In Second Life, there is a proposed voluntary gender verification service in their JIRA that will allow residents to optionally verify their real life gender. Why? Because in the world, lesbians are considering it a form of “cyber-rape” that the woman they might be in a virtual relationship with might not actually be female in real life.
I think there are decent points to argue on both sides of this, but I have to say that in general – I am against it. Look at this real-life example:
Angie Zapata, a transgender teenager from Colorado was murdered because a man she was intimate with found out that she was biologically born as male. This man was found guilty of a hate crime for being prejudice against Angie for being transgender. His defense claimed that he was decieved and that she should have been obligated to tell him beforehand. This fact is simply not true in the real world. There are no laws whatsoever that claim that you have to disclose your biological sex to someone before sleeping with them.
So why should there be one in a virtual world? There have been many examples of people who have been able to explore different cultures and lifestyles by assuming a role in a digital society that is different than theirs in real life. I have never, under any circumstance, seen avatars in a virtual world as direct representations of their real life self. Instead, I’ve seen them as humans interacting in a virtual world as who they want to be represented as. It’s one of the beautifully intriguing things about virtual worlds for me, is the fantastical sense of a self that you may or may not resemble in actuality.
Lesbians saying that a man representing himself as a woman qualifies as rape is mostly congruent with a man in real life saying that his girlfriend representing themselves as their non-biological sex is rape. Gender is NOT binary, and is not necessarily inline with physical sexual organs (”sex”). The sex of a human being is not necessarily their gender. And in a virtual world, it’s all about gender. We can represent ourselves however we would like, and the physical parts in our shorts shouldn’t matter.
If we start with gender, what is next? Race verification to attend a virtual African-American only club? Nationality verification before you can live and interact with an Asian society? Picture verification to make sure that if I’m playing a short, skinny, adorable female avatar that I might actually BE short and skinny on the other side of the screen?
And, the hot topic at the moment is “what if the person in Second Life is transgender in real life?” What is their ID doesn’t state they are female, but they live their life as female? The majority of trangender people are NOT transsexual, they haven’t had a surgery, and their birth certificates and ID’s have not been changed. They wouldn’t be able to verify the identity they play in the world. Sure, it’s “voluntary” but that still would be another exclusion for them from actually being the gender they believe they are. It’s demoralizing, discouraging, and it happens enough in the real world.
If you choose to enter into relationships with anyone represented by pixels on a screen, you should never presume that they resemble who they are in real life.
