Feedback and suggestions

I just posted a story and was disappointed with the lack of gender neutral options.

Often I'll write a story where the main character has no specified gender such that any reader can slot themselves into it. By having to label it as "male" or "female", and then having to label the story as either straight or gay/lesbian, I feel like I've already knocked out half of my potential readership.

And that's to say nothing of nonbinary or genderfluid people who might want to read stories without having to force themselves into a gender role.

Can we mark stories' characters as gender-neutral? And, by extension, can those characters appear regardless of which gender is chosen for "character gaining weight" in the search?

This would be a good idea. Although I doubt there will be too many interested in it, it wouldn't hurt allowing this option.



No, please no! Those who don't care about the gender of the main character, can just refrain from using the filter.
But those people who do use a filter, are only interested in one specific gender, so it won't do any good to force other stories upon them.

I've just posted another gender-neutral story and been forced to not only pick one of two genders for the feedee, but to also assign a label to the orientation of the relationship. All labels are incorrect and now the description of my story is misleading. Please add the option for gender neutral stories.

I up vote this with both hands. I’d rather have a number of other options:

Character gaining weight, add:
* agender
* pangender
* genderblurry (or the more standard genderfluid)

Sexual orientation, add:
* asexual
* pansexual
* polysexual (yes, it’s different than pansexual)

Hopefully adding more inclusive options will be simple to implement, thus able to be done sooner than later.

Thank you for the suggestion.

We will take this into consideration as we do have 'no gender', which is effectively gender neutral as an option on profiles. So we could potentially introduce this to the story character section when we next update this area on the site.

This is from almost a year ago. The options have increased and evolved — somewhat. I have hope that the next change in options will be more inclusive for both characters and writers.

Maybe ff could set up a committee of writers to collect suggestions, then offer up a proposal for changes.

I’m not entirely happy with the options, and writers can still put info in the intros to indicate gender-neutral or other story ingredients.

Still, I find ff better than any other place to post these stories. I loved DeviantArt until they responded to homophobic complaints and removed one of my more romantic tales of young gay exploration. DA seems to allow explicit hetero content but not gay erotica.

Anyway, I see the ff team struggling to make things better. Let’s encourage them and keep offering suggestions. Ultimately, we all want to serve the readers here and make it easier for them to find enjoyable stories.