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by defaultnamehere 3624 days ago
'gender’: 1, // 1 is female, 0 is male. C’mon Tinder that’s not how gender works

C'mon Tinder.

4 comments

It's a float value.
The funny part is that you're getting downvoted when it's actually defined as a float.

Like, you weren't kidding. They honestly made it a float. What.

"Gender fluid"
Facebook supports a third gender
But that could be represented with an int, right? Why float?
Needs to be complex, apparently.
Only one axis? How discriminatory. :P
Please don't Reddit-ify HackerNews.
I feel the same way. As time has gone on, it's tending to be more and more reddit-y
"Infinite deminsional gender space"
Nah, it's a string.
Are there more than two genders now?
Yes, and I'm not sure why he's getting downvoted. This is a legitimate Facebook feature.

Gender can be either Male, Female, or Custom, and Facebook gives you the option to choose which gender pronouns you prefer. Thus, to see it represented as a boolean is unusual. I'm curious as to what the value of that field is when a user has chosen Facebook's custom gender display options.

'Custom' wouldn't work in Tinder. They should have at least a third option but considering they show matches based on a gender preference having dozens of gender options will make the app quite useless as you'll be spreading people who would be interested in each other but use different terms to describe their gender into a wide variety of groups.
I am sticking with the biological definition.
There are more than two options in conservative biology as well. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermaphrodite

The very first sentence of your link says "both male and female". In nature they have the ability to act as both male or female.
Are you claiming that it's equal to either only male, or only female? If not, then how exactly would you provide the information that an organism is both with a single required bit, where 0 is defined as female, and 1 as male?
The biological definition is not real. Binary genders are a trend, not a certainty in nature.
I was attracted to hard sciences because the subjectivity of things like psychology turned me off. Statements like yours make me concerned that liberal arts departments are going to try to make science fit their narrative. The roles of male and female is one of the most universally common behaviors across specifies. If I grew a vagina and had a baby it doesn't make me a different gender. It means I took on some of the attributes of a human female. At that point I wouldn't consider myself male or female. But I certainly wouldn't try to make up a 3rd gender for my unique situation.
That's a very positivist approach, and I hope the liberal arts continue to erode such binary based thinking in the sciences as I believe that philosophy makes better scientists. . And so what if you "made up" another gender? Gender is socially constructed and is not a real, concrete construct. I'm sorry that considering concepts and people as unable to be hyper taxonomized by artificial constraints is inconvenient to you and more valuable than treating the identities of others with respect.
But are there more than two biological genders? Or are we just talking about "my special identity" genders?
I think its more about the shape.
> Are there more than two genders now?

That question needs unpacked further:

(1) Are there more than two gender identities? Yes.

(2) Are there more than two socially ascribed genders? Yes, given that (1) has achieved a significant degree of acceptance, as has aligning ascribed gender with identity.

(3) Are there more than two grammatical genders? Depends on the language.

(4) Are there more than two arrangements of sex-related biological traits? Yes

(5) Are there more than two of any of the items in #1, #2, or #4 on which people might preferences that would be relevant in a dating app? Probably.

yes, as there always has been in the grammar of English and many other languages.
The commenter your responding to is most likely using "gender" to refer to the concept you would describe as "sex". That is, the biological characteristic of being male or female rather than a grammatical concept.
Sex isn't binary either.
In the vast majority of cases it is.
A trait either is binary or is not (being binary is, itself, binary.) A trait that the vast majority of the time takes on one of two values, but other times takes on other values, is not binary.
No, I would definitely agree that male is negative and female is positive. Unless there's a race condition.
No worries, Tinder doesn't ask for your race.
It's all the same on the inside anyway.
My gender is 88