41–50 of 63 posts
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It certainly doesn't have to be user facing. Gender may be used to make user behavior modeling or prediction more accurate.
Fair point. For aggregate statistical analysis this may well be useful.
A lot of complaints, excluding the binary gender complaints, totaly forget about how languages like portuguese / french have male / female differences for nouns and other language constructs.
Let´s say I have to build a phrase where I have the user profession like engineer and I don't know upfront, for portuguese male would be "engenheiro" or " engenheira" for female. It does have a lot of practical uses. And with a big enough training, the decision to use for that user is on your hands.
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Nobody is saying a form can't have "other", etc. as an option. Just that someone's MVP that guesses gender is allowed to do that without political-correctness police. I fail to see how this API needs to accommodate transpeople in its 0.1 release.
I fail to see how this API needs to accommodate transpeople in its 0.1 release. You have failed at empathy. Speaking to the fluidity of human gender, "Other" is the majority of the spectrum and defaulting to binary is just as naïve as defaulting to ASCII as expected input in an application/API written in 2013. Restricting yourself that early in the release cycle (and I'm still dubious of the merits of this project),…
I agree 100% about the fluidity of human gender, but rather than lecture people via a form/api etc. it is probably simplest to have words that most people use like male and female and something ("other", "trans", "enlightened", whatever) for the 3rd option.
>> I just read your comment history and, if I'm not mistaken, you're already biased. Or would you care to elaborate what you wrote here? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6451454
First of all that was a joke in the spirit of the Hangover 2. Might not have been that funny, but was an attempt at humor based on what it was responding to.
Secondly, I believe you are "biased" :) because though it is chronologically juxtaposed to this comment that's probably a coincidence because if you go through my comment history it might be the only one touching on the subject (I think, no guarantees).
edit - I did make a prison rape joke a year+ ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4148572) but I actually heard from people that it was hysterical* because of the play on "backbone".
* hysterical is a sexist word, I know.
For Icelandic names, it's easy to identify the gender by looking at the last name. For example Bjarni Benediktsson is definitely male while Katrín Jakobsdóttir is definitely female. Another strategy is to use gender-neutral terms until you find out the gender, as asking directly might be considered rude in some cultures.
Is the first name in Iceland the family name or is there something else going on here?
"Benedikt-SSON is definitely male while Katrín Jakobs-DÓTIR is female"
(Hey, I swear it was before taking a look http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icelandic_name)
Bear in mind that in some languages this problem doesn't exist. In Polish for example, all female names end with an "a". There is not a single exception from that rule, so if you see a name ending with an "a" it is always a female name.
And in Iceland you can reliably determine gender from a person's second name, ending in either -son or -dottir.
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You want an enlightened view of the complexity of sensitively handling transgender people, non-binary genders and other gender and sexual minorities? This is Hacker News. Such enlightened thought is frowned on by our new brogrammer overlords. Here's your beer.
I agree, but it's interesting to think about how you would handle such information programmatically. Even for a case where you let users input their own gender, it's tricky. Do you simply add some extra genders? Male-to-female transexual, female-to-male transexual, intersex? No matter how many categories you add, you'll always annoy someone for missing them out. Does 'genderqueer' and 'genderfluid' count as the same…
In UI, provide a form with "Male, Female, Other". If they click other, reveal an optional text field where they can enter what they wish. Store.
Normalize the synonyms of male and female to lower case "male" and "female" when doing analysis. You don't have to get 100% normalisation. But you'll probably get 80-90%.
Contemplate what you are actually using the data for, listen to users.
To be honest, if you manage to not put transgender as a sexual orientation, you'll be doing better than most people.
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I fail to see how this API needs to accommodate transpeople in its 0.1 release. You have failed at empathy. Speaking to the fluidity of human gender, "Other" is the majority of the spectrum and defaulting to binary is just as naïve as defaulting to ASCII as expected input in an application/API written in 2013. Restricting yourself that early in the release cycle (and I'm still dubious of the merits of this project),…
>> Speaking to the fluidity of human gender, "Other" is the majority of the spectrum I agree 100% about the fluidity of human gender, but rather than lecture people via a form/api etc. it is probably simplest to have words that most people use like male and female and something ("other", "trans", "enlightened", whatever) for the 3rd option. >> I just read your comment history and, if I'm not mistaken, you're already…
it is probably simplest to have words that most people use like male and female and something...
There are no assumptions, no assignment of labels, not one bit of imposing your cultural norms on anyone else. The hardest part of getting over biases is acknowledging that you have them.
Learn some sensitivity, please.
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And in Iceland you can reliably determine gender from a person's second name, ending in either -son or -dottir.
Yes, but probably there are people in Iceland and Poland with foreign names. I know that you both wanted to explain that there is a rule in some language and it's nice to find out about that information, but as long as it doesn't apply to everybody, I don't consider this a solution.