[Noisebridge-discuss] Gender & Technology followups from 5Mof
Annalee Newitz
annalee at gmail.com
Thu Sep 24 22:15:27 UTC 2009
On Thu, Sep 24, 2009 at 3:10 PM, Al Billings <albill at openbuddha.com> wrote:
>
> On Sep 24, 2009, at 12:49 PM, Jason Dusek wrote:
>
>> The term "gender" is probably too ambiguous and too loaded to
>> serve as the name of a form field in which people specify more
>> nuanced aspects of their sexuality. Maybe we need to coin a
>> term? It goes without saying, I think, that people generally
>> encounter the word "gender" on census forms, Equal
>> Opportunities Act forms and health insurance forms where the
>> term is taken to specify whether one is equipped to bear
>> children; using "gender" in another sense makes it both more
>> difficult to augment that kind of information and more
>> difficult to communicate what is really being discussed.
>
> Gender is very open ended. I generally think that both "sex" and
> "gender" should be used together with "sex" usually being a much
> simpler term (and, no, I'm not going to get into a long discussion to
> defend this!). :-)
I've always liked the male/female/other/decline to state options myself.
--
Annalee Newitz
editor and time distortion field operator: io9.com
writer: techsploitation.com
activist: cpsr.org
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