully have these terms to use, even for myself. )As if it was just determining the base parts the sim would have. Essentially what they were assigned at birth. And as we got more options it seemed like that was the intent all along.
Except then there were all these issues when implementing representation that made me think that it was less forward thinking and more of an accident that could lead to better things.
People reacted so harshly just to pronouns. We were told we were going to get a bunch of stuff back to back for Queer representation. And in the end we got a few flags months later. And then another update for pronouns announced like a year later. But I didn't notice any real difference, it seemed like a patch for bugs and that was it.
Then people realized that all sims were technically pansexual and lost it.
So it seems like the system now is like if you had started to do a thing, and stopped partway through, then started to do another thing and stopped. Like putting your shopping list in the sandwich you were in the middle of making, and then ordering a pizza instead.
You can chose the basic build of your sim's body, their sex, you can let them wear whatever clothes they want, you can give them pronouns, and there's a few sexualites you can configure same with romantic orientations.
But there's a lot you can't do even with the things you can do, and for each of those features we were promised more than we were given.
And it was often rolled out in a way that seemed like they really understood their players and the players' communities and then didn't.
It's like getting more skintones, and better hairs for black sims all over again. With them finally just getting help from CC creators in an attempt to appease everyone.
