It’s about time that Facebook recognized that there are more genders in the modern world than just “male” and “female”. Finally. Now, how do I change my own gender so everyone stops calling me female?
This is definitely modern times, when gender can encompass over 75 options, far more than just “male” and “female”. There are “transgender”, “pangender”, “cisgender”, and so many more, a remarkable array of choices and options. And it turns out that it’s easy to change the gender associated with your Facebook account to match your own now, far more than it was even a few months ago.
The trick is to find where on your profile editing options the gender is specified.
To do that, go to your home page or base page on Facebook, then look on the top left. It should look approx like this:
Click on Edit Profile to get to your profile settings.
Now on the left you’ll see a bunch of options:
What you want to select is Contact and Basic Info. This will then take you to a page with a lot of, well, basic info about yourself.
Scroll down a bit until you find this section:
As you can see, I’ve moved the cursor over the “Gender” area, so the Edit option has become visible.
Click on Edit to update your gender identification:
To see where everything’s changed, click on the menu option that shows either “Male” or “Female” right now.
There are three values: Male / Female / Custom:
Once you choose “Custom” a number of other fields show up, along with a box where you can type in a value. Start typing and autocomplete will show you the options that match:
Experiment by typing in different letters, you’ll see there are a remarkable number of different choices now.
Also pay attention to the sharing option on the top right of the field. Mine is set to “Friends”. You can change your gender to whatever you’d like and separately you can decide whether your friends, everyone or no-one gets to see it. Nice touch, Facebook.
Underneath the pop-up is a second option: the pronoun you prefer for Facebook references:
Again, nice touch, Facebook, having that be an option you can modify. I kind of like the neutral one myself.
Make the changes you want and you’re done. That’s it. No “Save” button, it’s ready to go.