Genders.wtf
genders.wtf
genders.wtf
I suspect it's very rarely actually important, it's just on the list of things they always have asked for and always will.
And some positions are only offered to diverse candidates or candidates from a particular subgroup, like LGBT etc. Last year, one of the roles I had to fill was diverse-only. Only applicants of color were allowed to apply for the role.
Technically-legal-but-still-violating-the-spirit happens if the people involved bother asking legal about it.
2. I can at least point to plenty of evidence that this happens. Take this 2021 UC Berkeley Study [1] showing that job applicants with black-sounding names were significantly less likely to get called back than applicants with white-sounding names. What's the motivation there? Good ol' fashioned racism. Y'know, the exact motivation that prompted the laws in question to be written.
It’s not my job to argue with HR about what constitutes legal hiring practices.
This is as close to a neutral and objective description of ESG as could be written in English! That is not grievance, and it should not be downvoted as such.
I feel the same way and have never been able to get a good answer for this one. "Statistics and hiring" is a very lame-duck answer. How does it help our product knowing that we have +1 more homonormative person?
If you have zero, and you're big enough to be collecting data, there's a good chance that something is wrong.
Apparently it helped Subaru a lot. [1]
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/06/how-sub...
Now sexual orientation, that's a head scratcher.
However, in most applications and services, this is not used like that. The gender mapping seems to be used exclusively to determine whether the marketing emails should start with "mr." or "mrs.".
Anything vaguely social is going to have instances where you want to refer to a user in the third person.
Of course, an easy solution to this is not to ask for gender per se, but for what pronouns to use. Even a dropdown with "he/she/they" options is going to cover basically everyone. If you need something more complicated than that, so be it, but probably YAGNI.
Die deutsche Sprache hat Geschlechter, welches Geschlecht passt am besten zu dir? Maskulin, Feminin, Neutrum oder zurück zum Englischen wechseln?I want to think we've grown out of the early design era of launching an image editor and getting asked on first run what format I want to use for exporting images. Ask me that question when I hit the export button. Similarly, ask me questions about grammar when it's relevant to the software, don't ask me questions up front that might never be relevant to my use of the software.
As an analogy, imagine if you started using Bandcamp and it asked you up-front for tax information just in case you ever decided to publish an album in the future. If the user hasn't ever switched to a language that requires knowing what gender variants they use, then that question is just one additional tiny piece of signup friction sitting in front of your service that you could get rid of for the majority of your users.
https://www.sos.ca.gov/business-programs/diversity-boards
The simplest way to game this is to claim to be a bisexual. This is even easier if you’re already married, since no one will expect you to prove it.
The ranking is referred to as the "progressive stack". Arguing over which groups go where is called the "oppression olympics".
This whole agenda towards absolute equality in all aspects of life is ridiculous. Why settle for race and gender? Let's make sure we have equal amounts of people by eye and hair color, height, weight, or any other criteria. Doing anything less is surely discriminatory.
[1] as defined by the prevailing political zeitgeist
So rest assured, companies won't treat chin diameter the same way they treat race and gender in an imagined "agenda towards absolute equality in all aspects of life".
Even still, if you must record the relevant salutations, you can ask for the salutation to use rather than the gender or sex.
Once you internationalize you will need this because in German it's an absolute no go to address a stranger by their first name (at least for B2B services).
And internationalization is on the road map for a lot of companies.
I was working for a UK steel supplier and they would address all their email recipients with their first name. We had to change this when internationalizing into German. If you want to sell to Germans you are much safer to use a more formal tone.
Slightly related to that is the formal and informal you that exists in a lot of languages.
I was also working for a German fashion startup mostly targeted at young women. In German it was fine to address everyone by first name and the informal you, but when translated the page to French, we could keep the first name but had to change the informal you to the formal one.
And I consider almost all "anti-rqcism" to just be racism but against groups it's permitted to.
For example, asians and higher ed.
Org A) 10% of applicants are brown, 9% of hires are brown
Org B) 10% of applicants are brown, 0% of hires are brown
Org A might be close enough to a rounding error you can call it good. Org B likely has some issues.
Hard to fix what you don't measure.
"So which report makes an organization less racist"
So that implies that org B is more racist(because it hired zero brown people) - is that not the conclusion the author of the comment wants us to reach?
Forrest Gump is smarter than a rock, but he is not smart.
Do you or do you not think it is incredibly likely this is an unfair die.
That's Company B.
But hiring isn't random. Maybe all the "brown" candidates lacked necessary qualifications. Or needed visas which they couldn't get. Or a million other reasons other than "org B is racist".
My point is: you need further context. To look at that one stat as given above and conclude org B is racist is....unwise.
I am not sure I have ever been on a team without some kind of like-me bias. It's real hard.
Or in the exact time slice you got the data there weren't any brown applicants.
> Org A) 10% of applicants are brown, 9% of hires are brown
That means nearly all brown applicants for got hired. You're probably thinking this is a "good stat" and therefore a "good employer". But what if the rest of that company's stats were "90% of applicants are white, 80% of hires are white." Is that still a "good stat/good company"? According to you, it should be (and I would tend to agree.) In both cases, we're pretty much showing "If you apply for a job here, you have a ~90% chance of getting in, regardless of skin color." Not bad!!
But wait. What if the demographic of applicants is more like 50% white and 50% brown. (Assume a non-remote workplace). Now, one has to wonder why, in a demographic where half the population is brown, why only 10% are applying to this organization? Could be many reasons. Culturally, maybe the brown folds simply choose not to apply here. Or maybe the organization has a history of mistreating brown folks, abusing them, paying them less, etc. That could explain the low rate of applicants here. Your good example of a "less racist" org doesn't look so good anymore. Many factors could be a play; some less intentionally-evil than others. Hard to draw conclusions simply by reporting on one stat in isolation.
> Hard to fix what you don't measure.
Yes, but harder to think critically about the data you do gather.
Nope, the denominator is different. If you select the same percentage from each category the proportions stay the same.
If there are 100 fruits where 10 are apples and 90 are pears and each fruit has 10% chance to be selected then you get on average 1 apple and 9 pears => 10% of the selected fruits are apples.
Not measuring something doesn't make it go away.
To answer your question - if there is such a complaint made, I'd appoint another qualified hiring manager(or HR person) to sit in on any future interviews with this person and give me their report on the situation.
Some people think that affirmative action isn't racist.
But tell me what it is when you think like: "hey we have enough asians, exclude that person, let's find a black to get our quota"
Some people will defend it like a user said below:
"By engaging in deliberate anti-racism efforts to counteract subconscious racism."
But what is "anti-racism"? It's being racist in the opposite direction. You think Y group is being oppressed "subconciously" so you oppress X group as much as you think you need to, to "even" it out.
We should strive for equal opportunities, not equal outcomes.
Tl;dr: it is less about the company being less racist on their own by knowing the race, it is more about the company having to report those numbers so that others could hold them accountable (in case there are any arising concerns about racism).
For instance, if you see that applicants that are otherwise equally qualified are getting rejected on recruiter screen disproportionally by race, you may have an issue with how your screening is done. And yes, this happens: https://eml.berkeley.edu//~crwalters/papers/randres.pdf
A reasonable goal is that race, gender, and sexual orientation should have no bearing at all on how likely it is that you get hired, promoted, or fired. So these inputs are typically blinded to hiring managers but available to HR in aggregate to let them perform these kinds of analyses.
I'll acknowledge this approach leads to some very odd interactions, like my school district asking what the sexual orientation of my five year old is. But it's not clear how else one can build a credible gauge for measuring and eliminating *isms from a system. (Open to hearing ideas!)
There being more male construction workers doesn't make it a sexist system.
There being more female teachers doesn't make it a sexist system.
There being more asian doctors doesn't make it a racist system.
Let people do what they want to do, you can look at demographics but stop trying to read racist tea leaves with it.
If it doesn't, you have an issue. The only way to know for sure is to measure.
E: To be clear, assuming equally qualified candidates, you would want expect hiring proportions to match the same A:B ratio as you get from applications.
No, I wouldn't expect this at all as I do not expect the height distribution of basketball player to reflect the height distribution of the general population. As I do not expect the personality trait distribution of pop stars to be the same of programmers, and again I do not expect the latter to be similar to the general population. Personal inclination, innate intelligence, talent, conscientiousness, and of course demographics, parenting, generational wealth all play a role.
Skin color is not an advantage when programming. It is also a characteristic by which it is illegal to hire a programmer.
That can be measured (imperfectly, but well enough), by filtering only for qualified candidates and then comparing the rate at which both A and B are hired and the rate at which they appear in the filtered list. E: This of course requires the filtering to be done _only_ with knowledge of a candidates skills/accomplishments, and association with demographics (including name, location, etc.) to be done only after the sorting.
If you also collect demographics of applicants, it may tell a different story.
If your employee demographics look skewed, but they're consistent with applicant demographics, you have an easy out when accused of ism.
Of course, if you collect the information, you might also use it for ism purposes. Or you might just lose or discourage applications from non-favored people. It's hard to show.
(It also doesn't help that the federal categories feel poorly chosen and ill-defined)
Are you sure? There being more male programmers is widely used as evidence that it's a sexist system.
If females don't want to go into programming then don't make them.
There are really good female programmers, but males tend to be more frequent.
We all have different traits that make us good at different things, that's the beautiful thing about humans.
But if there is something to address, address the pain points specifically and directly.
Don't try to guess a "correct" ratio and work backwards with affirmative action (denying one race to boost up another).
For all you know the current ratio is the realistic ratio and where we should be.
In reality, the proportion of women in STEM directly matches the proportion of women in STEM majors, which directly matches proportion of women who say they're interested in STEM.
Maybe institutions can afford to leave sexual orientation out of it until you’re talking about a body of people that is firmly within the age of consent threshold or has at least hit puberty. A lawyer might disagree but for him the remedy is to bend him over and remove the stick from his ass.
Ideally the race information you input would only be given to HR and not shown to anyone involved in the hiring process. It would then be used to identify anomalies indicative of bias occurring.
[1] https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2021/08/18/name-discriminati...
I'm just suggesting we let this same process unfold naturally. And that affirmative action, by placing emphasis on superficial differences between people, takes us in the wrong direction.
I don't doubt that some companies use this data to drive quotas but that isn't something inherent to collecting and analyzing race/gender info in hiring.
On top of that, something being impolite to mention doesn't mean it's not driving discrimination.
You seem to be avoiding the question. This process clearly works, and doesn't require any metrics collection or monitoring. Furthermore, DEI initiatives are clearly harmful to organizational goals[1] and clearly disenfranchise people who are just interested in colour-blindly carrying on with their work. Why do we need them?
PS. I'm hoping to preempt a no true Scotsman style reply about DEI. The example below was undertaken at a major corporation with the world-class consultants.
1. https://www.cspicenter.com/p/what-diversity-and-inclusion-me...
Across what time scale? Exactly how long is acceptable to you to wait as things work themselves out? Surely 400 years would have been enough time for this to really kick in.
> PS. I'm hoping to preempt a no true Scotsman style reply about DEI
I'm not defending DEI as practiced, I'm merely defending the idea that 1) racial discrimination in hiring happens, and 2) it's possible to do stuff about it faster than letting this work out "naturally".
I'd say ~80 years is about an appropriate amount of time. It's about how long it took antisemitism, anti-Irish and anti-Italian sentiment to die out. No amount of metrics will change the minds of adults who grew up in "a different time". Your only option is to wait for them to die.
> it's possible to do stuff about it faster
My point is that by attempting to address the concern faster than "naturally" you are almost certainly prolonging the "natural" time actual integration takes.
I'd prefer to be called German Irish (or some other identifiable family history origin) or American. White or Caucasian isn't a nationality or race.
If your father is from Ireland, but you are dark skinned then you will suffer the same prejudices and abuses as anyone or your skin color. If your father is Kenyan and you are light skinned, you will smoothly fit in with the “white majority” without anyone digging into your history.
The context of US race questions is to counter US racism. Logical etymology doesn’t really apply.
If your ancestors came to America and were Irish, they faced discrimination just as much as other groups, if not more than most, even if they had a similar color tone as other Europeans.
What possible genetic diversity can be had from just 3 families [0]... (Shem, Ham, Japheth)
I identify most with Inyalowda [1], haha.
Several South American countries have more European ancestry than does the US.
Hispanic/Latino (and not-Hispanic/Latino) are the only ethnicities in that context, and it exists specifically to enable categorization that reflects the social construction of Whiteness at the time it was created while not obviously breaking the (bogus, in any case) biological rationale for the construction of “racial” categories, which is why most categorizations of data using that ethnicity treat Hispanic/Latino as another bucket alongside the racial buckets, from which everything of either White or every race (usage differs) is transferred if Hispanic/Latino ethnicity is also indicated, leaving the effected race buckets with only the non-Hispanic/Latino elements.
> Don't they call you "white hispanic"?
Usually they ask me to check a box, and as a Brazilian I don't ever really check "hispanic" as I don't feel that is a term that applies to me.
I’m committed to anti racism but the US approach is charlatanism all the way down. The esteemed Dr King and Mr X would be rolling in their graves.
No, it doesn’t. In fact, most of the time in the US, “skin color” is code for race/ethnicity. Light-skinned Black people, White non-Hispanics, mostly-White Hispanics, Native Americans, and Asians can have very similar or even identical literal skin colors; but the Black person is still Black, the Whites are still White (except maybe the Hispanic ones), and the rest are neither White nor Black.
Some federal contracting also places requirements on a company's demographics.
You are correct that the government has started asking contractors and large employers for some of this data. But it is only a requirement for the business itself, not for their customers.
"Your honor, my client was paid less than half what her male peers were paid."
"Does the defense have a counter-argument?"
"Well, uh, your honor, we, uh, don't actually know the gender of our employees, so we don't, uh, have that data at our fingertips. We probably don't, we think, but we don't have the numbers to know one way or the other, and..."
ETA: More importantly, I had forgotten about the EEO-1 report. Any company with over 100 employees is required to track and report this demographic data. https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/tools-and-samples/hr-...
A really good defense would be to build a totally race and gender anonymized system of hiring. How could we have discriminated against your race and gender when your name was obfuscated, your voice was modulated, and we took very strict precautions to ensure nobody involved in interviewing or setting compensation even knew your gender? This was not feasible before remote interviewing became normalized during COVID, but I'm interested in seeing if it gains traction.
The evidence the plaintiff brings can be as simple as "I polled ten people with my job title in the company." If the company hasn't tracked this data at all and can't produce it in its defense, then in a civil case the plaintiff would have the preponderance of evidence on their side and the resulting resolution to make them whole could be all the back-pay they are owed between what they made and what their peers made.
So even outside of the need to file EEOC-1, companies are heavily incentivized to track this data (as any competent employment lawyer would indicate); you don't want to be scrambling to satisfy evidentiary burden in a lawsuit.
If someone complains about an orchestra that doesn't have the racial or gender makeup they want, but the orchestra points out they have blind auditions and robust systems to ensure that the identities of musicians aren't leaked to evaluators then it's tough to provide a preponderance of evidence of discrimination.
We'd have to wait to see what happens if someone tries it. Point is: in the average case, it's setting oneself up to spend time in court, and most companies optimize for staying out of court, not becoming a test subject on the path-dependency of novel caselaw.
The requirements to prove a discrimination suit are far more direct: you need to prove that the company directly used protected class to make hiring or compensation decisions. And if the people making these decisions were never even informed of the candidate's protected class status it's exceptionally difficult to make the case that this was affecting this decision making.
> for example, basing a candidate's pay on 110% of their pay at their previous employer can result in implicit wage discrimination because men tend to enter the workforce at a higher pay and catch higher pay bumps in promotions
Actually, this is a perfect example of something that isn't going to get the company into legal trouble. They didn't make this decision on the basis of race, gender or another protected class. They made this decision based on something entirely objective: the candidate's previous pay. If that employee's previous employer was engaging in racial discrimination, then that's the company that vulnerable to a lawsuit.
I'm interested in this notion that you can sue your current employer, because a co-worker's past employer potentially engaged in gender discrimination that bumped their salary, which in turn was used in negotiations with the current employer. Do you have an example of any such lawsuit succeeding?
Rizzo v. Yovino, 9th Circuit ruling, indicates that basing present pay on past pay may violate the Equal Pay Act of 1963 (https://www.forbes.com/sites/ericbachman/2020/03/13/past-sal...).
... but more importantly, this case has entangled the Fresno County public school system for over a decade. That's expensive relative to the alternative of... Not doing that.
> "Your honor, my client was paid less than half what her male peers were paid."
> "Does the defense have a counter-argument?"
No. It should be more along the lines of "Prove it". To come forth with such a claim carries with it the implication that one actually has /evidence/ for it, however (in)substantial. The response is NOT to automatically deflect to the defense in order to prove innocence.
> "Well, uh, your honor, we, uh, don't actually know the gender of our employees, so we don't, uh, have that data at our fingertips. We probably don't, we think, but we don't have the numbers to know one way or the other, and..."
Nothing wrong with that. Evidence can be procured on demand by court order. And even if it were discovered that this one individual female client were paid less than her male counterparts, you'd have to prove that it was because she was female. That means gathering evidence on what her female peers were paid, as well. This particular client could have been an anomaly (e.g. less hours worked, less responsibility, not exactly a peer to her counterparts, the lower pay was only temporary and/or due to some previous agreement, etc.) leading the courts to find nothing systemically wrong with this employer. Don't be so quick to judge, without evidence or context.
And the burden of proof is on the accuser. The court doesn't just say "we don't have the data, so we must assume it's what the accuser says".
> If you insist that the complainant is the one who has to investigate the salaries and work performance of all her coworkers, you’re immediately setting her up for failure.
Yes! And that's exactly how the court works: the burden of proof is on the accuser.
> Requiring the company itself to record this information can provide evidence that they’re abusing employees
And why on earth would the company want to do this, when it could potentially harm them?
It is so ridiculous that it gives the information to allow the company, manager, HR to discriminate (even unconsciously), exactly the opposite of what the legislation is trying to achieve.
What is worse from a cyber security perspective is that this information is now proliferated increasing the chances that it will be breached.
Golf clap US government...
For all the talk about it in this thread, we aren't moving to some kind of double-blind anonymous voice muffled 60 Minutes interview screening processes anytime soon. It's a goofy idea because once you hire somebody, people are going to work face-to-face with them anyway.
Note that the tracking is desired because a seemingly neutral policy can still be illegal; the EEOC gives the following example:
> An employer has a "no-beard" rule, which disproportionately excludes African American men because they have a higher incidence of pseudofolliculitis barbae, an inflammatory skin condition caused by shaving. The employer must be able to demonstrate that beards affect job performance or safety. Also, there must be no alternatives to a strict "no-beard" rule that would meet the employer's business or safety needs.
Those forms (nearly?) always include a "prefer not to say" option.
This preoccupation with race as a demographic discriminant is pretty uncommon in Europe.
Perhaps Europe would benefit from more data in this regard?
If we could guarantee that another genocidal dictator won't come to power then I might be OK with it. Couple that tracking with the surveillance and one might be able to ensure few slip through the cracks.
But is the race of someone voting really useful, or is it just a fairly good proxy for other demographics. And at what point does this use of race as a demographic in itself become a societal pressure for blacks, latinos, asians etc to fit into certain stereotypes?
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/09/us/politics/joe-biden-poo...
But of course, some people are so coddled by modernity and their social media bubbles that they implicitly think racism is all about choice of vocabulary or other completely superficial things.
As people have mentioned, this applies to hiring -- but at the top of the funnel in who your posts are reaching/motivating, not just at the end for diversity stats.
Unfortunately, I think that's another reason we need to collect those statistics. Because if we can't measure the problem, we'll have a very hard time fixing it.
They found that patients were more likely to follow the doctor's instructions after they left the clinic if the doctor was the same race as the patient.
I mean, I guess both, but it's primarily sexes, isn't it?
Like, why should they know?
I'm happy for them to have anonymized stats for decision making, but they shouldn't have it attached to a record with my name.
Insurance.
A very similar thing is asking for your feedback on every second page of the website, and then forwarding it straight into /dev/null. It's because once you shared it via their website, you will be less inclined to go post a (possibly damaging) opinion elsewhere. Your instinct to be heard has been satisfied, and the chance of a negative review visible to others has decreased by N%, which is still good enough for "economies of scale".
Similarly, HRs have somehow collectively figured out that if you nudge people to self-express by stuffing their gender issues into the peers' faces, they will be less likely to self-express by demanding better salary, scheduling, working conditions, etc. It organically grew from the "employee of the month" bullshit and other "trinkets in lieu of a raise" programs, and is now reaching completely ridiculous levels. Hopefully, the rising inflation will give people a more tangible problem to solve, and we will see more focus on things like quality of life, affording kids, retirement perspectives, and so on.
Gathering this by companies is so they can better profile you and serve you tailored content (as defined by them.) E.g. If you respond "Man", they might want to send you fewer ads for tampons and more ads for razors or whatever. Note, I'm not saying this is a good thing, but it's the reasoning.
1. HR gets asked by their employees for statistics on how many non-binary/PoC/women/<insert your label here> people in the organization are represented in management/executive/engineering/<insert your probably under-represented role here>.
2. The org at first responds "We don't know because we don't collect this data".
3. The question-askers respond "How convenient, that's because you know they're under-represented".
4. Company responds with typical "meritocracy" answer, then eventually launches long, drawn-out process because hey, "we're a data driven organization!"
5. Years later, after the original question-asker is long gone they share the data, ideally after a few cycles that show <current under-represented individuals> have grown from small percentage of total to slightly larger small percentage. Company loudly boasts on all social media platforms about wokeness and snowflake status.
6. Times change and society moves on, leading to questions of "why does the company care if I'm <whatever, it's now a non-event, progress!>"
7. Employees respond with lack of giving a sh!t or manufacture false outrage at the violation of their personal privacy.
8. the cycle continues, while data deteriorates, leading to some pretty hilarious options in drop-downs.
We hate it, but we're required to.
Quite often, it seems, they ask to build your profile to sell to advertisers. As much as it would be great for everyone to be treated equally, our genders do affect the crap that we buy and advertisers often care about it.
But more broadly, finding trends/patterns really does come down to being able to sort people into different buckets. Especially now, with the push towards ML, you never know which feature will turn out to be significant, so the strategy ends up being to collect as much data as possible and let computers churn through it looking for patterns.
It would be tempting to ascribe a gender-specific motive to the collection of gender data just based on the significance that we feel towards gender. But I'm not sure those collecting it have those motivations. They're just sucking in everything that they can get away with in the hopes that some of it will prove valuable.
I immediately dropped the applications. Perhaps screening out people like me was the real goal to begin with, and maybe it's a win-win after all.
And in some cases it could even be considered as sexual harassment.
Example: "I am lesbian" in other words means I'm sexually attracted and may or may not have sexual intercourse with another woman.
Now try to think of questions you would have to ask to receive the above as the answer.
Maybe it's just me, but unless asked, it feels very inappropriate to just tell people with whom you have sex or wish to have sex with. Especially when the topic of conversation was about something completely different and in no way related.
Turns out that my employer deliberately doesn’t send gender to the insurance company. This means it defaults to male. A urologist appointment for kidney stones was then rejected by the insurer when it didn’t match the provider.
If this was an Ob/Gyn appointment that makes a little more sense, but kidney stones and urology in general are non-gendered. This was not the first claim either. Plenty of others were fine with other providers.
I can see gender being used sort of generically for fraud prevention in some cases. But, it’s a stretch to say it’s broadly useful.
In general now I lie on forms about as much as I can. At Panera Bread I was asked if I’m the CEO when my account came up first name Panera, last name Bread. There’s no reason for any personal data, so I don’t give it.
That's ridiculous. You're making things a thousand times more complicated for no good reason besides ideological performance. It reminds me of how, in ancient China, once a new emperor was crowed, everyone was supposed to stop using the characters in his name in written documents (i.e. re-spelled a bunch of stuff).
Classical gender is actually a pretty good solution to a lot of practical problems.
Cool, I had no idea you were able to peer inside my brain and tease out my inner thought process. Thank you for explaining to me that I didn't actually think the idea through and am just operating on what you classify as "ideology".
It's strange because I thought I just wanted to be able to find what I want. Like, if I want a blouse, I want to filter for blouses. If I want a t-shirt, I want to filter for that.
I thought that I thought that searching by sex is just a proxy for what I'm actually trying to find and that providing more granular filter options, and more accurate descriptive data about garments that could be used for searching and so forth, that a shopping service would be more useful, not less.
But, hey, you obviously know me better than I do, so my bad.
> Cool, I had no idea you were able to peer inside my brain and tease out my inner thought process. Thank you for explaining to me that I didn't actually think the idea through and am just operating on what you classify as "ideology".
I don't need to peer inside your brain to understand your proposal makes things far more complicated for me, and there's no reason to drop classical gender as a classification except for ideological reasons.
> It's strange because I thought I just wanted to be able to find what I want. Like, if I want a blouse, I want to filter for blouses. If I want a t-shirt, I want to filter for that.
And if you pair this with dropping gender as a classification (the context of this thread), now you're expecting people to be very familiar with a lot of clothing jargon, so they can use that jargon as a proxy for gender. An even then, it breaks down. For instance: men's and women's t-shirts are typically not interchangeable.
It's also an idea that is over-optimized for a particular kind of online search, and breaks down for physical retail (in more than one way).
There's nothing wrong with adding the criteria you propose to a classification system that includes classical gender, and it would be a great improvement, but it's not a substitute for gender.
Good thing I never suggested that.
Go back and look.
I never once suggested those things should be exclusive of one another.
> And if you pair this with dropping gender as a classification (the context of this thread)
Again: I never said that. In fact, no one in the thread I was responding to suggested that.
Go read from the beginning as it seems you've let your own ideology get in the way of your reading comprehension.
It all started with AnEro objecting to being asked about their gender.
Counttheforks agreed with them, saying it would be more inclusive to not ask users for that kind of sensitive personal information.
deelowe then asked "What should the option be when I'm searching for clothes and I want to filter out dresses and blouses?".
Counttheforks provided an excellent suggestion that involves classifying the type of clothing rather than asking for personal information about the user and then inferring what they're trying to do.
I suggested another alternative involving filtering by garment type/style. Those suggestions are certainly complementary and in fact countthefork's suggestion specifically mentions gendered styles as one way to classify garments.
All of this would improve the shopping experience while simultaneously making that experience more inclusive and not violating individual privacy.
Look, I understand, you apparently see culture wars everywhere. But if you wanna have that fight, you can do it with someone else.
Sorry, that's not really true. Upthread, there's this:
>> What would an acceptable inclusion measure be?
> Not asking.
Followed by a whole lot of discussion about finding clothes by using classifications other than gender.
>>> What would an acceptable inclusion measure be?
>> Not asking.
Yeah.
Not asking about the user's gender, not the gendered style of the products they're searching for.
Do you really not see the distinction?
Here, let me clarify: If I was a trans man, this is the difference between telling the website I'm a trans man, versus searching the website for clothing styled for men.
The objection was about the former, not the latter.
Want proof? Here's AnEro's actual comment, which it appears you didn't actually read:
> What features are you bringing me that are improved cause you know my sex? What features are you bringing me that are improved cause you know I'm trans?
(emphasis mine)
> Followed by a whole lot of discussion about finding clothes by using classifications other than gender.
Yeah, because that's the question that was asked.
AnEro asked "What features are you bringing me that are improved cause you know I'm trans".
In response, deelowe asked "What should the option be when I'm searching for clothes and I want to filter out dresses and blouses?".
We answered that specific question with some alternatives ways to achieve that same endgoal that doesn't require the website to ask for the user's gender.
Did you just expect people to change the subject?
I think (and kind of hope) that we might be slowly progressing towards an era where we stop discretizing gender into specific labels. The ever-growing number of labels suggests, to me at least, that we've got a wrong fit for the data type. I think it's rather simple: a multi-dimensional continuum of gender identity cannot be reduced to specific names. But that concept of "discrete gender" is very well-entrenched in society, so there's an attempt to make it fit by adding more discrete categories.
I'm not sure this is "wrong" given that I don't think society/culture/whatnot ever turns on a dime. But I don't think this represents a satisfactory state.
A good place to start is to stop asking for "gender" when it's completely unnecessary for whatever service is being offered. I think most websites don't need to. And if they're legally obligated in some way, that needs fixing.
...Am I making any sense? I'm having a moment of struggling to render my thoughts to words.
The idea that there are "only two" genders is, imo, a bit of a 20th century lens, and I expect we'll move to disentangle gender from what anatomy do you have.
I agree that asking for gender is fraught. I am non-binary, and I constantly have to either lie or just choose "Not sharing". The best systems just take a string and leave it at that.
I get that it was socially convenient (for some) to compress the multi-dimensional continuum into a binary. (Or in many other cultures, something more complicated.) But I think at this point we either add the extra bits or just stop fussing about it so much. Hopefully both.
That said, I think it's entirely possible to usefully reduce a multi-dimensional space to discrete labels without excessive harm. Look at the actual space we live in, for example. Naming places and regions can be both useful and helpful as long as we don't take the names too seriously. I suspect the same is true for the space of gender. But as with physical space, I'd rather let people self-organize and self-identify than for one group to try to impose their boundaries upon others.
100% on your last point about self determination. If people want to define themselves, by all means!
2. Mrs Prof Dr. - Again this is likely German, and is not a gender selector, rather a title selector. It is standard in Germany to use both Prof and Dr titles, the Mrs then implies female. You wouldn't use it conversationally.
A man is most commonly (by percentage of total adult human population) an XY male, with a penis/testes, and produce sperm.
A woman is most commonly (by percentage of total adult human population) an XX female, with vulva/vagina/uterus/ovaries and breasts, and produce eggs. Older women (after menopause) no longer produce eggs and so have neuter gametic sex.
Pre-pubescent children don't produce gametes, and thus have neuter gametic sex.
A trans man is an XX female, possibly with surgical alterations to physiological sex, possibly with hormone replacement therapy to alter hormonal sex, and possibly (if either of the two former are present) with neuter gametic sex. Being a man does not require being male.
A trans woman is an XY male, possibly with surgical alterations to physiological sex, possibly with hormone replacement therapy to alter hormonal sex, and possibly (if either of the two former are present) with neuter gametic sex. Being a woman does not require being female.
Other combinations are possible.
Confusing gender with the various forms of sex and sex characteristics is unnecessary and causes confusion.
"Gametic sex" is only useful when discussing fertility, and is (mostly) a function of the other aspects of sex, but can change to neuter without altering the others (e.g. via vasectomy).
Chromosomal sex can't change. It's the fixed characteristic. For most people, the other aspects of sex, gender, and sexual attraction are determined by their chromosomes.
If one is making a distinction between these aspects, it's important to be clear about which parts can vary. A trans man is much less likely to be color blind than a cis man, for example, so if you're studying color vision you should ask whether the subject has a Y chromosome and not what their gender identity is. If you're selling clothing, you probably want to know the gender identity (for the style) and physiology (for the fit), but don't care about the chromosomes. You'll get bad data if you mix them up.
Correct: they display a physiology significantly different from what they would naturally produce without hormonal and surgical alteration. Gender is a social construct that is expressed, while sex is an inmate characteristic determined by chromosomes (though the vast majority of people express a gender corresponding to their sex).
Gametic sex is redundant with chromosomal sex. A person without a Y chromosome will never, ever produce sperm. A person with a Y chromosome will not ever produce eggs. Genuine intersex conditions are extremely rare (on the other of hundredths of a percent) and no one has ever produced both gametes.
Gender identity is so strongly correlated with sex that it's reasonable to use them interchangeably. When we say "women give birth", "girls start to menstruate at puberty" and "men experience colorblindness more often" good faith listeners understand the unstated implication that this extends to transgender men that retain functional uteruses and trans women.
... indicates that the webmaster has never been to Germany etc. These are titles, not genders. In some countries the titles "Mrs.", "Doctor", "Professor" pile up into one combined title. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that drop-down list in much of Europe.
Edit: looks like I was beat to it.
I personally think it's silly to require someone to fill in the title in all use cases except for the title an education facility puts on one's fancy piece of paper. There's a certain vanity to it, like programmers who insist others call them "engineers".
But nowadays "Frau Doktor" usually refers to a woman who is a doctor, as "Doktor" has a male grammatical gender, so it's awkward to address a woman only as "Doktor X", even though that's technically acceptable. The grammatically female word "Doktorin" has not caught on, even though it's also correct.
Fifty years ago, could be either.
Nowadays, no.
And there is much wrong with it in other parts. It's two generations ago that the war against sexism put 'mrs' out of style over here, so it feels quite culturally insensitive in academic and therefore international environments to keep asking women if they are married or not.
Of course the arrangement of my internal organs is relevant to doctors and medical sciences. As is my blood type and my cholesterol level. That doesn't mean you should be asking for my blood type when I'm registering for an online service (unless, of course, that service involves blood donation or something). That's the whole point -- it's really, genuinely, just not relevant to the vast majority of cases where it's asked.
Has anyone ever declared themselves to be male in the first person, female in the third, and neutral/plural in the possessive: "he/her/their"?
1) Because that's how people do it. Sometimes we all collectively settle on a standard that isn't the best, but that's just how it's done.
2) It allows for more easily expanding to multiple pronouns, e.g. "he/they" or "she/they", which indicate that the person is ok with "she/her/hers" or "they/them/theirs".
3) It makes it easier to state neopronouns (e.g. xe), by standardizing the form -- he/him/his is the same format as sie/hir/hirs or xe/xem/xems.
4) (My opinion) It feels more natural to say "he him" than just "he". "What are your pronouns?" "He." I dunno, it's a short enough utterance that it could be easily to mishear?
You will sometimes see people write something like "he/they", but that just means that either are acceptable.
On the one hand, you can't reasonably force people to select either masculine or feminine, particularly in English. On the other hand, if someone has answered the gender question with "neither / other" or "unknown / I prefer not to say", how would you refer to them in French, say? Would you ask "êtes-vous heureux", or "êtes-vous heureuse"? Unfortunately many languages do not currently have an established or convenient way of referring to non-binary people. (Though perhaps it's true that "most" languages are like Finnish or Hungarian in that gender does not feature in the grammar at all. The Indo-European and Semitic languages with which English speakers are most familiar are somewhat exceptional in that respect.)
If you're saying you personally don't care what gender you get referred to as, that's your right. But for other people getting misgendered can be a significant problem. If you want to change that, it's not those people you need to get to change. It's the ones making such a big deal about other people's gender.
If they're out of the norm then it may make sense to mention it then, I don't think society is hostile to it. I believe it applies to less than one percent of the US population, so it seems excessive to establish a norm of behavior for all, since harmony seems achievable despite that.
After I won, one of the organizers delicately asked me what my pronouns were so I would not be misgendered during the awards presentation. He said that he thought I was cisgender but needed to check because I declined to state.
I wonder what percent of people decline to state because they don't wish to share the info versus are not comfortable with the other options. I will continue to decline to state in almost all circumstances. Maybe companies will realize their data is garbage and stop asking.
I'm not gay though. I'm just kinda weird, which I'm fine with even if others aren't. I think I'm just a guy who sometimes likes to wear a bit of makeup (think Fall Out Boy, not cross-dressing) and is straight, but also kinda asexual, I guess.
It's sad though because although I identify as a straight male and have spend my entire life being abused for my gender and sexuality, I now have the privilege(?) of being discriminated against in the workplace. Growing up my parents told me it was just school, but it's not, people just suck.
I learnt to handle the name calling though. Those who were badly bullied can probably relate, you have to grow a thick skin just to survive emotionally. But knowing employers might discriminate against you is different because you have no power.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b1/Atf_form...
https://www.npr.org/2022/02/17/1079181478/us-census-middle-e...
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b1/Atf_form...
Hipanic is not a valid race there.
https://www.pewresearch.org/interactives/what-census-calls-u...
Dr (male) and Dr (female) as separate titles makes sense for example, for i18n reasons, since some languages like Spanish will require the info - even a simple 'welcome!' would have to choose bienvenido/bienvenida depending on gender.
The Canadian Decathlon one is here (go to the filter) - https://www.decathlon.ca/en/c/22252/sports - and you can see the train of thought that it makes sense to put a filter in as sportswear comes in male/female. Those filters probably make a bit more sense when filtering a specific category too but I can see how that would all get in without someone considering how absurd it'd look when filtering all products.
"If you can reasonably achieve the same purpose without the processing, you won’t have a lawful basis".
GDPR gives a lot of leeway in determining a purpose. But if you don't have a purpose, then the processing is unlawful regardless of literally anything else you've done or not done. Not even with valid consent of the data subject (because, guess what, consent attaches to the purpose).
So if you say "we need this data for addressing communications to the data subject," that's a purpose. On the other hand, if sex gets stored in a DB column and never used, that's a violation.
Separately, GDPR has a Data Minimization requirement: you collect data for a purpose, could you achieve that purpose with less data? This one has some flex to it. If the answer is "we could but not as well," then the data has a purpose. Maybe not a great purpose, but it's something.
This is Personal Information and so the data processor must have a specific reason why they need it, and must take appropriate steps to secure it. They can't just capture it "In case we need it later" nor can they just store it haphazardly because it's not valuable to them, or refuse to update it because that's difficult.
Spanish has a lot of word variants based on feminine/masculine/plural subjects, but it's not really based on gender (otherwise inanimate objects wouldn't have those variants); as far as I can tell with my limited Spanish experience they're based on word agreement in the sentence with the pronouns or at most with masculine/feminine presentation.
Is there ever a scenario where, "el gata" would be correct in Spanish? "Gato" agrees with the "el" pronoun; it's not based on the gender identity of the noun independently of the pronoun, is it? Are there other languages that work differently?
This also seems like a problem that doesn't really require knowledge of gender identity as much as "do you want us to use masculine/feminine variants of words when referring to you?" -- something that seems easy enough to guess based on the pronoun or (when loading up a language translation that needs more advanced logic) to just outright ask the user.
I kind of hate the software trend towards "we need to derive everything we're doing from first principles"; I feel like a lot of these problems could be solved by saying, "when we encounter an edge case we'll ask what to do, rather than doing data collection up-front that will be irrelevant for the majority of users."
It's true that inanimate objects have kind of arbitrary genders, but for specific people, they're based on their actual gender.
But you can ask the pronoun. If you know the pronoun, you know what variants of words to use, don't you? You don't need to know if the person is transgender or what their gender identity is, if they use `el`, you use masculine word variants to refer to them.
I'm not sure what I'm missing here; the only reason why knowing the gender identity would matter is if gendered word variants are allowed to mismatch pronouns in the language.
And even in that case, does the specific gender identity matter, or do we really only need to know whether someone wants to use masculine/feminine word variants when referring to them?
It just seems a bit more direct to ask how people want to be referred to; I would compare it to how typically in web forms we ask people if they go by Mrs/Ms/Mr/Dr/etc directly, rather than asking them if they have a PHD and are married.
Especially if we're talking about gendered languages where there isn't strong support for nonbinary pronouns/variants. Someone telling us that they're agender/nonbinary doesn't actually help us much in that situation; we won't know from that information alone whether to use feminine or masculine variants.
That's a weird way to put it. Words have grammatical gender, in some languages like Spanish there are articles like "el" or "la" that go with that, but in other languages like Russian there's no article.
For things in Spanish the grammatical gender is fixed. Eg, a window is always a feminine word. For cats it of course depends on the cat.
You're not matching the word to the article, but the other way around. "ventana" is a feminine word, so there's always a "la" before it.
> Is there ever a scenario where, "el gata" would be correct in Spanish?
Not in that specific case, but there are rare nouns where both are valid, eg "el mar" and "la mar", and sometimes with a subtly different meaning used for poetic effect.
If even that; if I know someone uses "el", then "el mar" isn't a problem, and I know to use masculine word variants in other locations. Is there any scenario where knowing that a user/player uses "el" to refer to themselves wouldn't allow you to derive what gender-variant of another word to use when referring to them?
I guess if someone is using completely agender pronouns (I don't know what that would be in Spanish) I'd need to ask about feminine/masculine word variants, but I'm still struggling to see why I need to know their actual gender.
Take a sentence like "$PERSON picked up $ITEM".
Russian requires knowing the gender of $PERSON because the verb "to pick" is modified depending on the gender of the person. It also needs the accusative declension of the $ITEM. In Russian you don't just say "book" in every context possible like in English, the word "book" gets different endings depending on the context it's used. A bit like verbs vary in English: become, became.
You also need to be very careful with things like word play -- it just doesn't translate right. Eg, there's a point in Monkey Island where an actual monkey is used as a wrench, because "monkey wrench". That just doesn't translate, at all.
And culture. Eg, things like honorifics and the general way people talk may not necessarily translate. For instance apparently the famous Star Wars "Do not want" happened because in Mandarin shouting just "NO!" isn't a thing.
Point being, no, you can't translate simply and naively. Translating something like a game is a very serious job where you should actually talk to translators in advance if possible to figure out whether your wanted design is going to be a huge pain or not, and if something might not translate at all.
But this is exactly what I'm asking -- does it actually require knowing the gender of the person, or does it just need the pronoun to line up with other word variants? Because those are two different things. I keep asking this, and people keep on replying with language examples where knowing the pronoun would be completely sufficient to translate the sentence.
Does the Russian language allow you to mismatch pronouns and gendered variants of words with each other when referring to the same subject? Because if it doesn't, you don't need to know the gender, just the pronoun, and then you need to match the gendered variants of words to the pronoun.
What is an example of a sentence where if I knew someone's pronouns in a given language but not their explicit gender identity, I would not have enough information about them to be able to translate that sentence?
----
> Point being, no you can't translate simply and naively.
This is also not what I'm asking. I'm not auto-translating games, I'm attempting to build systems where the options and information I'm collecting from players would allow a professional translator to translate that game.
I'm told up above that this requires not just knowing someone's pronouns but also their explicit gender identity. I can't find a language example where that's true.
That's one and the same the way I understand your question. Gender implies a specific pronoun. Though there can be exceptions, like where the "sea" in Spanish can be both a "he" or a "she", and which a famous poem uses to a hard to translate effect by alternating between both.
But, and I say this very seriously, translation is very lacking in things being "just" something. Eg, see this for a discussion of more issues:
https://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/bionic/man3/Locale::Mak...
> Does the Russian language allow you to mismatch pronouns and gendered variants of words with each other when referring to the same subject? Because if it doesn't, you don't need to know the gender, just the pronoun, and then you need to match the gendered variants of words to the pronoun.
Russian allows for sentences without any pronouns, or only neutral ones. Eg, the sentence "I forgot", in Russian has "I" as not indicating any gender, and it only being present in the ending of "forgot". You have to understand Russian grammar and cases to extract it from there. And yet "I know" is gender neutral. It's funny like that.
> This is also not what I'm asking. I'm not auto-translating games, I'm attempting to build systems where the options and information I'm collecting would allow a translator to translate that game.
I'm not talking about auto anything. I'm talking about that support for translation in a game is complex and requires serious planning. Any time you're composing a sentence from parts is likely a place where complexity will explode exponentially as you add support for more languages.
There's also all sorts of weird quirks to consider. Eg, if you have some sort of mystery, in Russian gender appears pretty much everywhere, so if your mystery murderer is one of the few women in the setting, then Russian makes it nigh impossible for anybody to refer to her, or for her to talk about herself, and not drastically reduce the list of suspects by instantly revealing it has to be a woman.
If you truly like to suffer, have a place where you form a string of the form of "$PERSON picked up $COUNT $ITEMS".
In some languages you need the gender of $PERSON, and it'll affect the verb. You'll need to know the right declension of each item that can be possibly picked up. Plurals of course need to be accounted for, and in Russian the forms of "file" for amounts of 1, 2 and 5 are different. So a little thing like that can balloon into pages worth of weird and complex code.
An additional fun quirk is polite language and honorifics. "Do you want some coffee?" can be said to anyone in English, has formal and informal forms in Russian and Spanish, and a whole bunch of possibilities in Japanese. If you happen to mention 5 different people in a Japanese sentence you'll likely make it clear who's your younger sister, who's a classmate, who's your superior, and who's the jerk you hate.
Right, but you're describing a situation where a specific singular sentence doesn't happen to have a gendered pronoun in it, you're not describing a sentence that requires knowing a person's gender. If you knew as a translator what pronouns a person commonly used, you'd still be able to translate the sentence "I forgot" in a grammatically correct way, right?
Unless Russia supports someone simultaneously using a masculine pronoun and a feminine variant of "forgot" when talking about them? But my understanding is that it doesn't.
We're not talking about a situation where we have no idea who the subject of that sentence is -- if you know what pronouns a person usually uses in Russian, it still seems like you could pretty easily translate that person saying "I forgot" -- because the important grammatical part of that is the consistency between the gendered variant of "forgot" and the gender variant of the pronouns that person usually uses.
----
> If you truly like to suffer, have a place where you form a string of the form of "$PERSON picked up $COUNT $ITEMS".
So I have looked into this a bit as part of building dialog systems for my games, and yeah, it is super complicated. But while yes, it absolutely requires writing a ton of code and supporting a ton of variants and possibly even writing specific language-dependent code for certain translations, and while yes, it does require tracking object state to a much greater degree than you typically would for a purely English game, it still doesn't seem to change anything about what information I need to ask the player during their profile setup.
I'm still having trouble finding an example of where asking a player what their pronouns are isn't sufficient information from that player to do a translation.
Understand, I am not saying that translations would be easy, I am not saying that dynamically constructed sentences would be simple (they would not be simple). I am not saying that cultural translation and differing norms and references wouldn't be intensely difficult to deal with. But I can't find an example where I need to know the player's gender. I don't know of a language that gramatically distinguishes between pronouns and gender to a degree where knowing someone's pronouns wouldn't be sufficient to determine what gender-variant words to use to when referring to them.
I'm trying to imagine a scenario where someone says, "I use primarily he/him, but technically I'm actually agender", and I reply, "oh, good to know, we couldn't have done a translation with your character without also knowing about the agender part."
One possibly unobvious thing is, though - there are only three grammatical genders in Russian, so all words which do have gendered forms can have at max 3 of them (male/female/neuter). This means that if you do allow more than 3 kinds of pronouns, you’ll probably have to define the pronouns->grammatical gender mapping somehow. Well, I guess plural variant also counts, so maybe 4.
Ooh, so that's what you mean. In that case I'm quite sure it'd be extremely situation and culture specific, probably to the point of being impossible to accurately translate. Concepts like "agender" are deeply mired in local politics and characteristics of the specific language.
In English a game could treat somebody as "they" without much difficulty.
But in other languages, you quickly run into trouble. Eg, Spanish has seen some use of "@" as a stand in for indicating "either masculine or feminine", eg, "invitad@s" -- but that's rather quirky, goofy, literally unpronounceable and unfitting in any kind of serious context.
In anime there are characters whose gender is supposed to be unknown, like Nanachi (https://madeinabyss.fandom.com/wiki/Nanachi). This works in Japanese and English, but Spanish and Russian outright treat Nanachi as female, and just stick a "gender is supposed to be ambiguous" note somewhere in the corner and this particular bit about the character gets completely lost in the translation.
I don't mean to dismiss the concerns of nonbinary people who don't want to use any gendered variants of words to describe themselves, because 100% agreed, that's a real problem with translations to Russian, Spanish, German, etc... No dispute at all on that point.
But outside of that context, it sounds like Spanish and Russian do have a way of dealing with this situation? They use a default gender and add a note that it's meant to be a bit ambiguous. This is kind of what I'm getting at, it's not that Spanish/Russian languages have no way to talk about someone who's nonbinary, they just use a default gendered pronoun.
That is a real problem if you want zero gender at all, but most people aren't going to care -- for most people it would be fine to just ask their pronoun in that language, and at most follow up with "do you want feminine/masculine variants" if they provide an ambiguous answer.
----
Coming back to this conversation a day later with a bit more thought, I really feel like we're talking past each other. My contention isn't that gendered languages provide an easy way to be completely genderless. I agree with you about pretty much all of the difficulties in translation you've talked about, and agree with you that nonbinary representation in those languages is difficult. I even agree with you that gendered verbs/nouns make writing ambiguous dialog much harder, absolutely hiding the gender of someone in a novel in Russian is going to be harder than it would be in English.
My contention isn't about any of that stuff at all, it's that the languages:
A) do still have mechanisms for ambiguous gender (ie, using default gendered pronouns) where defaulting to masculine case is probably fine for many contexts where you don't know who your user is or where you're referring to a generic non-specific user. It seems (at first glance at least) like that won't offend many people.
B) But more importantly to the starting point of the thread, making the determinations of which gendered nouns/verbs to use only really requires knowledge of the pronoun, not knowledge of the underlying actual gender identity that someone has.
In other words, if you know someone uses "el" in Spanish, it doesn't actually matter to the translation anymore whether they're nonbinary or not. Just from them telling you what pronoun they want to use, you know what gendered word variants to use when referring to them. My understanding is that Russian is the same; you don't need to know if someone is nonbinary, you need to know whether they want masculine or feminine word variants.
That being said, completely agreed that if you ask someone for a Spanish pronoun and they say "elle", that complicates things (although maybe that's a bad example since it seems like modern Spanish language in specific is now starting to some tools in that direction).
[ ] male
[ ] female
[ ] non-binary
[text box for other]
(Ideally you'd allow the user to specify the pronouns themselves, but even among people who use non-conventional pronouns, getting them to correctly enter the subject/object/possessive cases of their choice is heavily hit or miss)
Perhaps we can evolve from a 1970s tech to something less flaky?
The fault is not with the format, but with the developers that choose to use it after they've outgrown it. For anything more complex, choose SQLite. For everything else, choose Postgres. Use the right tool for the job.
There's likely much worse things happening in these cases than just broken CSV parsing. Since these issues got deployed to production, lack of testing, for one.
IMO the concept of gender is really not that useful anymore. We should only ask for sex, and if you don't need to know the sex you just don't ask.
And yet people get lambasted on twitter for suggesting that there is an undercurrent of narcissism when people obsess over pronouns.
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
The claim that enjoying to be asked about pronouns is a narcissistic trait is unfalsifiable at worst and unable to be worked out through dialog at best. We could say something about it through surveys and descriptive statistics, but that wouldn't form the basis of a causal relationship.
Instead, rhetorically, it's much easier to ask if there simply isn't an interpretation which doesn't assume the worst in people. Doing so reveals more about the commenter than it does about the topic and kindly suggesting a positive or at least neutral interpretation builds bridges of meaning instead of assuming an argument.
Am I operating in good faith if I ask everyone if they are Sunni or Shia for some ulterior motive, assuming they are Muslim? What about astrological signs? I'd argue not, but a similar thing happens when pronoun-talk occurs.
Whether someone finds salience in pronouns' mapping to "gender identity"—insofar as the concept is coherent—is largely a matter of worldview. Many, if not most people, only care about sex. The imposition of worldview here is what motivates the narcissism charge. That and the fact that most TRAs are narcissists, but it could be unrelated.
The word "defeatist", for example, has no particular political connotations now. But in Germany in 1917 it was a weapon, used by Ludendorff in a purge of those who favored a negotiated peace. At the start of World War II it was used extensively by Churchill and his supporters to silence their opponents. In 1940, any argument against Churchill's aggressive policy was "defeatist". Was it right or wrong? Ideally, no one got far enough to ask that.
We have such labels today, of course, quite a lot of them, from the all-purpose "inappropriate" to the dreaded "divisive." In any period, it should be easy to figure out what such labels are, simply by looking at what people call ideas they disagree with besides untrue. When a politician says his opponent is mistaken, that's a straightforward criticism, but when he attacks a statement as "divisive" or "racially insensitive" instead of arguing that it's false, we should start paying attention.
So another way to figure out which of our taboos future generations will laugh at is to start with the labels. Take a label — "sexist", for example — and try to think of some ideas that would be called that. Then for each ask, might this be true?
Just start listing ideas at random? Yes, because they won't really be random. The ideas that come to mind first will be the most plausible ones. They'll be things you've already noticed but didn't let yourself think."
Anyway - if you cannot steelman the "many people obsessed with pronouns are narcissists" phrase you are probably not the best person to ask other people to steelman anything.
If you can do it without being transphobic, I'd like to hear it.
proceeds to show exactly where they got it from
Apparently in your mind "obsessed with pronouns and wanting to be celebrated" automatically means trans people. You realize that other people use pronouns right? And you don't have to be trans to narcissistically obsess over them and insist on being celebrated.
I hope you're able to overcome your clear transphobia some day.
What I'm pointing out is that characterization is transphobic. Usually when people point out that a characterization is incorrect, they aren't accused of making that characterization themselves. Typically folks understand the difference and I expect you to as well.
This really isn't that hard. As I explained elsewhere, if you buy an iPhone that doesn't automatically make you an Apple fanboy. Likewise, if you're trans and you make it a point to use certain pronouns that doesn't make you a narcissist. I'm specifically calling out SOME people, not even trans people.
Some people absolutely do latch onto pronouns because it brings them attention. These are the people that want to be celebrated, because they're narcissists. I really can't make this any more clear that these are not just trans people. Do trans people tend to care more about pronouns? Sure. But that doesn't automatically mean they want to be celebrated for doing so.
In my experience trans people just want to be called by their preferred pronouns. They’re not obsessed with it. Most don’t care about being “celebrated” they just don’t want to be excluded or harassed.
I hope someday you examine your transphobia.
If I buy an iPhone it doesn’t automatically mean I’m obsessed with Apple and want to feel special because I bought an Apple product. That’s an additional step.
(Asking for Pronouns for practical usage makes more sense but that’s not for celebration)
You can choose to design your products to cater to feelings if you like. But that does not make it an ethical imperative to design your products so that no one feels a certain feeling.
This extends to non-living things, in many languages, you can't just do "$THING has been deleted". How you say "deleted" changes depending on the grammatical gender of the thing. "El objeto ha sido eliminado", "La entrada ha sido eliminada".
Even in gendered language, you need to come up with some kind of "other" category, and you'll likely need to rewrite your sentences to make it work if you can make it work at all.
No clue. But at least you have the data to use whenever you figure out what to do with it, and I imagine somebody tackled that question already, since this is not something that showed up yesterday.
In some languages like English you can go with "they" or such, in others there aren't good options that would be widely recognized. But that's just how i18n goes. Languages don't neatly align with the desires of computer programmers.
I can't speak to Russian at all, I have zero experience with that language in any context. But I was taught that when speaking Spanish, if you're using a noun with two different gendered variants but you don't know the gender, typically you default to a specific one of the gendered variants that plays double-duty as the gender-neutral term (and different animals/objects have different defaults you're supposed to use, which you just kind of have to memorize).
For example, I was taught that if you're picking up a cat off the sidewalk, and you haven't checked its genitals, and you want to ask if it belongs to someone, you just use "gato", and it's understood that "gato" can mean both "explicitly male" and "I haven't taken the time to check." Similar deal for mixed groups containing people of multiple genders, I was taught if there's at least one man you use the male forms when referring to that group.
Admittedly I did have an American education, so it's very possible I was taught incorrectly. I don't put a lot of faith in my Spanish teachers. But it's not like gender ambiguity is a modern thing; scenarios where speakers don't yet know the sex/gender of the things they're referring to are a fairly common issue that will come up pretty often in any culture, regardless of what its gender norms are.
If you're in Russia and you tell a story about a fox you almost hit with your car or something, I assume you can tell that story to a friend in a way where your friend will understand you're not claiming that you were ever close enough to the fox to determine its sex. Again, I don't know, but I assume there are something like default gender-variants that Russian people use in that situation; I assume its possible to have that conversation in Russian.
Yeah, but that doesn't work great in many contexts. If somebody already told you their name is "Maria" and you refer to them as a man, expect confusion or offense.
In Russian, people's gender applies to verbs and adjectives, so that works even less.
> If you're in Russia and you tell a story about a fox you almost hit with your car or something
Funnily enough, foxes are female by default in Russian, while rabbits default to male. If you're making a game, and foxes and rabbits are things you can run over, there are cases that will require you to have both a male and a female version of the conversation.
Isn't that's true of every language, including English? Singular "they" has risen in popularity quite a bit in English, but there are still a ton of people who use "he" as a gender neutral term, and once someone tells them their name is Maria, they switch to "she". I'm not sure I see the difference.
If someone tells you their name is Maria or you learn someone's gender during a conversation, as the hearer you intuit that Maria is a common feminine name and starts using feminine pronouns; you stop saying "they told me their name was Maria" and start saying "she told me."
In English conversations with people who don't use singular "they" this is a pretty common experience I run into fairly often. If I'm telling a story about someone and I don't reveal I'm talking about a woman until part-way through the story, at that point the person I'm talking with will fluidly switch from "he" to "she" when referring to the subject.
> If you're making a game, and foxes and rabbits are things you can run over, there are cases that will require you to have both a male and a female version of the conversation.
I worry a little bit we're talking past each other, because I agree with all of this and I'm not sure I'm communicating well enough what my contention actually is. I would expect with any language with gendered verbs/nouns, you're going to need multiple versions of most text sections. But my point is that in situations where the sex/gender isn't known by both the reader and the speaker, there is a default version you can use, it's not untranslatable.
Doesn't work in many languages. You can't talk about somebody else or yourself in Russian in gender neutral terms for any length of time. Sentences like "I'm tired" and words like "friend" are gender specific. Gender neutrality like "they" isn't an option. Referring to somebody as a "he" then switching to "she" will be seen as confusing or insulting. So your plot twist is likely impossible to translate to Russian.
> But my point is that in situations where the sex/gender isn't known by both the reader and the speaker, there is a default version you can use, it's not untranslatable.
There are, but it typically doesn't work for people. Yeah, you can treat a rabbit as male by default, but that doesn't work in Russian for people. Eg, if you run over somebody, you can refer to them in neutral terms like "person", but that's going to get weird very fast. It's roughly like talking about running over a "creature" for an extended length of time -- people will quickly start wondering why you keep sticking to such a non-specific term.
I know that; but there isn't a default gendered form to use when referring to people non-discriptly, like "he" is very often used for in English?
I just don't understand how that's possible; it's not a cultural difference -- there is no way that any population isn't going to run into situations where they're forced to refer to someone who's gender they don't know.
Not knowing the gender of a person you're talking about is an extremely common situation that would comes up all the time, regardless of a country's history or language. Is the sentence, "a cloaked figure approached me but was covered in so many layers of jackets and clothing that I could not tell if it had a penis" untranslatable in Russian?
A police report comes out and the police want to say, "someone robbed the convenience store and we're looking for any information we can find about the culprit." That's untranslatable in Russian? That's not a scenario that the language developed to accommodate? They can't default to masculine pronouns, they have no natural way to signal that they don't know if the criminal is male or female?
Even the car example -- it's extremely plausible if you witness a car accident involving a human being that you might not know whether the people involved are women or men. Are you telling me it's impossible to have a conversation about that without it getting "weird very fast?"
Gender reveals are not just plot twists in books, they happen in real life. There is no way that a culture wouldn't regularly encounter these scenarios; people have conversations about events that involve human agents where they don't know basic information about the humans involved all the time. It is just unfathomable to me that what you're saying about the Russian language is correct -- that you could witness an event happening from a distance where you couldn't identify the genders of the people involved, and the language just wouldn't have any way at all for you talk about it even by defaulting to masculine pronouns/variants; that the language was never at any point in history adapted for dealing with situations where you're talking about a person you saw who was wearing a mask.
Gender ambiguity is a scenario that Russians will encounter in real life and I guarantee have encountered in real life throughout Russia's history regardless of their cultural views or linguistic representations of gender. They probably have a way of talking about those situations, or at least understand that sometimes gender in a conversation is being inferred or substituted without factual knowledge of the actual person being talked about?
Sure, you can refer to them in explicitly vague terms, like "cloaked figure" or "person". You still use gendered language, only now it corresponds to that of the abstract noun you're using.
> Are you telling me it's impossible to have a conversation about that without it getting "weird very fast?"
Yeah, because there will be situations where you can't maintain ambiguity for long enough. Eg, take a sentence like "I went around the corner and crashed into a stranger", "stranger" is already a gendered word (and the sentence also makes you disclose your own). Yeah, maybe you didn't see immediately who it was, but if you interact for any length of time, the cultural expectation is that you'll include it when retelling.
Eg, in real life you crash into somebody, get knocked down, they cuss you out, and you figure out that you crashed into a woman. When retelling though the normal way to explain it is to say "I went around the corner and crashed into a female stranger".
English allows for more ambiguity. You can say, set up a mystery encounter like: "We're meeting my room mate who works at NASA as an engineer, won a robotics competition and just recovered from an illness", and then boom! It's a woman. Can't do that in Russian. "room mate", "won", and "recovered" are all gendered, and you can hardly pretend you don't know who they are without looking insane or obviously hiding something.
You can of course technically do it -- "We're meeting a person who lives in my house", but it only works if you're implying you yourself haven't met them and know absolutely nothing about them, and it takes pretty darn special circumstances for it to make sense. If you know about their achievements because somebody told you, you'd know their gender and just use it from the start.
Right; while English has more ambiguous tools, even in English many speakers will think it's a bit weird to keep using "they" to refer to someone if you do know what their gender and pronouns are. (For many listeners at least), it wouldn't be natural-sounding dialog/conversation for me to describe my sister exclusively with the word "they".
I'm not saying that in casual conversation people would use ambiguous language -- but there are scenarios where you'll have conversations about something you saw where you don't at any point during that conversation have any knowledge of the genders involved, and of course the language has support for scenarios like that.
Agreed that English has more tools for explicit ambiguity; if you see a car fly off a bridge, you can say, "I hope they're OK." But even if you weren't using 'they', you could say "I hope he's OK" in that situation and the majority of people around you would understand that using the word 'he' wasn't a declaration that you knew who was in the car. The movement away from "he" as a default gender in English wasn't because without singular 'they' there was no support for situations where the gender was unknown, it was a movement away from the social/political/moral implications of default gender in society, and later became expanded into a way to explicitly accommodate nonbinary speakers and avoid misgendering.
I got curious about this and tried to look it up, and while the explanations were a bit limited, my takeaway is that it does seem like the Russian language works the same way? If a car flies off a bridge and you use masculine language to talk about the driver, and then later find out the driver was a woman, my understanding is that people probably aren't going to be offended about that or think that you've done something odd? At the point where you learned the driver was a woman you'd just quickly apologize and switch to feminine forms.
The squid one actually seems legitimate to me. ;)
Legal sex (which is really ascribed gender, and starts out as assigned gender at birth) has the exact same problem as gender identity here. As does assigned gender at birth itself (since there are people for whom that is neither male nor female as legally recorded.)
But given the mix of gendered and non-gendered terms in the instruction, its just a product of the fact that both law, and even more the bureaucratic processes and documents supporting its application, is very much not DRY, so “we recognize the existence of non-binary gender” isn’t a point change to the “gender” module of the legal system, rather it requires changes throughout a “code base” that is giant, and has no version control or test suite.
Are you sure you are not committing an is-ought fallacy?
Male/female is determined by chromosomes, either XX or XY.
Seriously however, any link to where this is specified in the way you claim it to be? How does it see SRY gene disorders? If your child is a daughter to you but technically has XY, will the law mandate you to declare her as a son? etc.
This isn’t true legally (where “sex” is really an ascribed gender assigned at birth and possibly updated later for a variety of reasons) or medically (since an individual with a 46,XX karyotype can be male or female medically, as can an individual with a 46,XY karyotype.)
No, the instructions give a specific list of qualifying relations. They only give examples for the last one, which is a descendant of any of the earlier-listed ones. Except for that last one, “foster child” and “stepchild”, they all use gender paired terms (“brother, sister”, “half brother, half sister”, “son, daughter”, etc.)
As stated elsewhere, yes the instructions do specify the descriptors used for dependents. Interestingly, "grandchild" "stepchild", and "foster child" is allowed.
"A qualifying child is a child who is your... Son, daughter, stepchild, foster child, brother, sister, stepbrother, stepsister, half-brother, half sister, or a descendant of any of them (for example, your grandchild, niece, or nephew)"
https://codes.findlaw.com/us/title-26-internal-revenue-code/...
> (2) Relationship. --For purposes of paragraph (1)(A), an individual bears a relationship to the taxpayer described in this paragraph if such individual is--
> (A) a child of the taxpayer or a descendant of such a child,
Neither the words 'son' nor 'daughter' appear in it at all. The words 'dependent' and 'child' are present.
edit: even going back to 1950 we get "other dependent relative" https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-prior/f1040--1950.pdf
going back to 1930 we get "person (other than husband or wife) under eighteen years old" https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-prior/f1040--1930.pdf
No, its not.
> Neither the words ‘son’ nor ‘daughter’ appear in it at all.
No, what appears on the form is the column heading “Relation to you” with a free text field in that column for each line for a dependent claimed. But that is not the issue.
What appears on the instructions [0] determining when you can use the line (and what is therefore likely replicated in tooling which supports completing the form in line with the instructions) is this “A qualifying child is a child who is your… Son, daughter, stepchild, foster child, brother, sister, stepbrother, stepsister, half brother, half sister, or a descendant of any of them (for example, your grandchild, niece, or nephew).” [1]
Which, read strictly, says that a first-generation biological descendant of yours must have binary gender (“son, daughter”), as must a biological- or step-sibling (“brother, sister, stepbrother, stepsister, half brother, half sister”), though binary gender is not important if they are your foster or adopted child (“stepchild, foster child”), nor is it important for a qualifying descendant child (but still required for the first ancestor through which their qualification is traced) of any of the others (“or a descendant of any of them”.)
I think it is pretty clear that the use of words specifying binary gender is overspecific drafting of either the instructions or the source legislation/regulation, not that there is really an intent to apply limitations by binary gender at select, but not all, levels of this qualification. But the limitation is there in the text.
[0] https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/i1040gi.pdf
[1] p. 17
In the meantime, Form 1040 itself does not and has never mandated a description of "son" or "daughter."
Good luck with the present Congress, and particularly House of Reps.
10/10 five stars cannot be improved upon
Good to see that great game here, and be reminded of its great sister game https://sunlesssea.fandom.com/
Unless the information is important (health) or being used analytically (improving participation, etc) then there is no reason for it.
I think you wanted to say "not allowed".
I think we're talking about different things.
Not necessarily. There are programmer-ergonomics benefits to using a enums instead of booleans.
Personally, I'd never represent anything except a literal true/false value as a boolean. That has nothing to do with how I conceive of the possible values; it's mainly because I like to give things names that I can read.
In actual practice, the Australian Government found it sufficient to expand gender on passports from [M]ale [F]emale to simply include [O]ther (2011) [1].
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/sep/15/australian-pas...
[2] https://www.passports.gov.au/getting-passport-how-it-works/d...
In a lot of places (at least in the US), "guys" is not a gendered expression. My wife will often say "do you guys want to meet at 9?" to a group of 100% women, and nobody even thinks about it being a reference to gender.
Is something along the lines of what our company Slack bot would auto reply when messages contained the word "guy[s]"
Whatever, I don't care - I can't get upset over someone saying 'hey guys' (though I try and avoid that myself), and I dislike making slackbot reply to that - just thought it was funny and possibly bait :)
Eg, take the concept of grammatical gender. "Ventana" ("window" in Spanish) has a feminine grammatical gender in Spanish. I don't think it has ovaries, at least mine doesn't.
When a form asks for gender, it's typically concerned with the grammatical sort. It wants to know whether to welcome me with "Bienvenido" or "Bienvenida", not anything having to do with my biology.
Not in singular as far as I know. Plurals traditionally prioritize men, so 20 women and 1 guy would be "ellos".
> It's a generic greeting (used in the plural as well, as far as I know... unless you want to be fancy and say "Bienvenidas y bienvenidos", which is rather an idiotic trend).
In plural, software could get away with defaulting to masculine.
But really that sort of thing only gets you so far. In Russian gender goes damn near everywhere, and trying to be gender neutral gets awkward very fast. For instance an instant messenger displaying the notification "Bob is online" needs to know Bob's gender to do it correctly in Russian.
One piece of software I've seen tried to get around it by transliterating the english word "online" in Russian letters. That's also rather awkward, and would be user unfriendly in many cases.
In the Americas and the Pacific islands, many cultures had non-binary gendering systems, and in the European colonization and cultural genocide this was one of many things that were erased as it was incompatible. So reconciliation and representation of indigenous cultures simply includes non-binary gendering, and it is not separable from this effort and direction.
This coincides with western non-binary recognition, the thing thats having a lot of resistance and lack of consensus.
I can see it being very likely that these efforts coincide and amplify the willingness to recognize a non-binary gendering system that is distinctive from sex, and not synonymous with sex.
I do think it's turned out to be useful and think it'd be fine if that caught on, but do remain uncertain exactly how "mainstream" one may regard this usage—so, how useful it is for communicating with a general audience—especially internationally. Pretty much everyone on e.g. Twitter understands (if not accepts) the distinction, sure, but I hesitate to guess what a broader poll might reveal.
Even then, for the vast majority of the population, sex and gender match exactly. I don't think many programmers, designers, or managers actually care. They might after activist outcry, but since even the big and socially progressive companies haven't come up with a uniform solution that pleases everyone, I don't think it'll happen soon.
> I never thought casual homophobia, some of which I regrettably gleefully took part it in, would stop so quickly when I was a late-teen in 2000
On the other hand, asking people to reformulate their ideas about core concepts like gender and sex is a much bigger ask than to refrain from casual homophobia.
In their historical usages, "gender" and "sex are synonyms. It shouldn't be surprising that past usage continues to the present, and it is not strictly incorrect to use language this way.
As for so-called conceptual "gender", most people these days probably mean the updated sense of "gender identity" which, insofar as the concept is coherent, appears to be fully pseudoscientific. The previous meaning of "gender identity" from the 90s (toddler's self-recognition of gender) has been eschewed completely in contemporary discourse.
There are probably ways to talk about gender coherently, in terms of expression, presentation, stereotypes, etc., but laymen have largely stripped "gender" of its coherence. I think the toothpaste is out of the tube on that one.
"gender identity" as used in psychology and sociology is a reflection of phenomena occurring in the real world. The existence of trans people and their reported experience is de-facto scientific evidence of gender identity as a concept. There are of course disagreements and mutually exclusive theories but we don't call physics psuedoscience because string theory and quantum theory are incompatible*, we just acknowledge that we don't have enough evidence to unify our understanding of the concept yet. All of this is of course made more complicated by culture as a moving target but the fundamental point stands.
> There are probably ways to talk about gender coherently, in terms of expression, presentation, stereotypes, etc.
people are out there doing it, they just use specific terms rather than general ones because our previous conception of "gender" is too broad to reflect our understanding as it has been updated by evidence.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_identity
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_expression
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_role
* I don't know if this is actually true, insert your own conflicting theories here
what specifically is incoherent about it? I attempted to address that by noting that active areas of research will always have mutually incompatible theories that are incoherent when taken together, but perhaps I misunderstood what you meant.
You cannot "define what a woman is", but you can "identify as a woman" (what do you identify as?).
You cannot really say why being trans-gender is okay, but being "trans-abled" (so called amputee identity disorder) is not. Nor is being "trans-racial" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypatia_transracialism_controv...). Even though we have long believed that race is more socially constructed than gender.
The whole concept of "gender studies" as it is now is one of the least scientifically sound academic fields (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grievance_studies_affair). The field is full of people openly questioning the very idea of trying to be an impartial researcher in search of "truth" and instead treat it as an activist project (https://hipatiapress.com/hpjournals/index.php/generos/articl... - an example of a paper that in plain text advocates for using male students of feminist studies as "viruses" spreading the good news).
Most of the theories are unfalsifiable anyway - and are no more scientific that angelology or hamartiology.
- Self-identity: There is nothing special about sex/gender as a property that distinguishes it as a special case for self-id from other empirical properties of human beings, such as height, eye color, or hair follicle shape. Barring special criteria, if we allow self-id for one property, we must allow it everywhere. Everything goes.
- If one truly believes that gender is distinct from sex, then what motivates one to "identify" as something else?
- Many if not most transgender individuals emulate the opposite sex and their associated gender stereotypes. Surgically-implanted breasts and facial hair are secondary sex characteristics—their presence has nothing to do with gender. How those characteristics are presented or hidden are gendered expressions, but not their mere presence.
- Epistemically, we only know what it is like to be the sex we are. We can attempt to understand "what it's like" to be the opposite sex, but we can never know. Therefore, one can "identify as" something else, but that something else is just a facsimile.
There might be some exceptions, like an airline won't accept a non-binary gender because of safety (weight distribution estimation). For a dating site it might make sense to allow anything.
Some planes have weighing systems built into the landing gear but most passenger flights are WAY under max weight (Airbus can tell the pilots if the weight/balance once underway doesn't match what the computer was told).
Male, female. Then "Don't specify". If you're datamining or have specific products for specific nonbinary consumers, add that.
For science and health, be as specific as required or ask for biological sex and demand "male" or "female" as appropriate.
(IMO).
If the form's request for sex is salient IRL, and the form-filer's sex will be apparent anyway, I don't think refusing or having an expectation of privacy about one's sex is reasonable.
This is not the case for most things, but I do think it goes beyond dating.
Like a salesperson asking for my email address: why do you need to know; what is this information used for?
Optimal gender selector: slot machine game with only one pull. Your pronouns are... cherry, apple, seven. Nice.
Many people prefer not to say for whatever reason, and people identifying as anything other than male or female aren't going to be a statistically significant minority for whatever data collection purpose you have.
But in any case, it's the context that matters. Most of the time you don't need to know a person's gender so just don't ask. Many other times gender is just a proxy for something else, such as a person's title. It's better to just ask for their title than their gender.
0. Not known
1. Male
2. Female
9. N/A
And it suits everyone.
Not Known is for when no answer is given. This option shouldn't be presented to the user, but is for the case where the field is optional.
"Not Listed" might be a better title for N/A?
Edit: Just saw your edit, makes more sense. Still feels a little on the edge for me, but we're all going to have different needs out of something like this.
The purpose of the standard is to give a numeric code which is language agnostic, for internationalization of forms and software.
Adding other genders isn't really applicable, since there's no common meaning or terminology across languages. M and F are universally recognized because they're grounded in reality: Every language in the world has a term for them.
The reasoning is that the word "other" can be alienating to some folks. The way we use the phrase "the other" to imply something foreign and untrustworthy in common language is a good example of why someone might not want to be called "other" in a form.
Now, this is a really minor thing, and won't impact 99.9+% of your users. But it could impact a few people! It's ultimately up to you whether you think it's clearer/more appropriate for your app to use "other", "not listed", or something else! My goal is not to be prescriptive, just to provide a little color and reasoning.
That's the opposite of what the parent was suggesting I think?