How to change your gender settings to neutral with Facebook Timeline

UPDATE: Facebook now allows custom genders, including neutral genders. Enjoy! \o/

Instructional post.

Problem: Once you set a gender on your Facebook profile, you can’t reset it to neutral. Although you can choose to hide your gender from your info page, it still appears when referencing you, as in “X changed his profile picture”.

Solution: As seen here. For Firefox users - use Firebug to edit the HTML of the dropdown selection box and add in a third option with a value of zero. This returns your reference pronouns to they, their etc.

Problem #2: Facebook changes profile to “Timeline” setup. Above solution stops working.

Solution #2: Okay, here’s the instructional part. The trick is nearly identical to the one above.

1) Get an HTML inspector, e.g. Firebug for Firefox. These instructions are written for Firebug users, but can be adapted to other HTML inspectors.

2) Open Facebook Mobile.

3) Click “Timeline” to go to your profile page.

4) Under your name, click “Edit profile”.

5) Under “Basic information”, click “Sex”.

6) Radio button options for “Male” and “Female” appear.

Right click the radio button which is selected. (In this example, it’d be the “Male” radio button.) From the context menu, select “Inspect Element With Firebug”.

7) Firebug will highlight a line of code, <label onclick=””>.

Expand the line of code by clicking the plus sign on the left.



8) The line expands into the following block of code:

Right click the line that begins “<input type…” and select “Edit HTML”.

9) A line of code appears.

Note the property “value”. The “Male” option has value 2, the “Female” option value 1.

Copy the line and paste it so you have two lines of code. Remove the checked=”1” from the first line of code. In the second one, change the value to zero (value=”0”).

10) Your code should look something like this:

Looking up from the Firebug panel, you’ll notice the page has changed to include an extra radio button, which is checked:

Click save to submit the value “0” from the radio button you created, and you’re done!