Nonbinary avatar shape (and just more dynamic base avatar shape settings)

As many of us know there is a huge variety of avatars in Second life. It’s a wonderful part of the platform that just allows unlimited expression. However something very old remains from history, an unspoken unnoted legacy setting. Despite all the advancements over the years, the base/classic avatar shape setting still only allows Two Binary options: Male or Female.

This hasn’t fully limited expression though, many creators have found workarounds over the years. Many workarounds just involve setting the base avatar shape for non-human and gender neutral/fluid avatars to female as it allows more variety in size and structure due to odd bulkiness of the SL male avatar. And while it’s all good and fine they are still just workarounds for the lack of a gender neutral base shape. It also leads to one of the ways scripts can try and guess a users chosen gender (OBJECT_BODY_SHAPE_TYPE) to end up with the wrong result and misgendering users in many cases.

If it was just a hard system limitation that would be extremely hard to fix this would be understandable why it’s left this way. However again looking at (https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/OBJECT_BODY_SHAPE_TYPE) it seems to indicate it’s a RANGE from [0.0, 1.0] which if true means the base avatar system from the beginning has always supported a Gender range from Female to Male and yet the shape editor in the viewer still only allows only two options… Again the question is why?

Thus I propose a third gender neutral option combining mostly based on the dynamic range of size of the female avatar for backwards compatibility with the non overlapping male avatar sliders unlocked. This would solve the issues of a binary choice and allow even more customization of the basic avatar shape.

https://secondlife.canny.io/admin/board/feature-requests/p/nonbinary-avatar-shape-and-just-more-dynamic-base-avatar-shape-settings

Start by reviewing the proposed behavior in the issue, the OBJECT_BODY_SHAPE_TYPE wiki reference, and the linked pull request #1109. Determine whether the requested neutral or range-based avatar shape behavior remains unaddressed; done would require an agreed design and corresponding viewer support without breaking existing shape behavior.