I noted in my blog that despite the custom gender options, Facebook still requires users to select Female or Male when creating a new account. No doubt this is for the benefit of advertisers.

I would imagine, however, that many binary trans people would prefer to be identified simply as men or women, without qualifiers. In fact, when the custom gender options first came out and some cis allies were encouraging their friends to list themselves as cisgender in solidarity with trans people, others cautioned that doing so would put pressure on stealth trans people, who would feel dishonest choosing “cis” even if they were always presumed to be.

While I’m non-binary and don’t like gendered ad targeting (or gendered anything else) in general, I would assume that many products targeted to women might be of interest to trans women as well. Before the non-binary options were available, I changed my profile from Female to Male partially so that I would stop seeing ads targeted to women. Much of what advertisers think men want to buy (cars, etc.) isn’t of interest to me either, but that’s the price of using a “free” site…