[zeta0134]

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.

[k-mcgrady]

'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.

[collyw]

I am sticking with the biological definition.

[Strom]

There are more than two options in conservative biology as well. [1]

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

[mrits]

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.

[Strom]

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?

[legodt]

The biological definition is not real. Binary genders are a trend, not a certainty in nature.

[mrits]

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.

[legodt]

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.

[mrits]

There is a difference between binary based thinking and thinking about binary.

[legodt]

Very good point, but in nature a binary of sexes is not absolute. You are applying the artificial gender binary to sexes, which in nature are often messy and unclear. This can range from species that change sex organs as they mature, take on different reproductive roles dependent on situations, and even manifests in a statistically significant amount of humans born with both sets of reproductive organs. Assuming two sexes, then going on to conflate that with gender, demonstrates only an elementary understanding of reproductive biology.

[curried_haskell]

But are there more than two biological genders? Or are we just talking about "my special identity" genders?