it would be really nice if the staff could do something about the #intersex tag being completely filled with fetish art. i know a lot of intersex users have complained about it and been dismissed, and i argue that it is an expression of bigotry, though maybe a clueless one. it's reinforcing the association of "intersex" with inaccurate, exaggerated, sexualized ideas of intersex bodies, and, though i am not personally intersex, i sure as hell would not want to discuss my actual experiences, identity, health, community, etc. in a tag that is functionally a porn category.
edit for clarity: this is specifically about "dual-sex" characters with a penis, vagina, and testicles being tagged intersex, as real people cannot be born with that combination of traits.
Can we brainstorm some possible solutions to this? I don't think we can solve it just culturally, as there's so many existing posts, and asking NSFW artists to just not tag their stuff is asking them to forgo visibility entirely.
To name the broader problem, there's a portion of cohost users who come from nsfw art sites like e621, and tag image posts like you'd tag images there: with every word referencing something that occurs in the image. So tags like #intersex and #transmasc get filled with porn, but also #woman, #lesbian, #pokemon, #steven universe, etc. Essentially anything that names any qualification of character, or anything that can occur in an image.
IMO for some of the tags less populated, the "show 18+ posts" button helps decently with this. But as mentioned in @fivefeather's post, that doesn't change the nature of the tag - a non-NSFW post will still show up to a bunch of people looking for porn. There's also non-NSFW art tagged like this, and the 18+ posts button doesn't exclude that.
My initial idea would be some kind of tag namespace, for example, art/pokemon, art/woman, etc. But how could we support with site design - maybe making it not as hard to add a prefix to 24 tags on a post? And how do we decide on what the prefix should actually be?
Also, how do we deal with the history of posts already in the tags they're in?
Another idea would be to just... cede the tags already populated by porn to porn artists. Maybe add something like #intersex discussion, #steven universe discussion, etc? Not my place to decide that, though, and there's no precedent for discussion like that. I mean, there's no more precedent for art/ either.
I also don't love ceding the most obvious tags to porn. For the dual reasons of liking non-porn posts, and also the current situation making it relatively difficult to find all the porn art tags one might want to find to search for posts, because they're all just regular tags mixed in with tags not used for porn.
my issue is not the fact that porn and non-porn end up in the same tags. cohost's solution to this, the button to filter out 18+ posts, is (imo) effective and robust with few exceptions, and people do sometimes spin off n/sfw-exclusive tags (e.g. #sfw furry, #transmasc nsfw). it's fine that it bothers you! but it's not what i'm talking about.
the issue with the #intersex tag is that the porn is almost exclusively not of plausible intersex bodies. most porn tagged as "intersex" depicts characters with breasts, a penis, vagina, and testicles. it's not possible to be born with that combination of traits, but the tagging enforces the idea that this is what intersex people look like and the subsequent fetishization.
getting to the actual question, though - i should reiterate that i, myself, am not intersex, and my word shouldn't be gospel here. as of today, the staff are putting forward rules about mandatory tagging. given that, a rule stating that certain types of art (that is, characters fitting the above description) should not go in #intersex is plausible, though clearly defining what is and isn't allowed might require some careful wording. there are other tags out there that porn artists could move to.
