
When Binary Code Won’t Accommodate Nonbinary People - royapakzad
https://slate.com/technology/2019/10/gender-binary-nonbinary-code-databases-values.html
======
planetzero
"cisgender"

Who gets to decide when a person should use the word 'cisgender'? I'm being
told what I have to call you, yet this word is thrown around as if I had any
choice in the matter.

------
core-questions
This article, if read like it's satire, is absolutely hilarious. The only
shame is that it's not satire.

> “programs can only have two genders and you can’t change your gender and how
> people changing their gender broke the university’s system…as though trans
> and enby folx are an inconvenience to code.”

Any change is an "inconvenience to code". If I have to start accommodating
_any_ new fields or _any_ new values in an enum, it's an "inconvenience".
Obviously that's relative to the database in question; in some a change would
be as easy as ten minutes work, in others such a change would need to be
threaded through a thousand different places and so it wouldn't be as easy.

This has nothing to do with the meaning of the field itself.

> The reason for this has to do with both hegemonic heteronormativity and
> math. Everything you do on a computer is secretly math, and that’s the
> trouble.

This is a bizzare statement. Computers only work at all because of math; you
could not design a functioning computer without something math-like being
involved.

Heteronormativity (well, probably what the author means is "cisnormativity",
if that's a word either) - I take this to mean the implicit assumption that a
'gender' field in a system only needs to have two values.

> Let’s say that you have an old system where you have a field name Sex, of
> type Boolean.

This is actually very unlikely to be stored as a boolean, though under the
hood a minimal amount of space will be used to store the information. An enum
would be more appropriate, or a single-character field perhaps. Otherwise, my
gender would be "true"... or would it be "false"? Maybe we can label the field
is_male....

Technical quibbles aside, though, the more important thing to note is that it
was a completely safe, politically correct, reasonable choice to implement
such a 'gender' field until literally only a few years ago. This article
castigates and demonizes the "heteronormative" programmer for simply
implementing things with what seemed like common sense to everyone then and
still many people now, and goes further to insult the entire foundation of,
well, everything.

> The messiness of the “real” world and people’s shifting identities are
> rarely consistent with the sleek empiricism required to effectively do the
> math that is under the hood in computers. This is most obvious when it comes
> to the gender binary and binary representation in computer systems.

There's not that much math involved here, though, is there? This really
touches more on the "phallogocentrism" concept (
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phallogocentrism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phallogocentrism)
):

> In post-structuralist, especially feminist, theory: a structure or style of
> thought, speech, or writing (often considered as typical of traditional
> western philosophy, culture, or literature), deconstructed as expressing
> male attitudes and reinforcing male dominance; phallocentrism implicitly
> communicated in or through language.

which is essentially a rejection of deterministic meaning in any real sense,
combined with a bunch of the typical babble from Derrida that serves to do
little more than to attack the very foundations of logic in an attempt to
replace it with hand-wavy bullshit.

> “While issues of identity, data, and information systems seem to be—on one
> level, at least—an interesting conceptual or philosophical problem to
> ponder, they also expose the urgency of recognizing the very real and lived
> challenges these tensions and the rapid rise and adoption of data-intensive
> technologies and platforms generate for already vulnerable trans and queer
> populations,”

Like, honestly, if your biggest problem in life is the value recorded about
you in a database somewhere, and this is causing you "lived challenges"...
well, sorry, but get over yourself. This implies to me that a lot of bigger
problems have been solved, and it's time to work on smoothing off the last
remaining edge cases; surely if there are still big problems to be solved
(like, actual social exclusion, or access to medical care issues) these sorts
of minor concerns can wait, and don't need the entire structure of
programming, mathematics, logic, and basic epistemology to be attacked in
order to justify adding a field to a database.

It would be one thing if an article like this was just written to say "Hey!
People with non-standard gender labels want to have some freedom in your
database! We don't like it when we have to pick! You can make us feel better
easily by planning your database a little bit differently!", then fine, sure,
whatever.

Instead of doing that, the author has to blow the wrong thing out of
proportion, likely due to their lack of understanding of how these kinds of
systems are built and how implementation decisions are made. The entire thing
is chalked up to malice, specifically malice committed by the evil men who
build everything.

> trans and gender nonconforming people are excluded from or subjugated to
> information systems is a phenomenon she labels data violence

There is no violence here.

It's a tired argument, but using the word "violence" in conjunction with
extremely minor perceived slights that cause no measurable harm makes people
tune out, and having tuned out, when _real_ violence happens they're less
likely to care. We educate children about this concept by telling them stories
like "chicken little" and "the boy who cried wolf" \- don't abuse your
personal ability to summon everyone for help or it will not work when you
really need it.

If you must have a concept of "data violence", it seems like it would be much
more applicable to someone hacking into your personal data and violating it,
changing it, or exposing it to others. Having to select an option on a form
that doesn't completely describe your existence is not even remotely
comparable to this.

