Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Gender

gistfile1.md

1. There are two and only two genders.
2. Okay, then there are two and only two biological genders.
3. Gender is determined solely by biology.
4. Okay, it’s mostly determined by biology, right?
5. Please tell me it’s determined by DNA.
6. Gender can be reliably determined through visual means. After all, no man would ever wear a burka.
7. Once gender is set, it never changes.
8. Even if the gender can change, it will only change from the one value to the other value.
9. Only one gender can be “active” at the same time.
10. We’re tracking gender now, so we’ve always tracked it.
11. I only need to be concerned with human gender.

Source: http://www.cscyphers.com/blog/2012/06/28/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-gender/

I only need to be concerned with human gender.

Made me think of this, haha.

A person has a single, legal gender

• A person knows what their legal sex/gender is (I currently do not know what mine is in the UK, where I live)

Here's another falsehood to add:

• The design requirement forcing a user to specify gender in the first place should not be questioned.

Also:

• The system I am working with will have only one Gender enum
• Ok, then all the Gender enums will have the same genders
• Ok, then all the Gender enums will have Male and Female

One system I work on has no fewer than six different Gender enum types, only some of which are for people, the rest are for Tournament systems, e.g. is this a Men’s competition, Women’s, or both.

Which leads to another falsehood:

• All Gender enums that have Female mean the same thing and can be compared freely.

@BU-AWolfe
As I noted in my earlier comment (and as others have too), even from a strictly legal standpoint, that's not actually the case. There isn't a single, coherent legal gender for all people. For example, in the US your birth certificate, your passport, your driver's license could each say different things and the procedures to change each are different. All states allow changing gender on your driver's license, but many don't allow changing the birth certificate. Some states allow non-binary option (X instead of M or F) for driver's license. The federal government allows changing the gender on the passport and the procedures is easier than some conservative states have for changing driver's license but doesn't allow third option (like some other countries do, including Malta and Bangladesh). Transgender children will sometimes be in the public school system as their gender but won't have changed their legal gender anywhere else as they are minors and can't do so. So even from a government perspective, it's not clear cut and actually generally not a simple matter of birth assignment. Even your birth certificate could say something different if you had it changed.

So this isn't just an ideological thing like some people try to make it - if you as a programmer assume that a record from two different databases must not be referring to the same individual simply because the two databases have different gender markers, you are making a bad assumption.

"this isn't political"
"this isn't ideology"

what if i told you that everything is political and critically structuring ideas is good actually?

my existence is political. all ethics emerge from ideology. stop fearing these words just because fools use them like bludgeons.

@BU-AWolfe

The reason this looks like alt-sex propaganda is that very few of these 'myths' have to do with programming. ...

Dang. I never thought I'd see the day when a CS lecturer at Boston U, clearly old enough to know better, would start throwing around inane terms like "alt-sex propaganda", as if they were some paranoid villager somewhere in the hinterlands of a totalitarian kleptocracy.

@thomasjwebb

but many don't allow changing the birth certificate.

Almost all do, there are only a handful that do not.

The federal government allows changing the gender on the passport and the procedures is easier than some conservative states have for changing driver's license but doesn't allow third option

The US federal government opened up applications for passports with X as the sex marker to the general public on April 11th 2022. They are also now issuing cards for trusted traveler programs (e.g. Global Entry, Nexus, Sentri) with X as the gender marker as well.

Change the title to: things some programmers say and I don't like.

@muhammadmp97, these are things some programmers say and then write code that enforces their opinion on their users. Everyone on this thread is arguing about whether "gender ideology" belongs in a developer's head, but that's missing and proving the point. Regardless of whether you agree with the original 11 points, these are things that a developer, regardless of whether they personally agree with the point or not, should know is not universal and is not a fundamental "truth". It doesn't matter if gender is an int or a bool or a string, it matters that if you are writing a database that doesn't allow people with "X" instead of "F" or "M", the you are no different from the developers that don't allow people with the last name "Null".