Comment by Waterluvian | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Waterluvian | Hacker News Reader

These are amusing, silly, embarrassing, cringey, and somewhat kind of sad.

I think (and kind of hope) that we might be slowly progressing towards an era where we stop discretizing gender into specific labels. The ever-growing number of labels suggests, to me at least, that we've got a wrong fit for the data type. I think it's rather simple: a multi-dimensional continuum of gender identity cannot be reduced to specific names. But that concept of "discrete gender" is very well-entrenched in society, so there's an attempt to make it fit by adding more discrete categories.

I'm not sure this is "wrong" given that I don't think society/culture/whatnot ever turns on a dime. But I don't think this represents a satisfactory state.

A good place to start is to stop asking for "gender" when it's completely unnecessary for whatever service is being offered. I think most websites don't need to. And if they're legally obligated in some way, that needs fixing.

...Am I making any sense? I'm having a moment of struggling to render my thoughts to words.

No, that makes total sense to me. My general feeling about gender is, "must we?" I just get exhausted at the insistence some have on dragging gender into everything.

I get that it was socially convenient (for some) to compress the multi-dimensional continuum into a binary. (Or in many other cultures, something more complicated.) But I think at this point we either add the extra bits or just stop fussing about it so much. Hopefully both.

That said, I think it's entirely possible to usefully reduce a multi-dimensional space to discrete labels without excessive harm. Look at the actual space we live in, for example. Naming places and regions can be both useful and helpful as long as we don't take the names too seriously. I suspect the same is true for the space of gender. But as with physical space, I'd rather let people self-organize and self-identify than for one group to try to impose their boundaries upon others.

As a geographer I completely appreciate the value of quantization. You’re right, it can be done and has value in the abstraction. Though it’s rarely free of issue, too. I’m thinking about border disputes. Gerrymandering. Square cows.

100% on your last point about self determination. If people want to define themselves, by all means!

What you've described is what most non-binary, trans, and many queer folks believe. (And many allies as well.)

The idea that there are "only two" genders is, imo, a bit of a 20th century lens, and I expect we'll move to disentangle gender from what anatomy do you have.

I agree that asking for gender is fraught. I am non-binary, and I constantly have to either lie or just choose "Not sharing". The best systems just take a string and leave it at that.

The only example here where I imagine a legitimate use case is the (Canada only) one, where some idiotic beaucracy is in place to handle folks who need to update gender on government identification (like passports)

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