Today is the annual #TransDayOfVisibility.
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Practical thoughts:
1) actively encourage trans people into your community and spaces. Be explicitly clear that they are welcome.
2) promote and enforce robust codes of conduct, and ask for this in events to which you contribute.
3) report anti-trans content to your own instance admins, and to the hosting instance admin if it makes sense to do so.
4) buy stuff (if you are in a position to do so) from trans people. Loads of trans people in the fediverse have small shops selling cool bits and pieces (drawings, books, jewellery, and more).
5) if you control the design of forms and systems, do not collect gender information unless necessary (and I don't have a good example of when this might be, but someone might)
6) push back against laws and policies which discriminate against, or make life harder for, trans people. Write to your MP, and be vocal in your support.
@neil
re 5:
you're probably actually asking for pronouns or titles so you can address someone correctly in a invoice or email template. Ask for that directly, rather than asking what shape genitals they have, cos that's freaking weird dude.
Outside of medical or sex work contexts I can not think of a reason you really really need to know someone's gender.
"We need it for the advertising profile" isn't as good an excuse as you think it is. Splitting billions of people in to two buckets isn't an effective marketing strategy. -
@neil
re 5:
you're probably actually asking for pronouns or titles so you can address someone correctly in a invoice or email template. Ask for that directly, rather than asking what shape genitals they have, cos that's freaking weird dude.
Outside of medical or sex work contexts I can not think of a reason you really really need to know someone's gender.
"We need it for the advertising profile" isn't as good an excuse as you think it is. Splitting billions of people in to two buckets isn't an effective marketing strategy.> Outside of medical or sex work contexts I can not think of a reason you really really need to know someone's gender.
I didn't think of sex work contexts, but I was going to suggest that the medical context is only common context where I think knowing the gender and biological sex information is an absolute requirement (hormone effects on medication, birth control, etc etc)
Speaking as my employed-persona, it can help human data stewards with entity resolution, but it's really not a requirement (and isn't really, overly that helpful from a statistical pov because it's ~50/50 that it's mistakenly entered in the first place)
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> Outside of medical or sex work contexts I can not think of a reason you really really need to know someone's gender.
I didn't think of sex work contexts, but I was going to suggest that the medical context is only common context where I think knowing the gender and biological sex information is an absolute requirement (hormone effects on medication, birth control, etc etc)
Speaking as my employed-persona, it can help human data stewards with entity resolution, but it's really not a requirement (and isn't really, overly that helpful from a statistical pov because it's ~50/50 that it's mistakenly entered in the first place)
@feff @mindpersephone @neil but also note that a two or even three gender or sex choice might give you a lot of edge cases too that specifically hurt trans and intersex people. If you really want to know someone's hormonal state or if they have a specific organ it's probably more accurate to ask directly than to assume that all people who might reasonably pick woman have a uterus and an estrogen dominated endocrine system
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@neil
re 5:
you're probably actually asking for pronouns or titles so you can address someone correctly in a invoice or email template. Ask for that directly, rather than asking what shape genitals they have, cos that's freaking weird dude.
Outside of medical or sex work contexts I can not think of a reason you really really need to know someone's gender.
"We need it for the advertising profile" isn't as good an excuse as you think it is. Splitting billions of people in to two buckets isn't an effective marketing strategy.@mindpersephone @neil I can think of a couple of instances where knowing someone's gender can be useful or even a requirement:
1. Reporting purposes, e.g. gender pay gap (requirement in some jurisdictions, including the one I live in)
2. Insurance, where it can make a significant difference to pricing (though banned in some countries now)
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@neil
re 5:
you're probably actually asking for pronouns or titles so you can address someone correctly in a invoice or email template. Ask for that directly, rather than asking what shape genitals they have, cos that's freaking weird dude.
Outside of medical or sex work contexts I can not think of a reason you really really need to know someone's gender.
"We need it for the advertising profile" isn't as good an excuse as you think it is. Splitting billions of people in to two buckets isn't an effective marketing strategy.@mindpersephone @neil And even in a medical context, I need to know *why* the question is being asked, as "we need to know what your hormone levels were like as a teenager", "we need to know what your hormone levels are like now", "we need to know your genital structure" and "we need to know about your sex chromosomes" are all *different* questions, but all too often presented on forms as just "Sex (M/F): ...." or "Gender (M/F): ...."
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I can't say for certain because I don't work in medical settings - but from an analyst perspective, knowing the proportion of patients with non-matching sex and gender can help policymakers ensure appropriate service provision and funding is in place (if we had a kinder government in place)
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@mindpersephone @neil I can think of a couple of instances where knowing someone's gender can be useful or even a requirement:
1. Reporting purposes, e.g. gender pay gap (requirement in some jurisdictions, including the one I live in)
2. Insurance, where it can make a significant difference to pricing (though banned in some countries now)
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@feff @mindpersephone @neil but also note that a two or even three gender or sex choice might give you a lot of edge cases too that specifically hurt trans and intersex people. If you really want to know someone's hormonal state or if they have a specific organ it's probably more accurate to ask directly than to assume that all people who might reasonably pick woman have a uterus and an estrogen dominated endocrine system
@emilychwiggy I can at least say from the space that I work in that we have better data points than gender/sex and train our stewards to recognise trans and intersex cases where our matching engine fails or is unsure. We don't need to know the organs someone has as that's not our remit
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Today is the annual #TransDayOfVisibility.
*waves at all the lovely trans people here*. I am delighted to share this space with you.
There is still so much more than we - cis people - can and must do to make the world safer and friendlier for trans people.
Trans rights are human rights.
🤩 -
@neil
re 5:
you're probably actually asking for pronouns or titles so you can address someone correctly in a invoice or email template. Ask for that directly, rather than asking what shape genitals they have, cos that's freaking weird dude.
Outside of medical or sex work contexts I can not think of a reason you really really need to know someone's gender.
"We need it for the advertising profile" isn't as good an excuse as you think it is. Splitting billions of people in to two buckets isn't an effective marketing strategy.@mindpersephone @neil where GDPR and GDPR inspired laws apply, people should take a look at Mousse c. SNCF as guidance for pronouns (https://curia.europa.eu/juris/documents.jsf?num=C-394/23).
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@neil
re 5:
you're probably actually asking for pronouns or titles so you can address someone correctly in a invoice or email template. Ask for that directly, rather than asking what shape genitals they have, cos that's freaking weird dude.
Outside of medical or sex work contexts I can not think of a reason you really really need to know someone's gender.
"We need it for the advertising profile" isn't as good an excuse as you think it is. Splitting billions of people in to two buckets isn't an effective marketing strategy.@mindpersephone @neil fair, interesting perspective
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Today is the annual #TransDayOfVisibility.
*waves at all the lovely trans people here*. I am delighted to share this space with you.
There is still so much more than we - cis people - can and must do to make the world safer and friendlier for trans people.
@neil thank you
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@neil
re 5:
you're probably actually asking for pronouns or titles so you can address someone correctly in a invoice or email template. Ask for that directly, rather than asking what shape genitals they have, cos that's freaking weird dude.
Outside of medical or sex work contexts I can not think of a reason you really really need to know someone's gender.
"We need it for the advertising profile" isn't as good an excuse as you think it is. Splitting billions of people in to two buckets isn't an effective marketing strategy.The counterexample here is airlines, which need to know the gender as written in the gender-marker field of the passport. Some ask this directly, but an increasing number ask for title, from a short list of something like Mr, Ms, Mx. They also say that this must match what is written in the passport. The problem is, my passport explicitly says that my title is Doctor, which is not one of their options (and which is gender-neutral, so wouldn’t help with what they want).
The underlying advice of ‘ask for exactly what you have a legitimate reason to need’ still holds.
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