To start with: THIS IS NOT A DEBATE ABOUT TWYS. I want to know site policy, I am not interested in debating what the policy should or shouldn't be. I ONLY want to know what the policy is in the below situation.

My question is, if genitalia and body types are censored so that genitalia are not visually represented in a picture (even if that information is obviously derivable from the picture) how is TWYS impacted for gender?

I've added two specific examples of what I'm asking about with a transgender character below. Max the Eevee is a transmasc eevee I draw without body modifications, meaning that he has a vagina and breasts. If Max was uploaded unaltered, he would be tagged as "female" and "male (lore)". Because of that, I have a policy that my transgender characters should not be uploaded to the site.

But here, I've altered sections of a comic featuring Max:

(cw human/pokemon relationship, censored animal genitalia)
★ https://courageous-cactus-837fe3.netlify.app/links/max-censor-1.png: : in this picture, Max has had genitals and breasts obscured with censors and has been given an (obviously fake) mustache. My rough reading of https://e621.net/wiki_pages/3294 is that this would either fall under 4.A.iv (male) or 4.C.iv (ambiguous) based on current gender tagging rules, depending on whether an obviously fake mustache is enough to put a character into the male body category. But I don't know for certain if censors are actually interpreted this way.

(cw human/pokemon relationship, hyper penis)
★ https://courageous-cactus-837fe3.netlify.app/links/max-censor-2.png: in the second picture, I've gone a step further and given Max an "obviously" non-canonical giant prosthetic penis. This one seems a lot simpler? My guess is that it would fall under 3.B.i (male) - BUT I still have a question of whether censored breasts would lead to a label of gynomorph.

Text and dialog and actions in the comics are unchanged - so Max is canonical transgender and the comics will occasionally point that out in text. Max might be in a situation where he's explicitly (pun always intended :3) talking about being fucked in his pussy, but visually would be shown with a cock and the penetration censored enough that it could be interpreted as anal. But my understanding is that text is not used as an indicator for visual tagging of gender (correct me if I'm wrong), so that shouldn't change anything about how the piece is tagged.

Again, I'm not interested in debating what the policy should or shouldn't be, I want to know what the policy is. if I upload artwork edited in either of these ways, what would it be tagged as? Do censors still count as ambiguous genitalia if the description is still making it obvious that the character is transgender?

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I've done page edits for pieces in the past to help with content warnings in comics where I wouldn't otherwise be able to tag them with upcoming info that I think that users might really want to know about:

(cw rape, fatal vore, disposal/scat)
★ https://e621.net/posts/5215836: in this picture normally there would be no way to signal that the comic was about to veer into extremely cruel vore and outright scat, so adding a visual content warning allows for those tags to be used without falling afoul of site policy.

And that's worked pretty well on the few occasions that I've done it - users who have that stuff blacklisted and want to avoid it don't get the comic shoved in their face <3

So if there's a way for me to do edits to certain comics so I can get them up on e621 without violating tagging policies or (to me) misgendering the characters, I'm happy to try and make some of those edits to make that work. But I want to try and confirm ahead of time whether it would work, or whether I'm barking up the wrong tree X3

Thanks! <3

For a character with breasts and a vulva that IDs as male, you tag it female and male_(lore), not the other way around.
For a feral character with nipples but no teats [as your eevee appears to be] the nipples do not influence gender. With the genitalia completely obscured as it is in that first image I would tag him as ambiguous_gender because he doesn't actually seem to have breasts or teats, let alone any visible genitalia at all. In the second he would be tagged as male.
Ferals in general have different gender tagging standards because they're much more ambiguous than a human is on average. Most ferals won't have breasts outside of pregnancy and nursing, so we generally have to stick to genitals only instead of animal secondary sex characteristics, unless depicted otherwise.

you tag it female and male_(lore), not the other way around.

Good catch, fixed. Sorry, brain derp moment.

It sounds like the second censor version would work for my purposes then. Just to confirm, this would be the case even if text in the image was referring to Max as having a vagina, since gender TWYS is based only on the visual elements?

foxyoreos said:
Good catch, fixed. Sorry, brain derp moment.

It sounds like the second censor version would work for my purposes then. Just to confirm, this would be the case even if text in the image was referring to Max as having a vagina, since gender TWYS is based only on the visual elements?

Yeah, TWYS doesn't use text except in very specific scenarios - for gender, it is irrelevant. Things like "fuck my boy pussy" or gender-based dirty talk [good girl, etc] are pretty common in roleplay-like scenarios so they wouldn't really influence depicted gender. Solely what the character looks like.

You would actually use trans_man_(lore) instead of male_(lore)

foxyoreos said:
It sounds like the second censor version would work for my purposes then. Just to confirm, this would be the case even if text in the image was referring to Max as having a vagina, since gender TWYS is based only on the visual elements?

Correct, the second edit would be tagged as male. With those little labels you put on, it would be tagged as a prosthetic_penis which I only just now found to be an existing tag.

And also what Moonlit said about feral nipples. Those have no influence by themselves

Thanks so much, I appreciate the info <3

there are instances where parts of a feral character's other than genitals come into play when tagging gender, but usually it's where the character has facial features that are very distinctly, uhh, "gender-y", so it dosn't really come into play here. and there's a few other things, but it can get pretty hard to describe individual qualities beyond that.

if a character presents mostly or totally androgynous, the gender tagging is going to hinge entirely on their genitals.

foxyoreos said:
Thanks so much, I appreciate the info <3

You're very welcome ^^