[eridius]

Unfortunately, yes. It's a shame to see your comment currently at the bottom, since it's the point I wanted to make.

I think the example of the Norwegian tax system was a good one, because it demonstrates the article's point without any risk of discrimination. But the earlier example of Gender is a terrible one. Gender is more than just whether you have dangly bits hanging off your pelvis, it's also a very critical part of a person's core identity, and there are a lot of different variations. Lumping everything other than cis-gendered male/female into "its complicated" is a great way to make anyone who doesn't fit into the gender binary feel like they don't belong.

Perhaps a more compelling example would be race. I know there's a fairly standard set of racial categories used when asked to self-report race (e.g. in those optional questions you can fill out when doing various standardized tests), which are fairly broad, and I'm pretty sure the last one is "Other". But at least with race, nobody feels like their racial identity is not recognized as legitimate by a large percentage of the world population (which is a serious problem that non-cisgendered or non-gender-binary people have). But even here, imagine if the test just said "White, Black, or It's Complicated". It should be easy to imagine that a lot of people would be pretty outraged over that.

All that said, if you capture the main categories, and then have a free-form "Other" that people can fill in the details, that's similar in spirit to "It's Complicated" but a lot more palatable. Heck, depending on why you're asking the question, you might not even need to save the answer to Other (e.g. if you're only ever looking at data in aggregate, although even then you might want to pull out keywords from Other in order to report more groupings than the form offers), assuming the people filling in the form have no way of knowing whether you're keeping that data or not. So in the backend you might still have the equivalent of "It's Complicated". But how you present that to the user is important.

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Edited to add: Looking back at this, I realize that it looks like I'm just talking about whether the user feels fairly represented, which is related to but not the same thing as whether the form actually discriminates against minorities. So on that note, I just want to emphasize the importance of picking an appropriate set of main categories, even if you have an Other, such that very few people should ever resort to using the Other, and those that do should not end up getting unfair treatment as a result. For example, if policy is made based on the demographics of a particular set of people, that policy needs to account for anyone who doesn't fit into the standard groupings. If you just have e.g. "Male, Female, It's Complicated", policy is almost certainly going to be made based on the standard gender binary, without accounting for anyone who doesn't fit.

And on a related note to that, it's not even just the person filling out the form who might feel unfairly represented by a poor choice of categories. Anyone else who does fit into those categories is going to see the categories as a reinforcing of their worldview, i.e. anyone who sees "Male or Female" as a set of gender choices will just be reinforcing the incorrect idea that everyone fits into the gender binary, and this helps cause discrimination.

[rjknight]

This problem sneaks up on us, because in non-emotive contexts it's normally acceptable to say "what percentage of users will be affected by this?", and if it's below a certain percentage it may be the case that it's not worth the cost of fixing the problem. However, whilst it's acceptable to give a degraded service to people who use Internet Explorer 6, it being presumed that they have the option of using a more modern browser, it's not acceptable to do the same to people with non-binary gender identities (I mean, you can do it, and plenty of people do, but it will upset at least some people and you're not going to have any good answer for their complaints). What looks like an edge case from an engineering perspective looks like a fundamental part of their identity to the person who doesn't fit the available categories.

In these cases, I think there are two approaches that satisfy the requirements of simplicity and humanity: think very carefully about whether you need that field and, if not, just remove it; alternatively, make it a free input field. If you think that collecting as much data as possible is a good thing, then the free input field gives you the best possible scenario - the strictly most accurate, detailed data direct from the person who is in the best position to tell you. If you don't need it, then just don't ask.

[eridius]

Of course, depending on why you're asking the question in the first place, a free input field can be a problem, because there can be many ways of expressing the same concept. So if you have a free-form input, you're going to need to figure out how to analyze that data to produce the groupings that you really want. But if you are capable of doing that, then absolutely, a free-form input field is the best way of avoiding unintentionally discriminating against anyone.

There's also a distinction here between questions that are objective vs subjective. Many would argue gender is objective, but they'd be wrong, it's subjective. You can't look at a person and tell them what their gender is; it's something only they can decide. So a free-form input field for Gender would be great, because everybody can feel fairly represented. But if you're asking for, say, Age, that's objective, and you can get away with letting the user choose from a set of ranges without any risk of discrimination (assuming you cover the full range of ages of all possible users).

[brudgers]

So if you have a free-form input, you're going to need to figure out how to analyze that data to produce the groupings that you really want.

That suggests the root of the problem. Presumably the model is based on identifying a particular feature of the world as worth measuring [e.g. gender]. But boxing gender [e.g. masculine | feminine ] is not a feature of the world and the boxing means that the model does not correspond to the world in regard to gender, even though that was the purpose of capturing gender in the model. The idea of "getting the groupings I want" means my methods are suboptimal scientifically. The objective truths are in the data not in my interpretation.

[shaftoe]

Sometimes, you just want to find out if someone is a girl or a guy.

Not every question needs to become a forum for minorities to express themselves. Not every worksheet or webform should worry about "reinforcing the incorrect idea that everyone fits into the gender binary."

Walking on eggshells...

[eridius]

This comment here is a perfect representation of the problem. Most people do fit into the worldview of "girl or guy". But plenty of people don't fit into the gender binary at all,, which means there's no way to find out if they're "a girl or a guy", because the answer is "neither". And there's plenty of people who do self-identify as one of those 2 genders, but it's a different gender than most of the world insists they should identify as (I'm talking about transgender people here, if that's not immediately obvious), and they may not necessarily be open about it yet, or open to everyone, and being forced to pick "guy or girl" may therefore be problematic because either they have to give an answer that they may not be comfortable with everyone knowing, or else they have to give an answer that doesn't match their personal identity (the ideal solution in this particular case is to allow them to give no answer).

> Not every question needs to become a forum for minorities to express themselves.

This is perhaps the most problematic part of your comment. If a question allows the majority to express themselves, but denies that same right to minorities, or in fact refuses to acknowledge that the minorities even exist, that's absolutely discrimination. And perhaps even worse, when you have questions like "what gender are you?" that are asked often and where most questioners only accept male / female, that reinforces the incorrect idea that gender is binary and that there are only 2 answers, and effectively tacitly condones other forms of discrimination centered around the same question of personal identity. Which comes right back to your question. The reason you think it's perfectly ok to say "Sometimes, you just want to find out if someone is a girl or a guy" is because you're part of a culture in which the majority of people either refuse to acknowledge that there are more possible answers to that question or think it's perfectly acceptable to pretend that the minorities don't even exist.

[shaftoe]

And the fact that a M/F radio button is being called discrimination shows just how far we've come since the days of firehoses, police dogs, and internment camps.

[eridius]

It sounds like you're being dismissive, like you're saying discrimination is only discrimination if someone is suffering bodily harm or being deprived of their constitutionally-granted rights. I hope that's not how you meant it.

[taejo]

Then you can have a radio button:

   Girl or guy
   ( ) Yes
   ( ) No