Thursday, October 5, 2017

The Comments Section, Part 6 (Yahoo Letter)

This is a message I left for Yahoo on their support forum, when I discovered I couldn't change my gender in their account settings, and apparently they have zero customer support except for their FAQ and forum. No phone support, no email support, nothing. Nothing in their FAQ even contained the words "gender" or "sex", and the forum had various posts repeatedly stating that it is impossible to change this option.

After reading through some forum posts, I have come to the conclusion that there is no way for me to change the gender listed on my profile. I understand that I am the only one who can see it, but regardless of that, it is very irritating, and seeing the wrong gender listed on my profile with no way to change it creates a feeling of powerlessness. Trans people don't need more of that in their lives, and this affects them in a deeper way than a majority would have us think.

As a web developer, I find it rather insulting that this option hasn't been added, because this is not a hard thing to accomplish when the name variables are already all laid out for you. There have been requests on your forum from trans and cis people alike, demanding this option. It's a simple matter of giving us the option to change the gender variable. You already have that option for our names. It would take a professional web developer less than an hour to implement this.

Consider this an official request that this option be created, for the sake of the other trans people out there. I, however, will be switching to Gmail, because I'm not patient enough to wait for the Yahoo developers to add this option, and Gmail actually had a customer support person I could email to help me with this. Yahoo, please consider the number of people who have left your service because of oversights like these. Most of them never speak up before they leave.

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