There seems to be a lot of Futa / Futanari works on this site, which I love. Over 800, at least, which ranks favorably with other categories in size. So, I wonder if it makes sense to create a separate Futa / Futanari category?
From the stories I've read, it seems that Futanari stories have main (or primary) characters with female secondary sex characteristics (larger breasts, long hair, female facial structure, female body shape, etc.) but are born with both male and female reproductive organs (hermaphrodites).
I agree with that definition. Notably, it excludes the (equally hentai) definition of dickgirl, which is the same, except it omits female reproductive organs, and often includes balls, where futanari generally does not. Also, futanari are almost universally coded as "female, but", but for dickgirls, "male, but" is not unheard of. I'm against this suggestion, though. The theoretical gain for people who are icked by anything that goes beyond "definitely 100% female... but with a dick" is outweighed by the practical fact that of 103 of 441 stories in the Transsexual category tagged futanari, few authors will bother switching, and it'll just make futanari stories harder to find, not easier, because you'd either have to search 2 categories, or search only by tag. I don't think it's necessary, either: the word 'transsexual' has a narrower definition in the real world, of course, but on an erotic story site, it serves just fine as a general "there are NOT only two genders" category, imo. Maybe we could come up with a better, more all-encompassing name, though?
The problem I have is that I'm looking for Transgender/Transexual stores about trans experiences, and they are swamped by Futa. A quick check and 50% of the top transexual stories are Futa, which are very different type of stories.
I see this as symptomatic of the general issues with categories. Further fragmenting the categories seems like a band-aid solution: after all, you're still left with the question of whether a transgender-focused story in an existing universe is properly transgender category or fan fiction category. I don't oppose futa having a separate category: it's probably easy to add and technically solves the immediate problem. But, as an example, you can then start considering "how about we split mtf and ftm as separate categories? that will also make it easier to find what I'm looking for" and ultimately the "categories" are doing work I feel tags ought to rightly support. On a different tack, it seems like this would be solved if searching "transgender" as a tag actually brought up transgender stories and not, for instance, biologically futa stories. The problem is there isn't really a way in place to police people's uses of tags. As a thought, a system to report inappropriate/unfitting tags might handle it, but that's its own can of worms.
Well, a story about trans experiences might go into Modern Age / Contemporary and Trans while a story about futa might go into Modern Age Fantasy and Trans or Fan Fiction and Trans (As it adds the possibility to add a category for each dimension, the story owners are more likely encouraged to fix the category as it would increase the visibility of their story. On the other hand, readers would more likely get the right results. (But they would also miss correct results that aren't filed correctly yet.))
