[tommorris]

You want an enlightened view of the complexity of sensitively handling transgender people, non-binary genders and other gender and sexual minorities?

This is Hacker News. Such enlightened thought is frowned on by our new brogrammer overlords. Here's your beer.

[quesera]

Wow, that's misplaced hostility.

If you wanted to deride the fact that many folks here won't spent multiples of effort on special, experimental, no-right-answers-and-likely-to-be-criticized-for-it-if-you-even-try cases that affect minuscule fractions of their potential user base, well...get in line behind the IE5 advocates, I guess.

Someone recommends using a free form entry for gender. No amount of normalization will fix the "ham sandwich" entries (except that we know they are nearly all male), so you'd trade the integrity of a small percentage of your data for the appearance of "making an effort" for the vanishingly small percentage. Net fail.

Just to be clear, my primary feeling here is that -- in the hypothetical case where gender matters -- you're best served by keeping it simple: (female | male | other/it's complicated | prefer not to answer). This should serve all cases equally.

[eksith]

The solution is already available by the very same folks who would just as easily think nothing of presenting that "female | male | other/it's complicated | prefer not to answer" field though.

In lieu of questioning who the user is, may I suggest see what the user does instead? Behavior, in the end, is the real key to unlocking demographic potential. What purchases are made, what items were clicked on, where they had browsed and what titles on pages attracted them on the site can tell far more than a simple field.

This, of course, takes time and testing plus accumulation of data. But since a fair number of HN users also like to exalt the status of "Big Data", there's a more productive use for it.

Don't try to finagle who the user is or isn't. Just find out what they want.

[batemanesque]

ah yes, because trying to be decent & inclusive to persecuted minorities is the comparable to supporting an obsolete browser - yr analogy is a perfect illustration of the grotesque intersection between the Valley & bigotry.

also, "the hypothetical case where gender matters" is a glorious illustration of straight privilege

[quesera]

> a glorious illustration of straight privilege

Gender has nothing to do with orientation. Please don't propagate such normative misunderstandings.

If I may restate for clarity: in most cases of software implementation, a user's gender is not important data (obvious exceptions include medical and related fields).

Generally, gender should not be requested. Where requested, it should not be required. Where required, one should have no compunction against answering randomly.

That's prerogative, not privilege.

[batemanesque]

opted for "straight privilege" as an alternative to "cisprivilege"that I thought HN people were more likely to understand. I'd have thought it was obvious I wasn't actually talking about orientation

[IsaacL]

I agree, but it's interesting to think about how you would handle such information programmatically. Even for a case where you let users input their own gender, it's tricky.

Do you simply add some extra genders? Male-to-female transexual, female-to-male transexual, intersex? No matter how many categories you add, you'll always annoy someone for missing them out. Does 'genderqueer' and 'genderfluid' count as the same category, or different ones?

Maybe just add a free text form for people to input their gender? But then it's impossible to normalise if you want to do any analysis.

Maybe we should just be enlightened and ignore gender altogether? But sometimes knowing your user's gender is really important, and it seems weird to discard this data because some people don't fit. Maybe the best compromise is simply to have 3 categories - male/female/other - though even then you'll get complaints. "Who are you calling 'other'?"

Anyone have any other thoughts?

PS: I seem to see way more people in tech complaining about brogrammers than actual brogrammers.

[tommorris]

Easy. Store in your database (or whatever) as free text.

In UI, provide a form with "Male, Female, Other". If they click other, reveal an optional text field where they can enter what they wish. Store.

Normalize the synonyms of male and female to lower case "male" and "female" when doing analysis. You don't have to get 100% normalisation. But you'll probably get 80-90%.

Contemplate what you are actually using the data for, listen to users.

To be honest, if you manage to not put transgender as a sexual orientation, you'll be doing better than most people.

[IsaacL]

Good answer, that sounds like a reasonable compromise.

[batemanesque]

re: the brogrammer thing, that's little more than a sign of the breadth of their insidious reach...