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Comment by quadrifoliate | Hacker News Reader

> That said, it is incredibly revealing of your personal biases...if you implement gender as a boolean that also determines the user's pronouns.

It is probably revealing of your personal biases that you cannot imagine systems in languages other than English that need to do some of this since multiple parts of the language, including verbs, are necessarily gendered, with a neutral gender usually only reserved for inanimate things. Reference: I happen to speak one such language.

Problems like this are just hard due to generations of built-up cultural context and the associated effects. We can and should do better, but there is no need to get overly enthusiastic about accusing people of biases while we are at it.

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There's a world of difference between "Which of these two options defines your gender identity and sex organs?" and "Which grammatical gender form should we use for words when we talk about you?". The former is a deeply personal question with unclear benefit; the latter is a specific question about how you want the site to do a specific thing it needs to do. (Does it really need to do that? Why exactly are you asking about gender?)

I have an anecdote that I think fits your assumption. It comes from my years in the Danish public sector where some of the systems are many decades old. In Denmark we’re all issued a social security number that is designed in such a way that the last number of it, is odd for males and even for females.

To make things short and somewhat anonymous, we had several systems that couldn’t handle people changing the “gender” of their social security number. They could handle you getting a new social security number, but it had to be of the same “gender” as your previous.

This makes no real sense, as it’s just a number and all these systems handle both types of numbers. But there we were, and it took us several years to get to a point where we could accommodate an employee changing the “gender” of their social security number.

So sometimes, developers do weird things because of their assumptions.

Ps. I’ve put “gender” in “”s because I’m unsure what the right word is in English.

It could help an e-commerce site predict what kind of clothes to recommend, or otherwise segment you for marketing

Everyone has biases, that's just a fact. Something can only be unbiased in comparison to something else that has the same biases. Having biases doesn't make you evil.

Yeah, I only considered English language sites, not other languages that don't support gender-neutrality as easily. I think I should add something about them, though. I don't see how any language could possibly require gender to be implemented as a boolean. If you've got an English-language site you're translating to another language, and you've implemented a selector for "he", "she", and "they" pronouns without direct reference to gender in the English version, you could just re-use the same implementation in your language with different options.

(Also, I can guarantee that there's someone who speaks your language that prefers to be referred to in the neutral/inanimate form. Doesn't matter which language. It's fine not to support that on the site, just wanted to point it out.)

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