Gender, people, names, systems & software
This overloading happens all the time in systems, and when you see it, ask clarifying questions before you assume something's broken or wrong. The answers to your questions will most likely lead you down informative paths of how people are actually using the system you are looking at. If it's impossible or difficult for users to have new columns/fields added to data storage, they'll come up with…
Governments and corporations will trust AI to make judgements on people's identities. If those systems are trained on cis- and hetero-normative data sets, you'll have AI that consistently misgenders people, and could be locking trans and queer people out of bathrooms, offices, homes, transportation, and medical care. Alyx Baldwin explains the problem and what companies and developers have to do in…
By Creatrix Tiara My relationship to my full legal name is complicated. The name I usually go by, Tiara, is the second word in my given name (my culture doesn’t really do middle names; we just have ultra-wordy given names) - and I have gone by Tiara my entire life, even incorporating it into my stage names. The first word of my name only really matters in bureaucratic contexts, where my full legal…
In an article at the Pacific Standard , Francie Diep reminds everyone that the Trans Rights movement in America didn't start with Jenner or Mock. Diep's reporting on Benjamin Cerf Harris' white paper for the US Census Bureau which crunched the numbers and found that since 1936, at least 135,000 Americans have transitioned and updated their names and/or gender markers with Social Security, and that…
This is my talk from Open Source Bridge in Portland from earlier this summer. It's a 45 minute introduction to the problems people face when using software that's not aware that peoples' names can change. Comment on this post at Dreamwidth
Over the weekend, I was at an intersectional, feminist hacker camp up in the woods in Sonoma county. Under the hazy sky (there were several large wildfires in Northern California, but we were not in danger) I had a chance to talk with people about name-related issues for trans and genderqueer folks. A longer document's underway, but here's a takeaway from our 30 minute session: Facebook should…
Today's bug in dealing with names and name changes was satisfying because it involved a display name field, in this case, the name on a membership card, so it flagged a case to look out for. For the past two months my wife Cynthia had been trying to update the name on my AAA membership card, she added me to her account back before my transition. Twice before she called member services, informed…
I hope you’ve been reading @zip’s stories , especially the one on Facebook’s horrid wallet-name policy . I have this feeling that you read that post and are going “but, actually…”, and I must: “But why don’t you get a name change?” # At least 28% of people who identify as trans * and genderqueer do not have identity documents that match the name they go by . And that number is probably much…