Agreed with ZK.

I'm honestly surprised that this has already ballooned to 30 posts. Welcome to 2020; where individuals make it their mission to be offended by words on the internet, and where administrators support such ridiculous behaviour.

Haily, you may wish to ponder this: If you take things on the Internet this personally, I think it may be best for you (and your health) to consider taking a hiatus from your online life. At least until you're comfortable enough in your own "skin" to coexist on forums such as these without demanding that things be changed to suit your preferences.

I do not think that the current title(s) should be changed just to conform to someone's absurd wishes. Whether or not they're relatively new, the fact remains that they represent a significant connection to a lot of games (some of which are historical), and changing them would defeat the purpose. Titles such as "Playroom Playboy" obviously have nothing to do with your gender. Please get over yourself. There are more important things to task yourself with worrying about. Like the fact that we need Donald Trump for 2020, so everyone go vote for him.

Note that I am advocating that Haily's rank, and only Haily's rank at this time, be changed. She wanted the rank itself changed for everyone, and I do not think this is reasonable until or unless we get a bunch of different people upset that they're being misgendered. If other people have no problem being called playboys, regardless of their gender, that's cool for them, but clearly Haily does have an issue with it.

Whatever you folks may think of the issue is actually kind of irrelevant in my opinion. You are not trans, and are not ostensibly going through gender transition issues. You aren't being deliberately called by a deadname (ahem, yeah, guys, that's a thing, now fucking cut it out, and yes, that does mean all of you who are doing it and don't seem to have fully gotten the message yet). Since you don't have this experience, your opinions about how easy it is to deal with aren't really germain to this discussion, so please stop trying to hammer them home. Whether one of you, four of you or forty of you say "jesus, Haily, get over it", all it's really doing is making you look like jerks. If you haven't gone through transition issues, you don't know what it is like to have an essential part of your identity being challenged, even in this admittedly small way.

The reality of the situation, as I understand it, goes like this. One of these sorts of microaggressions is really not that big a deal on its own. It's more annoying early on, when you're still wrestling with identity and trying to get folks to use your proper name and gender...but yeah, on its own, it's not a huge, earth-shattering deal. But it can add up with other things, and it can be compounded when folks dogpile you, precisely as some of you have done in this topic. You have, in fact, made the problem worse, all because you think Haily should just get over it and learn to live with it.

If you think she doesn't already know that she's in for a lot of stuff she will just have to toughen up and deal with, I think you're giving her far too little credit. I suspect that she knows better than many that there are a bunch of things that we can't change, so we'll just have to find a way to live with. Hell, I suspect we all know that, to one extent or another, and it's probably this attitude that is informing a lot of the posts in here.

But my reason for defending the request, at least to some extent, is because this change could be made to impact only Haily, and could be made very, very easily. I'd do it myself and save everyone else the headache of dealing with it. Frankly, the only reason I haven't done it yet is because Carter is clearly in disagreement with me here, and I'm not just gonna pull the trigger and override someone when I know their position opposes mine. If this change required a whole lot of legwork, or if it truly disadvantaged someone else, then I'd probably tell Haily that she'd have to find a way to work around the issue. Sometimes, change is not worth the effort; if it ain't broke for most people, don't fix it. Since it doesn't, I really don't see a problem in honouring it for Haily specifically.

So, in summary, I do accept that sometimes we just have to deal with stuff. Microaggressions happen every day to damn near everyone, and we can't go getting outraged at every little thing. But at the same time, I think folks in minorities get awfully tired of being told what is and is not a worthy cause for concern, so I wish you people would, as I said before, stop it and, if nothing else, just stay out of the way. Whether it gets done or not will have no impact on you personally.

Oh, and to address the "I have an ex named Sarah" thing. Again, Sarah is not part of your identity. I can accept that someone named Sarah might have traumatized you, and you may not like being part of Sarah's social circle, but asking for the rank to be changed wouldn't be all that reasonable in that situation IMO, unless, for instance, Sarah did you so much harm that you're legitimately triggered by it. Again, some of you are gonna roll your eyes at this, and there's something to be said for learning how to deal with stuff we don't like, but given that fixes of this nature are really quick and easy, and don't hurt anyone, I see no reason not to at least keep the door open for them.

I find it interesting that most of you are operating from a position where you imply that we should have to provide compelling evidence as to why we should change something, when that change hurts no one (remember, I'm talking about changing Haily's rank only, not the rank overall). I tend, by contrast, to operate from precisely the other end of the spectrum. I need someone to give me a good reason why we should not honour at least part of Haily's request.

Okay. I'll bite.
You're right. You don't have to be a five-star chef to know that a meal sucks. so for you, personally, to feel that this text is too small a deal to make an issue of is absolutely 100% okay. Where it comes to you, you don't have to object to the text or even to understand why someone else is.
To stay consistent with your analogy, what you and others are doing right now is saying that because you enjoyed this five-star meal, Haily can't say that it sucks and shouldn't send it back. Put another way, you are superimposing your tolerances onto Haily, and that's not cool. You're basically saying that if you and others aren't bothered by this, Haily shouldn't be either.

You're ostensibly visually impaired, right? If you own a cane, does it ever bother you when people grab it out of nowhere and try to guide you? Or how about being yanked by the arm, or assumed to need help when you don't? If you have a guide dog, does it bug you when people pet your guide dog without asking? When you're walking more slowly than other people, and folks yell out directions you don't need, does it annoy you sometimes? Do you ever find that people treat you like a child, and if so, doesn't it bug the almighty snot out of you? Does the experience of being visually impaired in any way bother you, ever? Because I can tell you it bothers me sometimes, and I can further tell you that if I'm having a rough go of it, or have had a lot of difficulty being blind lately for some reason (new route, difficult people, any number of things), someone coming up and saying "I don't see what you're so upset about" is going to annoy me. Who the hell are you to tell me when and where and why I should be annoyed? Get over yourself.

Mix and match your disabilities and your life experience, by the way. If you're black, maybe casual racism bothers you. If you're female, maybe sexism bothers you.
Now how would you enjoy being told to just get over it by someone when you said you wished thing x didn't affect you and should stop?

Now, I'll double down for a sec.

When it comes to gender identity and exual preference, people seem to really put their chips down where it comes to the superimposition of their own morals or tolerances on other people. As such, based on what I've heard, learned, read and come to understand from many people in my life who have shared personal anecdotes, I've come to accept that trans people, in particular, are almost always being bombarded in a hundred small ways to be a certain way, act a certain way, turn the other cheek, to just fucking deal with it because they're weird and the world is still getting used to it, or however you want to phrase it. You know how it's often said by black people that they're expected to bear the burden of educating white people and helping them manage their guilt? Yeah, trans people have it pretty bad in this regard as well, from everything I've seen. And if you're a young trans woman who has only fairly recently made her transition, if you're already a bit emotionally volatile, if you've already felt that the community (or parts of it) have attacked you needlessly by using your deadname and such? Yeah...to expect Haily to have the exact same thick skin as everyone else is not reasonable. To assume you know why she's upset is equally ridiculous. Stop placing your expectations on her this way. You probably wouldn't like it if it were done to you. Show some freaking empathy.

I've seen this literally dozens of times, and I've called it every single time. You can dance all day, but you're still stuck in the corner. My advice is to just accept that you've overstepped yourself a bit, take a pace or two backward, and ask yourself why it seemed necessary to condemn this action when its result would have zero impact on you.

How is it different though? That's what I'm trying to get you to understand.

Having unpleasant navigational experiences is annoying. It doesn't completely make life unlivable, but it's annoying. I can attest to this personally. There were days last year when I'd get to work and be utterly fed up with the world at large already. Obviously I wasn't going to punch the first person who approached me the wrong way, but I definitely showed some frustration at times. It's not always on me to turn the other cheek or educate people. Someone telling me, "hey man, it's no big deal" would likely have earned my scorn if not my ire, because again, who the hell are they to tell me what should offend me or not?

This is no different.

Saying that it doesn't offend you is totally okay. It's not precisely the point, but it's okay. Even going so far as to state that you'd rather not see the entire rank changed to suit one person, I can understand. It might not need to be said, but it's really not that offensive either.

But saying that she shouldn't be offended? Repeatedly referring to it as trivial? Both of these things are, in essence, you deciding to put your experience ahead of Haily's, in an arena where her lived experience trumps hell out of your own.

If you were going to be hurt or seriously inconvenienced by a change that might result from Haily's taking issue with the rank of Playroom Playboy, I'd feel differently. But none of you have legitimate grounds to be upset at this stage, as far as I've seen.

If you can show me factually how you should have the right to invalidate or minimize Haily's feelings while having your own validated instead - and yes, that's precisely what we're talking about here, so don't try and defend this - I'd like to see it. If you can make a convincing argument, you will be the first, and I've seen literally hundreds of attempts like this before, here and elsewhere. Go ahead and try, if you wish, but I'll tell you now; if the hundreds who came before you had no luck - with me and with others - I doubt you'll be any different. But have on, if you wish. Tell me why your opinions about someone else being upset should matter more than that other person's opinion, when it is they who are raising the objection and have grounds to protest this small microaggression where you very clearly do not.

Soren, again: why is it that you get to decide how small or big something is?

Scenario for you.

Let's say for a moment that you were a diehard Christian. Now let's say one of the ranks was "Christ killer". Just work with me here.
I'm not a Christian. It's easy for me to say, "well, it's just words on a forum, just ignore it. It's not really trying to upset you". And that latter is true. Nobody is trying to deliberately upset anyone with the creation of unique ranks. That's obvious.
But what if the "Christ killer" rank really, really upset you? What if you thought it was really tasteless and crude? What if you felt attacked as a Christian? If you said so, I might disagree with you personally. I might feel that there are some things you're going to need to toughen yourself against. But do you know what I -wouldn't do? I wouldn't come into your thread and say "there's no problem with this. You're just overreacting. If this bothers you, it's your problem". Because you have a right to be offended by something like this. If your religion was a large part of your identity, then someone mocking it or a particular thing you were seeing everywhere mocking it might bother you. Sure, you might be able to just turn aside, shrug it off, and if you can, that's awesome. Power to you. But sometimes we can't. Or sometimes we just don't want to. And we shouldn't always have to. While life is definitely about growing a spine and learning to be tough sometimes, it's also about calling shit out. We could argue about whether this needed calling out, or the method by which it was called out, I suppose, and there's some wiggle there, for sure. But what I would've hoped is that for most of you, who have no horse in this race and no reason to take issue with anything herein, you'd just shake your head, roll your eyes, say something like, "Ah, Haily's at it again" to yourself and walk away.

But you didn't do that. Over and over, people keep telling us how Haily has no right to object to this rank or be upset by it. People are making assumptions as to -why Haily is even upset, which are grounded not in fact but in guesswork. At this point, it ceases to be about whether or not Haily should've spoken of this at all, and starts being about why so many people think it's their God-given right to walk into a topic which has little to nothing to do with them, and dictate terms and standards. It's fucking amazing, honestly.

exactly the point i was trying to make cartertemm

i am sorry jaide bud i canned take you seriusly here. am i the only person in the world who learned that some times you just need to ignore things even if it is fucking hard.

Soren, you're dead right. We can't always walk on easy street. I've never said we can.

But if we have an opportunity to make one person's life a tiny bit nicer or easier, at no personal, professional or communal cost to anyone, why the hell would anyone object to that?

Right. And I disagree at this point that the title itself needs to go. We could scrap it, and that would be future-proof as well. But Haily is the one having the issue, so at least at this point I think that fixing the title for her is the main point.

It's one of those things that the majority of people won't so much as blink about, and no one expected it to cause trouble. But now that it has, even in an admittedly small way, I think it behooves us to confront it rather than shying away at the risk of nebulous "bad precedent".

I concur. Changing her title to something else for the time being would probably be the most reasonable option at this point. Whether this should be handled on a case by case basis in the future though... I don't know. I can see the potential for abuse. Not by staff, but by people who just want a title change just because, and are willing to fake some reason to change it.

The  other, less popular  option would be to go through all the titles and make them gender neutral. I'm personally not a fan of this one, because it seems extreme and unnecessary as I said before.

The fairest option for the future would be to make titles based on a gender option, but this would probably require the webmasters to get involved. I don't even know how difficult that would be to implement.