Sweet. Like they say in the article, this won't matter for a lot of people, but for those who use it, it matters a great deal.
I have one friend who changed gender and it really opened my eyes to how poorly a societally mandated absolute gender binary serves some people. And the extent to which that gender binary is actively enforced by society. I just never noticed before, because I fit reasonably well into one of the available boxes.
Most people never really notice how much of life in designed for the people in the meaty part of the bell curve unless they are or are close to an outlier. It can range from something like the inability to distinguish certain colors, being exceptionally tall, not having a binary gender identity, or those people who implanted electromagnetic sensors into their body to sense electric fields. But having at least one outlier trait that makes you not normal can give you a new appreciation for all the challenges that people run into on a daily basis for just being a little different. We as developers have an obligation to think about these things. And if the opportunity presents itself to remove one challenge by turning a select input into a text input (or a binary radio button to a select), we have an responsibility to do it.
I never thought I'd be grateful for being a fat, nerdy, awkward kid. It sure sucked a lot of the time then. But now those experiences really help me appreciate why it's important to try to be especially respectful toward people who are different not just in my specific ways, but in their own fashion. They are already getting enough crap.
I am one of those that didn't know there was a difference.
I was hoping you had a short explanation as I am pretty sure searching with some of those keywords will cause an issue at work but if not this will serve as a reminder for me to look it up when I get home.
And for you and other people whose URLs might get audited, here's the content:
What is the difference between sex and gender?
Sex = male and female
Gender = masculine and feminine
So in essence:
Sex refers to biological differences; chromosomes, hormonal profiles, internal and external sex organs.
Gender describes the characteristics that a society or culture delineates as masculine or feminine.
So while your sex as male or female is a biological fact that is the same in any culture, what that sex means in terms of your gender role as a 'man' or a 'woman' in society can be quite different cross culturally. These 'gender roles' have an impact on the health of the individual.
In sociological terms 'gender role' refers to the characteristics and behaviours that different cultures attribute to the sexes. What it means to be a 'real man' in any culture requires male sex plus what our various cultures define as masculine characteristics and behaviours, likewise a 'real woman' needs female sex and feminine characteristics. To summarise:
> "It's impossible to deny the biological reality that humanity is divided into two halves - male and female"
Actually, it's pretty easy. Even on a biological/genetic level, the lines can get rather blurry.
There are people with male genitalia who have two X chromosomes, people with female genitalia who have a Y chromosome, and a bunch of other variations[0][1][2][3].
I have long wanted to see a completely straightforward, all-in-one-place explanation of these topics. It could start with the question: "Aren't we divided into men and women?" Then it would briefly describe the levels on which this duality is thought to occur: genetics, development, anatomy, sexuality, and psychology.
Then it would describe the non-dual aspects of each level (XYY for genetics) and the way in which each level can "mis-match" with the others. On the 'bottom' levels like genetics and anatomy, most people are willing to believe the non-theoretical and purely evidence-based science about 'unusual' arrangements.
Once these things have been established as perfectly understandable, it becomes easier to believe that someone might self-identify as a different gender than their genetics or anatomy indicates. Or that the psychological identities might not be strictly divided into male and female.
Does something like this exist? The "but we're all men and women" argument is so common, and the knowledge about each individual way in which someone can differ from this norm is so scattered, it would be great to have it all in one place.
It's quite accurate as an approximation though, is it not? Genetic abnormalities are just that, abnormalities.
I fully support equality, but... if I said "Humans have five fingers on each hand", would you disagree and declare "clearly humans have no defined number of fingers on each hand, as every now and again a human is born with four or six fingers on a hand"? I don't personally care how many fingers you have, but it seems pretty clear to me that is a biological accident, and does not refute the notion that "Humans have five fingers".
Your notions about what makes for a human is something that lives in your head. Which is fine; the world is a complicated place, and we can't represent it in 3 pounds of meat without simplifying.
But the mistake many people make with gender (and a lot of other things) is to try to reverse the flow, demanding that the world correspond to the mental model.
As a non-gender example, I have friends who are ethnically complicated. Sometimes people will just ask them, "What are you?" Even strangers on the street. By which they mean, "I am uncomfortable because you don't conform to my notions of race. Please put yourself in one of my boxes." Those people always look like assholes.
When I arrived in San Francisco 15 years ago, I used to worry about what gender people were. I was uncomfortable that they didn't fit in the categories I had inherited. Was that person "really" a woman? Eventually I learned that gender was much more complicated than I expected.
But I also learned that other people don't have an obligation to fit neatly into my prejudices. Now my take is practical: unless I'm intending to have sex with somebody, what they have in their pants is none of my business. English, alas, makes ignoring gender entirely impossible. So sometimes I am forced to ask, "Hey, what pronoun would you like me to use for you?"
By which they mean, "I am uncomfortable because you don't conform to my notions of race. Please put yourself in one of my boxes."
You seem to be assuming.
At least when I ask what background someone is, it's usually either:
- bewilderment. I'm mildly interested in the differences in morphology between ethnicity, so I get very curious when someone's ethnicity is completely ambiguous. I also get excited when I can successfully identify the ethnic background of people with a mixed background, which of course requires asking. "Your cheekbones look Native American; your nose & eyes look Swiss...?"
- an attempt to quickly sketch out an early mental model of that person, to understand them better. Does every asian kid have super-strict parents? Of course not! But it is a common theme, so it gets tacked on to the early mental model: "May have had strict parents?".
I'm assuming for a given individual, but I'm confident in the aggregate based on other data.
Yes, some people are legitimately curious about the great tapestry of ethnic diversity. (I'm one of them.) I think there are reasonable, polite ways to handle that. Walking up to strangers and demanding that they say what they "are" is not one of them.
But note that in both of your forks, you're trying to place somebody in a box in your head. In the first, bewilderment, you are uncomfortable because somebody fails to conform to your existing boxes. You may have a much more interesting and nuanced set of boxes than the average person. You may be much more polite than the boneheads I'm describing. You also surely understand that those boxes are a pretty artificial construct, and that it's not the job of people on the street to help you improve your set of boxes. But if you think about what goes on for people for whom none of those is true, I think you'll find it pretty easy to imagine their side of an encounter like this.
Watch out, here comes one of those ever-so-frightening generalizations...
Humans are a learning species. Everything we observe is converted by our brains into data to be filed somewhere, even if it's only temporary storage because we consider it unimportant. This attribute is nearly fundamental to sentience. Let's not get offended when someone wants to learn more about the people around them, and what makes them themselves. This, of course, doesn't justify walking up to someone on the street and invading their personal space and time, but it does mean your vendetta against mental organization and near-automatic pattern matching is misguided.
Quick, tell me about people who can't recall much information at all! No, wait, tell me about people who are vegetative or catatonic and therefore unable to process the events occurring around them and convert them into data! Tell me about people who have a failed mental organizational process! This, naturally, would invalidate all of my claims and finally prove me a bigot.
I am all for learning. But you don't get to decide what other people are going to get offended about.
People in minority groups are understandably sometimes sensitive about people in dominant majorities acting like the minorities are obliged to educate them.
I don't have any particular vendetta against pattern-matching. Being made out of meat, I do it myself. But if it isn't done with respect and politeness, it is at best negligent and at worst arrogant and self-centered. And I definitely have a problem with those behaviors, especially directed at people who already have a hard row to hoe.
The ethnicity is curious, because it seems like in the US there are a few, very distinct boxes, where people seems to be extremely concern to belong (in general, of course). Being "in the middle" seems confusing.
In other parts of the world (I am thinking South America in particular), where you can have similar mix of ethnic background, society seems to care less about "boxes" and the boundaries are way more relaxed. People seems not to be that interested in being classified into a distinct box and care less about it.
> Those petitioning for the change insist that there are an infinite number of genders, but just saying it doesn't make it so.
Funny that HE says that, since disregarding your moral stand point on a non cisgender person, the reality, observational and scientific, is that sex is much more complicated than male and female. What we do with that may be up for discussion, but I find ironic how he's trying to deny this reality, basically, by just saying so.
Yeah. Until it became relevant to people I actually know, I had just taken the male/female binary as a fact. But it's just as constructed as a child/adult binary or South Africa's former white/colored/black trinary. Or the 7 colors of the spectrum I learned as a kid, rather than the continuous span of wavelengths that exist in the real world, filtered through our particular biology and the cultural heritages that shape color perception: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_term
But when I started paying attention and without being too invested in the notions I'd been handed, gender turns out to be more complicated than a boolean. Like you, I think the question is what we then do about it.
Does any of those mutations produce fertile individuals, with both reproductive organs fully functional though? I don't know enough to answer, but I believe that's what the parent is asking.
What I'm saying is, from a biological perspective, isn't sex determined by the gametes (which as far as I known, are two), regardless of vestigial organs, number of chromosomes, etc.? I think that's what caused the confusion on the parent about existing more than one sex (reproductive role); of course, by that measure, infertility is undetermined as it plays no role in reproduction.
Totally agree with you. At least in humans, there are two very clearly defined reproductive roles. Test tubes and surgical procedures can interfere a bit, but you can't be "mostly" a gamete donor or "only somewhat" of a gamete receptor.
Some inter-sexed people are fertile, but I don't think that's relevant to this discussion unless you also declare infertile cis-gendered people to be an invalid gender.
Biological sex is very complex but can appear simple with limited information because (1) many of the features are not superficially evident in gross anatomy, and (2) the majority of the time, most of the features line up in one of two main ways, making it seem like a simple binary thing.
And, in fact, there's research showing connections between transgender identity (where socially constructed gender -- usually based on the more obvious indicia of biological sex -- doesn't line up with gender identity) and instances where the various indicia of biological sex aren't aligned in the usual way. Its not, as I understand, apparently the only factor in transgender identity, but it seems to be a significant correlate.
The idea that gender ought to be simple seems largely supported by the illusion that sex is simple.
There's definitely a whole rabbit hole this way - lot of gender theory and stuff. If you're really curious, check it out, there are some interesting arguments (though few satisfying conclusions).
This change does not affect me, but I don't want to be pressured into referring to a male as female if he really is a male. Part of the transgender agenda is forcing others to accept such "gender identities". I don't want to endorse other people's illusions.
"I don't want to be pressured into referring to a male as female if he really is a male"
Exactly! And that's why changes like this are so important. I, like you, don't want to be pressured into referring to someone by a gender identity which does not match their reality.
So it's ok if we burst your bubble about some of your illusions? E.g., that you understand what you're talking about? Or that you are the one person granted divine right to determine who is "really" a male?
Your personal relationship to gender is very simple. Yay, good for you. But there are people whose relationships are more complex. I promise that they have thought about gender 100x more than you have, and it is you that have the illusions here.
How do I know? Well, I started out with those same illusions and then actually talked to people who changed gender or who just don't fit well in a gender-binary framework. I learned a lot. If you're willing to set aside your arrogance on this, you could do the same.
Except, of course, when he talked about gender identity, the transgender "agenda", how he refers to the gender of other people, and his construction of what somebody "really" is.
Thanks, I'm already familiar. (I'm not clear that you are, though, so unless you start being more explicit about your point, I'm done after this.) When he talks about how he refers to people, then we're already in the land of gender. Biological sex is something he can't directly perceive. He is basically saying that he wants to act as if gender is always exactly equivalent to biological sex. His post is basically arguing for a simplistic and essentialist notion of gender. Thus his opposition to the transgender "agenda".
This user quite clearly refers to people in regards to their sex, rather than their gender. You're making the mistake of assuming that he cares about gender, when sex is what he uses for his classification of male or female.
If he is classifying them as male and female and treating them as such, then both parts involve gender.
The first half involves judging people by appearance; unless he's running DNA tests, ultrasounds, and fondling everybody he meets before he uses a pronoun, then he his judging at least partly by how they present. That's gender.
The latter half, how he treats people based on his gender-presentation-mediated perceptions of sex, is pure gender, because there we're entirely out of the realm of biology and clearly into the social side of gender roles.
I understand why he (and apparently you) would like it to be simpler. It's more convenient for him if everybody goes around hiding the complexity for him so he doesn't have to have a more accurate view of the world. But it's bunk. Pretending that it's "just" sex he's talking about is part of the way he hides, presumably also from himself, that it's bunk.
The reality is that biological sex isn't a simple binary flag, its a complex of different biological and physiological elements that usually align in one of two common configurations, but, nonetheless, there's very large number of individuals where the biological elements associated with sex don't line up in one of those two ways. Surprisingly enough, for a lot of transgender people, they are in the group where the external genitalia doesn't align in the usual way with other biological features the way that is typical of sex.
So, even from the "biology is the only real thing that legitimate justifies gender identity" perspective -- a perspective that I personally find ludicrous but which is nonetheless common among people who whine about a "transgender agenda" and assert that gender identity is somehow invalid when it doesn't line up with biology -- even from that narrow-minded perspective transgender people (or a very significant share of them, at any rate) have a legitimate claim to a distinct gender identity.
The illusions about sex and gender are yours, not theirs.
It may be worth considering how much discomfort you feel when referring to a trans person by the gender identity they prefer, versus the discomfort they feel being referred to by the gender you prefer for them. I can just about guarantee you that the latter trumps the former by a long shot.
That just doesn't make any sense. Their gender identity is theirs to decide, not yours. You don't know what's going on in their mind, and it probably doesn't affect you in the slightest either way, so why not err on the side of tolerance and support?
I think the problem is that your definition of male and female do not match someone else's definitions. The presence of lack of dangly bits has remarkably little to do with what gender someone associates with (not even counting the fact that a person can have both sets of genitalia or neither).
For example, what gender would you assign to someone who was born with both sets of genitalia, and had the choice made by their parents to remove the vagina? She may choose to identify as female because that's how her brain (and possibly breasts) evolved, regardless of the choice her parents made for her as a baby.
I don't think you get to decide what 'other people's illusions' are. If somebody wishes to be called 'her', even if, purely biological, somebody is a 'him', and it makes that someone happy, why would you care?
> I don't want to be pressured into referring to a male as female if he really is a male. Part of the transgender agenda is forcing others to accept such "gender identities". I don't want to endorse other people's illusions.
Sex is biological, gender is a label people choose to identify with. How could it be an illusion? Would you prefer to inspect their genitalia before using pronouns? Men could always label themselves as female if they want anyway, now they simply have more options.
How do you decide 'if he really is a male'? 'Transgender agenda'? 'Other people's illusions'? I suspect you are uninformed on the intricacies of gender, and I recommend educating yourself on the subject.
Unless you intend to go around feeling up people's crotches -- which, even setting aside the absurdity, is an incomplete solution -- it's probably a lot simpler to just call people what they want to be called.
Do you also refuse to use nicknames because they're different from their legal names? What about Internet handles?
So you are the authority on everyone's gender? I don't think that anyone should have to justify their gender. What is the other part of the "transgender agenda"? Take over the world?
The weird thing is that I haven't seen all that many examples of reality-rejecting social activism, despite your claim that there is "much" of it. Are you sure you haven't just failed to understand what the people are actually saying?
It's not sad because "frighteningly representative" is purely subjective. I don't even know where to start disagreeing with you because you've failed to say anything about how.
If you believe in the right of self-determination, what's the fucking difference how someone self-identifies?
Everyone seems proud of themselves for realizing that both sex and gender do not divide into two nice halves. I guess I have just taken it as a given that is how the world is.
Nevertheless, Facebook is still predicated on the the worst false dichotomy of all time: someone is either my friend or they are not my friend.
Do we need an entire generation of friendism movement to raise awareness the world is full of colleagues, acquaintances, etc. I know this doesn't matter for a lot of people, but for those of us with nonconforming relationships, being forced to choose a binary option as friend or not friend is disheartening.
Hmmm... I think trying to link binary friend to binary gender weakens an argument that is perfectly capable of standing on its own. (It's pretty obvious there's a huge range of "friend"ships in the real world.)
As I have a lot of friends in Facebook that I assume do not share the same language preferences than me (they are from around the world), this feature had made think about how hard internationalisation can be... I'm pretty sure than translating all the possible options, plus pronouns, etc, will be an interesting problem ;-)
PD: I've checked and the option is only available so far to users using US English interface, so not a problem currently. I can imagine it will be at some point.
Proper internationalization [1] is really hard. Seems like Facebook has done a great job though. The documentation [2] for this feature points out that if you choose "custom" gender, you need to choose your preference for male, female, or neutral pronouns.
[1]: Heh, I'm so used to typing i18n, that was weird to type out.
But I'd also rather we just do away with the concept of gender. Sex is a thing, and is also non-binary. But "concept of gender" is something strange altogether.
Presumably the only reason for having it at all is that advertisers assume they need that information. In which case, 'Male', 'Female' and 'Other' would suffice. It's a pretty safe bet that if you don't identify as simply male or female, advertisers aren't going to bother caring about how to advertise to you.
I'm sure it serves other purposes too, even if they are as simple as displaying your sibling as "brother" vs. "sister", or your brother's children as "nephew" vs. "niece".
Sincere question: Why would a transgendered person specifically want to identify as a "trans ___" as demonstrated in the screenshot? Wouldn't they simply want to identify as their preferred gender (male, female, neutral, etc.)?
I'd understand the importance of explicitly using trans as a distinction when, for example, speaking to a medical professional or discussing a social issue, but on a public profile?
With respect, I think the disconnect for you is that you're trying to generalize across a rather diverse group. There's nothing inherent to the definition of not-gender-binary that suggests "and prefers not to identify publicly" in principle.
If you imagine that gender's not a binary, then you could imagine how "trans$foo" is itself a gender. From there, some people prefer to keep it a secret. Some people prefer to make it public. A lot of times it's a matter of personal safety or privacy, but some people prefer to make their presence known.
Consider it as the cousin to coming out as gay if you like. If more folks realize that they know LGBTQ folks, eventually it's no big deal. This is well underway for LGB but not TQ.
I can guess at several reasons, but hopefully somebody with more direct knowledge can answer. However, I have definitely talked with people who identify as, e.g., a transman, and you can see people identifying publicly that way:
When I worked at Peopleclick (HR applicant tracking software), we didn't go quite this far, but we had 7 gender options: Male, Female, M-F Trans, F-M Trans, Neuter, Other, and Declined To Identify. Which was pretty progressive for 14+ years ago.
This is what the queer activists I know have been saying in response - that this change was done to improve the product (the information they hold on people), with doing the right thing being a nice added extra....
I wondered this too, but to be honest I imagine it's not a problem. LGBT is a small, fairly tightly defined group (compared to, say, men age 18-25) that skews in known directions (liberal, urban, etc).
Also, this is an area of sexual politics that is generally not well understood by the majority of people — being that the majority are not gay, trans, or otherwise off the traditional dipolar gender and sexual attration axis. I don't know about you, but I prefer not to comment on things I don't understand so as not to put my foot in my mouth or inadvertently cause real offense.
Good to see them do this but I'd have preferred if they'd come up with 3-5 different ways to describe gender that we could use across the web. Have 50 different customisable options is a pain to implement for everyone. Maybe I'm wrong though - can someone with more knowledge on this tell me whether that many options is really necessary?
As a comparison, look at the spectrum of race. How we look at it keeps changing. Could we get by with a binary? Sure, we could have "white" and "non-white". Could we do 3-5? Sure, that's what Brazil's government does. They have white, brown, black, yellow, and indigenous; you can pick one. [1] But people in Brazil don't really like that. It may serve the governmental need to have a simple system. But for the individuals expressing their racial identity, it doesn't really fit their self-perceptions, and they don't like having somebody else's categories imposed upon them.
If you are looking for a simple way to solve this problem, just drop gender from your system. If you really need to use pronouns, just use singular they [2] for everybody.
I think the second-simplest thing would be to not ask about gender, but to ask about what pronoun to use. Facebook's going with he/she/they, which isn't what every activist would want, but it's way better than a simple binary.
If you really need gender, then I'd probably follow the Facebook model; the alternative is to basically repeat Facebook's process of talking to a lot of people and finding some other workable solution.
I wonder if they will expose it on the public graph api?
This will make it really interesting to better infer parts of some peoples personalities with the rest of the data people want to share on facebook, and serving ads to demographics who are going to want to click on your ads because it conforms to their views.
Agender
Androgyne
Androgynous
Bigender
Cis
Cis Female
Cis Male
Cis Man
Cis Woman
Cisgender
Cisgender Female
Cisgender Male
Cisgender Man
Cisgender Woman
Female to Male
FTM
Gender Fluid
Gender Nonconforming
Gender Questioning
Gender Variant
Genderqueer
Intersex
Male to Female
MTF
Neither
Neutrois
Non-binary
Other
Pangender
Trans
Trans Female
Trans Male
Trans Man
Trans Person
Trans*Female
Trans*Male
Trans*Man
Trans*Person
Trans*Woman
Transexual
Transexual Female
Transexual Male
Transexual Man
Transexual Person
Transexual Woman
Transgender Female
Transgender Person
Transmasculine
Two-spirit
This is great, but we can take this a lot further. Submit pull requests to fix gender-binary assumptions in open source software.
If an engineer refuses to accept your PR, they are an insensitive asshole, and deserve the public criticism and dismissal from their job that will inevitably follow.
I have one friend who changed gender and it really opened my eyes to how poorly a societally mandated absolute gender binary serves some people. And the extent to which that gender binary is actively enforced by society. I just never noticed before, because I fit reasonably well into one of the available boxes.