Flutterby™! : Gender & Flexibility

Avery Morrow: I’m Dropping Diaspora, This Site Is Now Closed is worth reading because, as Lyn tweeted:

Wow this is like a perfect case study of an amazingly ignorant software developer. Shames zir profession, really.

The particular complaint is that gender was made a text box in the Diaspora code. Sarah Mei describes why she made that change.

But the real issue, and one that I learned long ago when I wrote code to coerce users to enter phone numbers using the area code rules of the day, and then had to figure out how to ship a patch when the phone company relaxed the area code rules, is that if you can derive the information from your data, you shouldn't throw away information.

The users want to tell you about their language and use of it. If you need things like pronouns, do something like:

   if (gender == "male" || gender == "m") return "his";
   if (gender == "female" || gender == "f") return "her";
   return "zir";

And then as you learn more about how your users define themselves ("butch", "femme", what-have-you, maybe you give "zir" to the kinksters and "hir" to the pomo-feminists) the structure defined by your code can expand to encompass the structure used in the real world. If you want to offer autocomplete to suggest a standard, that's great, but you'll go much further if you can let the users define the ontology, rather than imposing one on them.

See also: Sarah Dopp: “Gender is a Text Field” (Diaspora, backstory, and context)