alias ambiguous_gender -> obscured_gender

BUR #56972 is pending approval.

create alias ambiguous_gender -> obscured_gender

This tag is meant to be for cases where you cannot tell the gender of a character because it's obscured (full armor), too distant (very wide shot), out of frame... But historically it's been extremely prone to being mistaken with androgynous, which is fair. I don't think this was ever the right name for it.

As you can see from the post versions, we had around 1.5k historical removals of the tag, and 800 of them were specifically to swap it with androgynous, which is around 10% of the tag's size. That's pretty bad! Even just opening the tag, at a glance, I can find more examples that haven't been fixed yet, such as post #11021213.

Getting the ball rolling to propose/brainstorm a rename to something less ambiguous (). Feel free to counterpropose. Maybe hidden gender could work too. The problem with that and this proposal is that both can be taken to mean "the gender has been censored".

Would vague or unclear work better than obscured?

Damian0358 said in forum #426111:

Would vague or unclear work better than obscured?

Those suffer from the same issue where androgynous already means vague/unclear gender. If you look at a trap but don't see the dick, it's unclear what the gender is. ambiguous gender is specifically when the character is hidden or so far away and you don't have anything useful to make a decision.

ambiguous gender is an ambiguous tag but obscured gender sounds like it excludes pov hands which is included in the examples in the wiki since the hands aren't obscured by anything so it's "unknown gender" as far as the taggers/fanbase are concerned

basically you want a tag that means no gendered features or unknown gender or more specifically unknowable gender but it runs into a problem with androgynous characters like Crona (Soul Eater) that canonically never had their gender disclosed

maybe the problem with the tag is that there is no way or point to include pov hands, mostly out of frame chars, silhouettes and armor in the same tag and these concepts should be split somehow

Definitely doesn't help that other boorus like e621 do actually use "ambiguous gender" to mean both obscured and androgynous. Which is likely to be the culprit for a lot of ambiguous_gender furry.