Separate tags for 'crossdressing' and 'gender bender' :implemented:

[jasty]

'Crossdressing' (boys wearing girl clothes) and 'gender bender' (boys transformed into girls) appeal to different crowds and shouldn't be lumped together. On e-hentai these are separate tags and they should be separate here as well.

 

[Pokari]

Counter-argument: Gender-bender is a catch-all that covers a lot more ground than cross-dressing and gender swaps.

Well, I can see why that particular distinction might be important for people reading hentai, but for the rest of us...

 

[Plykiya]

drown me in crossdressers and ignore the genderbends
upvoted

 

[Pokari]

Actually, it occurs to me that there's a much more real reason not to do this: The debates on drawing the line between "cross-dressing" and "gender-bending" are likely to spark caustic debates around transgenderism (over whether a character is trans or just crossdressing, or over whether "gender=genetics" or "gender=identity", etc. I don't think it's something that can be avoided by guidelines on what the tags mean, either).

 

[Plykiya]

Japanese media doesn't really pay much attention to trans as a whole. Trans are mainly viewed as crossdressers (traps) instead of trans, regardless of how well they pass or what they choose to identify as. I can only think of like, two or three manga that approach the topic of being trans fairly seriously.

Categorizing it wouldn't be that difficult. Any mention of crossdressing or traps can be under crossdressing, any conflicts of gender/transformation can be categorized as genderbend as well. Not like they have to be exclusive.

 

[kurisu]

Crossdressing // Bodyswapping // Genderbender. Pls.
In japan Gender Bending isn't an actual genre, there's certain tags that are similar and describe better what the manga is about (like otokonoko, seitenkan, tsf, etc) but they are still not real genres.
I'd like to have this differentiation too because sometimes I want to read traps, and having to search through GB genre makes it difficult as there is also magic sex changes and people swapping bodies and stuff.

 

[Pokari]

Japanese media doesn't really pay much attention to trans as a whole.

I'm not talking about Japanese conceptions on the matter, I'm talking about western readers'. In the context of what I was saying, I don't see how the origin country's genre divisions are salient.

Categorizing it wouldn't be that difficult. Any mention of crossdressing or traps can be under crossdressing, any conflicts of gender/transformation can be categorized as genderbend as well. Not like they have to be exclusive.

Categorising it wouldn't be that difficult if people agreed on base principles. But on this subject, they don't.

If you think people don't have sticks up their asses on this subject (myself included, of course) and won't get into any fires on the subject, I would direct your attention to a few of the posts in the comments section of https://mangadex.org/manga/24702/my-wife-is-a-man wherein different people thought the gender issue was cut-and-dry... In different directions. (The linked comment section is was on my mind when I raised the objection).

 

[Plykiya]

Discussion about trans topics are going to happen regardless of if the crossdressing tag exists. The crossdressing tag serves the purpose of further specifying stories that are less about actually turning into a girl (or swapping into a girl's body), but instead focuses on a character who dresses like a girl without necessarily having the body of a girl (or the opposite, of a girl dressing like a guy).

In the case of 'My Wife is a Man,' Kou never refers to his wife as a woman, and Yukio never refers to himself as a woman. It's a clear case of just being about crossdressing.

 

[Pokari]

I mean, your desire to persue your particular interests more easily is understandable, I just don't think splitting the gender-bender tag to achieve that is a great idea, for the aforementioned reasons.

If all cross-dressing manga were still gender-benders, the problem wouldn't arise (on manga-updates for instance this is genre "gender-bender" but category "trap," which aside from possible political-correctness issues with the term "trap" seems about right. But we don't have a two-tier tag system... Maybe we need one?)

In the case of 'My Wife is a Man,' Kou never refers to his wife as a woman, and Yukio never refers to himself as a woman. It's a clear case of just being about crossdressing.

You will find that I agree with that--I was, in fact, highlighting that series because it was an example of much debate with not much prompting. And my experience with batoto was that tag debates were the origin of a not-totally-insignificant portion of arguments.

Anyway, I think I've made my point at sufficient length (perhaps a bit beyond that? Long posts are a favoured sin of mine) at this point, so I'll let the matter be.

 

[Plykiya]

We're most likely not going to be splitting the genderbend tag. We can add crossdressing as a more specific tag for it, in the same way that Shoujo Ai and Yuri exist. Not completely different, but a more specific version of it. Like how people also want an Isekai tag.

 

[penrosecat]

The point of any tag should be to make it easy for people looking for a particular thing to find it.

For the above example, consider your typical reader of yaoi or shounen-ai. The kind of story they would have in mind is definitely different from trap, from the BL angle.

The other angle is the trans one.
The gender-bender thing, it is unclear (to most I would think) what gender-bender actually is. Are we talking about actual gender swapping or anything that ‘bends’ the boundaries of gender? It isn’t very specific, so it isn’t the best ‘tag’. Maybe a ‘category’..?

Discussions in the comments section about this issue should not influence the creation or introduction of tags. Those are about personal opinion, whereas tags are about convenience.

The thing is, when people read good hentai, many feel it would be nice to have a non-h version of the story which just goes along like any other manga. Which is why there’s such a large influx of traps in the first place.

tl;dr - An easier way to find traps plz

 

[Teasday]

Genderbending isn't very useful since it's essentially a superset of crossdressing and other activies related to skewing traditional gender expression, technically not including genderswapping (magical or otherwise) since there's no cultural norm to challenge by looking like a girl when you already are one. I would say the most accurate way of resolving this would be having the tags "genderbending" and "genderswapping", but because the former's definition isn't exactly widely known, it'd be simpler to leave it out and to use "crossdressing" and "genderswapping" instead.

 

[teriguu]

My 2 cents: genderbender is a good catch all genre for everything genderbending related, but I do miss a body swap tag

 

[Karai]

I think a point being missed here is that tags need not be exclusive. Having a single manga tagged with many tags that allow it to be searchable from varying levels of specificity would be handy. If I specifically want to be drowning in traps, I can search for traps and get a very specific type of content. But if I want to search for that + gender swap/transform etc, then searching for gender bender should give me the whole set of results, traps included.

 

[descending_angel87]

I think a part of the issue is how users are tagging some manga. Some people add the tag to manga that has little to do with gender bender. Like in one chapter a character cross dresses and suddenly it gets a gender bender tag. That tag alone can turn people off of series that have nothing to do with gender bender or if someone is looking for gender bender they might read a series only for it to be so minor it isn't a central part of the story.

Maybe some guidelines about what constitutes certain tags (like a prompt comes up when users go to change something) to let users know when to add a tag to a manga would be good. This will help keep manga from having every single tag imaginable and help refine searches abit. If a series doesn't have something that isn't a central or major part of the series, then it shouldn't get the tag. Like if a manga has 4 chapters that are a sports arc, but 80 chapters that aren't then probably it shouldn't get a sports tag. Just my two cents.

 

[Karai]

Devil's advocate: booru systems thrive on hyper-specific tags where an image with a girl lifting her arm is tagged into a group of thousands of images where girls are lifting their arms. Granted, the content is is different between managa and single images. Herhaps instead of limiting the number of tags, tags could be loosely ordered by content. For example, a slice of life manga that has a single ecchi chapter might be worth having ecchi as a tag since it is valid, but the tag order would be put it near the bottom of the list so users would know that there isn't very much ecchi, it was just a one of scene, but it is there. Perhaps even a more in depth system could tag individual chapters with specific tags, or tag a number of chapters that a tag applies to.

Slice of Life: 100 / 100 = 100%
Fantasy: 2/100 = 2%
Ecchi: 1/100 = 1%

Something like that would give finer control over how a manga is displayed in search results without having to make judgement calls on omitting potentially useful data.

Search:

ecchi

Results:

Super Ecchi Time: 100% match
Slice of Ecchi: 87% match
Best Friends Forever: 3% match

 

[Zephyrus]

I marked this as Maybe because the tagging discussion is ongoing. Nothing has been set in stone yet.

 

[Teasday]

I think a part of the issue is how users are tagging some manga. Some people add the tag to manga that has little to do with gender bender. Like in one chapter a character cross dresses and suddenly it gets a gender bender tag.

I would've thought it's common sense that the tags should be representative of the work as a whole but I guess that's not as common as I would like to think.

 

[Mangafreak18]

Bump, I needed this to separate. It a pain to dig manga that isnt the one we are looking for.

 

[monkey123]

Soo many subcategories

Swap, crossdress manside, crossdress femalside, possessing, futa, 100% genderbend into female, 100% genderbend into male, genderbend homo, genderbend no homo, genderbend with relapse and so on...