Poll: What is your gender?
I'm kind of curious how the division male/female is on HN, so if it doesn't offend your sense of privacy...
What? You covered every case. I guess 'other' refers to eunuchs and bigender, but why does there need to be a transgender entry? Don't they identify with the sex they switched to?
For me, the word gender refers to a configuration of organs and only has a secondary meaning for speaking about identity, but the secondary meaning is weak and it is better to speak about sexual identity, a phrase that covers the concept much better and directly.
[^] I was looking for a word that wouldn't be insulting. I hope I succeeded.
So for physical sex the "bonus options" (i'm excluding transgender in all cases, since it has its own explicit option) would include, but not be limited to: intersexed (itself an enormous list of totally different and interesting conditions), eunuch (a couple of options here as well), someone who has altered their body in a way that does not fall into eunuch or transgender, or that sort of thing.
Mental sex is a big one, since we don't really understand it and lots of people have slightly different ways of describing themselves. Just a short list: bi-gendered, neither, androgynes (who might say they're different from the bi-gendered--not both, not neither, but somewhere in between), non-conformist male or female (to the point where they would put "other" despite falling more into one category), various cultural versions, and so on.
Behavioral sex almost defies categorization, since it's often explicitly an attempt to defy categorization. You've got crossdressers (who might or might not choose "other" over male or female--or over transgender too, i suppose--and who might be aiming at "passing" or who might be explicitly aiming at perceieved crossdressing), androgynes, various quasi-genders that show up in the queer community ("butch", "femme", etc--though i wouldn't expect these to choose "other", they certainly could if we're talking about behavior and presentation), those who choose to "perform" gender as a political act, etc.
I'm kind of being lazy, but it's a complicated question...
Thanks for expanding my perspective in a useful way.
(Edit: and just as i post, the poll is edited. Now all us weird people can vote, too! Yay!)
(I don't know about over-representing females, though. It's hard to say without asking a bunch...)
Personally - and in contradiction to the link you posted - I'm assuming that people are either not going to report in or are going to tell the truth and that the chances of lying/not reporting in are about the same across genders.
With lying being very very low.
I started this poll because of this http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=749514 link posted (and dead within seconds) by a user that identified herself as a female by her name in the forum nickname.
It made me wonder how many of the anonymous nicknames belonged to females because for the most part all the names that I can relate to a gender on the forum with the exception of DaniFong belong to males.
Also, gender anonymity offers an additional freedom: in an age that points out and encourages women engineers and girl gamers, I would like to succeed or fail on my own merits. Anonymity guarantees that I do.
Hence, my current pseudonym, "Dove". It is believably feminine but not particularly so, and is about as non-stealth as I've ever been.
It shouldn't require you to be stealthy to be taken serious but I fully understand.
In my life at least one female programmer has had a pretty good influence on my development, here's to you Jenny Yip, wherever you are today :)
I'm part of a group of people that are involved with alternative energy, one of the guys there called himself 'fungus'. Everybody assumed him to be a male in is 30's, imagine the surprise when I found out he was a 13 year old whip-smart kid. Holding his own in a community where the average age is probably around 40.
If you're in that situation it's probably quite comparable to what you have to put up with. People will not give you 'full weight' because of who you are, instead of letting your creations stand on their own.
For a long time I thought about how to set up an abuse free forum, and my naive idea to require people to register with their real name went out the window when I realized that this guy, who is one of the best contributors there would not have joined at all.
One day...
The claim about voluntary response polls was especially with reference to your idea of comparing the previous poll's results to the results of today's poll. Both polls might be completely unrepresentative of the population of interest. Assuming that people who come forward voluntarily answer questions truthfully does not assure as that the people who come forward to answer are a representative sample of the whole population.
http://aurora.wells.edu/~srs/Math151-Fall02/Litdigest.htm
Perhaps the question should have been do you have an SRY gene on a Y chromosome - or (nearly equivalent) "did you have at least one testis at birth". Which would probably be closest to the questioners intent.
If a person dresses, acts, and thinks of themselves as a male would, would it be useful to know what chromosomes that person has?
That being given, when someone asks about gender or sex, I'm assuming that they are in fact interested in my biological properties, not my self-identification (which is/should be obvious).
http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html
A Harvard President lost his job over remarks similar to what you just made. And yet, we could observe that in aggregate, men and women have different hormone balances, biochemistry, reproductive systems, feel different degrees of different emotions, account for very different sorts and frequencies of crime, purchase very different products and services, and so on and so forth.
So yes, while you are factually correct in many ways, I am surprised you are still standing. The idea is not a pleasant one to most people. Perhaps because it can too easily be carried too far, or misapplied, or that the generalization will be mis-applied to a particular individual who will be offended, and certainly our society puts a very high premium on not offending anyone. Or maybe I am off in my thinking, but truth aside, I remain surprised that you have not piled on for making such a comment.
There are very reliable statistics that show pay discrepancies in the favour of men. For discussion of that to be taboo would be very bad.
Not always as obvious as you might think! It's the exceptions that are important, here.
Shouldn't your biology actually be more obvious than your gender? I mean, being somewhat of a devil's advocate here.
"Transgender" is pretty straightforward.
Come on, this is HN, you don't think humans are they only ones here do you?
There is no greater significance to it than that.
(Smooth, by the way ^_^)
Simply a side note:
We all have written our gender not only in our body, but even in our (invisible) souls.
Now, to all of you thinking that one is able to actually change ones gender: no, sorry, that's not possible.
Your soul will remain the same, and anybody really knowing you, will not note any difference...
So, you would judge for others how they are allowed to feel and you claim to know them better than they can know themselves and all that without even a look at the individual you are addressing ?
I don't think that has anything to do with being politically correct or not, simply with live and let live.
I'm not very current on 'invisible souls', but even those are private property last I checked and the only person who knows them close enough to make the call happens to be the one to express themselves.
To say that you have knowledge that overrules a persons feelings about themselves is a little far reaching.
If somebody would come along and told you how you can or can not feel about yourself and how someone else would be able to perceive something about you that you yourself would disagree with in such a fundamental way (it is your identity we are talking about here) how would that feel ?
Gender, however, is psychological -- it's how you perceive yourself in relation to societal norms. And it can be fluid, like any other psychological process.
Consider someone that told you they were "feeling mad." You can not reasonably refute that statement, as it's purely a statement of internal state and perception. Gender is the same way.
There is at least some, if not a majority of biological cause(as opposed to environmental) behind why some people who are one sex identify with another.
I know anecdote != data, but I have seen an obscure one-woman theater show done by an Australian actor; the theme of the show was "gender" and how little of it has anything to do with your physiology. She comes to stage in drag dressed as a man, but no facial hair; a weird, over aggressive super-macho man. Throughout the performance, she removes one clothing item at a time, and by the time she has stripped there was just a naked, aggressive douche-bag staring back at me. It was one of the profoundest acts of human performance I have ever seen. She is a very attractive women outside character; in-character, it was just another dude at the gym, I now remember that I don't even recall looking at her genitals, I wasn't looking for clues or confirmation, just annoyed there is a naked guy on front of my girlfriend.
I mean, that's the other option, isn't it?