Thanks for the feedback! When we were setting up the categories, we realized we could basically do it one of two ways: by grouping trans people with their real genders, or by separating out cis and non-cis people. We realized we wanted to do an approach that separated out cis men in particular, because we had theorized that this would be the most privileged group when it came to awards, and we wanted to be clear about that. We also wanted to emphasize how little recognition non-cis authors and protagonists got in a genre that's supposed to celebrate expanding boundaries and explore the widest range of human experience. Given that, though, we didn't want to simply make an "Other" category for the non-cis authors/protagonists, as this would quite literally be othering, so we tried to call the category by exactly what would end up there instead. We feel doing the gender categories the other way has its own downsides, namely downplaying the significance of the two aims we mentioned we were trying to achieve. We realize now that this does play into third-gender narratives for trans people, and for that we apologize.
Re: Problematic framing