He's written about gender very well before.[1] It is certainly a subject that I don't know very much about, but I appreciate that it can get very complicated very quickly. What are the good reasons for requiring it to be public?
Secondly, do you think that "other" is enough? To what lengths should developers go to handle rare corner cases?
Clearly, gender should be represented as a user-chosen 32-bit value with separate R, G, B, and A channels, and conveniently represented as an 8-digit hexadecimal number.
In this Portable Network Gender (PNG) system, the R channel is degree of traditional female gender; the B is degree of traditional male gender; the G is a catchall for other gender expressions (or perhaps a lookup table rather than a magnitude); the A indicates the overall transparency/importance of the other values.
On the other hand, this only offers around 4 billion unique combinations, which may not be enough to represent the diversity of the planet's 6-billion-plus individuals (not to mention situational identities). Everyone deserves gender-appropriate and gender-precise targeted advertising! So ultimately, a new Gender Protocol offering 128-bits of resolution may prove necessary (GPv6).
Jokes aside, I like to fit people into two numbers between 0 and 1, non-inclusive. The first, number A represents your gender identification, with 0 being ideally female and 1 ideally male (remember the scale is non inclusive of the bounds). The second number B represents the gender identification that you're attracted to.
So, for example:
Hetero male: A=0.8, B=0.2
Gay male: A 0.7 b 0.9, or a 0.8 b 0.7
It's a convenient way to explain gender to nerds, and remember that there are error bars on each number that vary over a lifetime.
Unfortunately, your specification of the "B" category appears to leave no room for a distinction between, say, a guy who likes uber-masculine men and uber-feminine women, versus a guy who likes humans more toward the center of the scale. (I assume the first guy would like 0.1 and 0.9 people, and you'd record it as the average, 0.5; and the second guy would obviously like 0.5's.)
Clearly we would need a graph with a bunch of data points representing the person's attraction to humans everywhere along the gender scale. For example, at a resolution of 0.1:
And while we're at it, why don't we add scales for attractiveness due to body type, perceived youthfulness, hair color, etc. (Let's hope they can be considered independently. Dear god, the complexity if that weren't the case--I suspect it isn't...) Methinks this is a problem that could suck up as much, or as little, effort as you're willing to put into it.
Some people--probably people who spend a lot of time dating, and who are attractive enough to be able to choose for whatever traits they want--would actually find useful the ability to specify things like that. Others might not care, or might not even know what difference most of these traits make to them (I would probably fall into this last category). Mmm, it might be interesting to see what the hardcore daters would discover about their own preferences (and how they might change over the course of dating). Does anyone know of any interesting studies or results in this area?
I don't know how much has your technique been exposed to the scrutiny of gay people, neither I want to be overly critic... But just be aware that many gay men are far from identifying with being "ideally female", and many gay women are far from identifying themselves as "ideally male".
Making gender one-dimensional is of course richer than using a boolean flag, but I think the problem is even more complicated than that.
EDIT: as gjm11 states, I'm wrong and your scale is indeed two dimensional, as in one might feel a (wo)man and be attracted to a (wo)man.
yid's scale doesn't propose conflating homosexuality with gender inversion, and ver[1] examples put the "gay male" at the same place on the gender scale as the "hetero male". That's the whole point of proposing two numbers.
[1] I normally don't use these funny gender-neutral pronouns, but here it seems called for.
You know, I thought that at firs too. I was going to say that it doesn't make sense to say a bisexual has B=0.5 and that we should have B_male and B_female. However, as I tried to think of a situation where you'd want to split that into two dimensions, I couldn't come up with one. As long as we read B as a relative preference it makes sense to say bisexuals have B = 0.5.
While I believe that people get overly sensitive about gender (or any politicall-incorrectness), I also believe that it is in their right to do so, and if Google does fulfil this request then all the better for it.
Aside, though, this post by Randall seems a little overkill at this stage... unless Google has taken an obvious stance on the issue there is no reason to take umbrage.
He's making a point since this is such a frequently overlooked issue. By raising awareness, other companies and startups are less likely to make this mistake.
Which is larger? The number of people who would object to "what is your gender" on weird-ass gender politics grounds, or the number of people who would object to "how do you wish to be identified?" on the grounds that it's ridiculous politically correct pandering to weirdoes? I don't just "wish to be identified" as a man... I am a man, and I have the external sexual organs, facial hair, Adam's apple and XY chromosomes to prove it.
Someone's always gonna complain, no matter what you do.
This fixes the issue of "there's more to gender than male/female/other", but it doesn't fix the issue of "women might not want to get sexualized comments sent to them".
The range of answers you get when you give a free text entry field is wonderful, and proves why this is the best route.
On matters like forced revealing of gender, my gender is rage.
I'm in the process of trying to convince an genderfork academic I'm friends with to actually put a 20 marks question on an exam "what is your gender?".
To be fair, it actually is hard to parse - I'm re-reading it, and trying to work out how to word it better, but the fact that I'm actually using a freeform gender, and the academic term genderfork, makes it hard to see how.
I'll have another stab later if I have time - My gender is currently busy.
It would also be ideal, given the current sexist state of language, to add a combo box to choose if you want to be refered to as "he", "she", or, in what now seems like a distant utopia, gender-neutrally, obviously given each language possibilities. That would be so much a big step into having gender equality on the net that the fact no big social network has done it yet tells us about how misunderstood a problem discrimination and biases towards sex and gender are.
The user specifies what pronouns to use, and perhaps there would be default values (or you could fill them all in by selecting a "traditional" option). I actually really like this idea. Users would be able to hide their gender if they wanted, and if they wanted to use something like "he or she/him or her/his or her" or "ey/ey/eir", they would be able to just fill it in, and the system would use it in its automatically generated notifications and stuff (Alex posted a comment on eir webzone). This would give us an easy way to gain exposure and experience to the various attempts at creating gender-neutral singular third-person pronouns, and maybe figure out which ones are good (or whether it's worth bothering about).
Also, it might allow for funsies like this.
Possessive: His Majesty's
Subjective: His [random from: Awesomeness, Sleepiness, Whimsy]
I pity the people working on localization if you have that system.
Also, some languages, for example Finnish, doesn't have gender-specific 3rd person pronouns, so giving them that option wouldn't make any sense to them.
Male, female, other, and leave blank / prefer not to disclose are all the options I would list. It's important to allow women and men who do not want to disclose their gender that option. It's also important to allow people who would like to list their gender as other to do so. Gender is an extremely tricky issue. Whatever you do, I recommend NOT listing "male to female" or anything of that sort. Transgendered people identify, from my understanding, as their adopted (actual) gender, not the one society would often assume them to have. I hope this helps.
>Secondly, do you think that "other" is enough? To what lengths should developers go to handle rare corner cases?
Other is enough. It covers all the possible alternate cases. If the person really doesn't identify with either gender, they can select it. If they don't want it to be public, it's broad enough that selecting it doesn't reflect anything on the person, especially if they post pictures(like several people in the "other" camp do in the comments have).
Randall even admitted in his blog post that it's simply not worth the effort to cover all the possible cases. The problem with this entire thing is that it's so complicated. The original survey apparently wasn't good enough for a segment of the population, and the question was framed for pure genetics. You're damned if you do and damned if you don't, because you'll get complaints no matter what you do.
Secondly, do you think that "other" is enough? To what lengths should developers go to handle rare corner cases?
[1]: http://blog.xkcd.com/2010/05/06/sex-and-gender/