[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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