Right. We considered it making an open text field but settled on the decision to make it an accept-list before it rolled out. It probably wouldn't make much of a difference now, but at the time we didn't know how much this place would grow, or how many trolls it would attract. There were quite a few trolls in the early days, and a bunch of tailists who eventually got driven out.

The decision to have people opt out of the feature instead of opt in was made because on many social media sites, if trans people are the only people using tags like this, it makes them much easier to single out and harass. It is like this because that is how the community decided they wanted the site to work. The implementation has some rough edges, but it works.