[Noisebridge-discuss] Gender & Technology followups from 5Mof

[Sai Emrys]

I really enjoyed your talk. To follow up on our followup, something I
was just thinking.

IMHO, from real world experience writing and maintaining a major app
w/ a hookup-my-users part to it: As a web app developer, I don't
really *care* about what your gender is, in detail. As a person, I do.

As a dev, what is important to me is what *groups* you belong to - how
I can lump you with other people and thereby treat you in some way
that's useful to us both. If I were to take an exhaustive
self-inventory of gender expression, that would be perhaps useful on a
profile page or the like - something where you are communicating on a
one on one basis with other people - but for coding purposes, groups
of one are worse than useless (because they're clutter).

And nobody is going to tell me "hey I'm looking for a [insert your
particular genderqueerness here]". They might, however, tell me "I'm
into the 'other' gendered people". (Note, the same is true of any
other trait you might care to name, like religion, sex drive, type of
humor, etc. Only the first pass is really useful as a filter, unless
you start getting into more sophisticated stuff like OKCupid's
question-matching algorithm, where the answer to any particular
question isn't especially important, and they're used in a more
large-scale-correlation fashion.)

So I'd like to draw a distinction between how you identify, as a
complex sociopolitical yada yada, and how others identify *you* as a
first pass.

Yes, it's pigeonholing, but that is a necessary thing to do because we
can't predictively guess all the details of all the possible variants
we might come across. Coded categories are for rough, first pass sorts
of filtering; anything more detailed and ornate - and difficult to
sort - has to take place after that, when you get to know the person
that the yenta picked out as a plausible match. I'm fine with having
catchall categories (e.g. relationship status 'complicated' or
'partnered but available [under some circumstances]'; gender 'other';
etc etc), but categorize you I must, or I do neither of us a favor.

Thoughts?

- Sai

PS FWIW, I'm very queer-friendly but not queer-political; I don't see
my own (moderately neutral/androgynous) gender as something I make a
big deal of. But as I said, there's me-me and
dealing-with-300k-users-me, and those are very different perspectives.