Should your system offer Mr, Ms ... and Mx? Last week the Australian government announced new rules for declaring a gender on passports. This week UK authorities revealed they are conducting their own review of gender on passports. What are the implications for systems design and management? The Australian move follows increasing pressure from transgender and intersex …
Really, in an equalized society, why should the question be asked?
Take it out of the forms as being totally irrelevant.
---------
Is gender really irrelevant? Whilst we are still able to distinguish people by gender it remains useful information for sorting individuals. And what of all the research that shows gender is not irrelevant in fields such as neurology and physiology?. Calling a tail a leg does not make it so.
Gender most certainly is not irrelevant. Interaction between the genders is the basis of a vast number of laws, both natural and social. Equalise that all you like...
Drop the whole Mr. / Mrs. thing. Provide choices for the (numerous) chromosome configurations on forms. Restrooms should specify acceptable chromosome sets in tasteful signs on the door. The list might be long. Given that it's possible that some gentlemen are chromosomally female, and vice versa, we're going to need at least four sets of bathrooms.
...as far as i am aware, from speaking with their spokesperson on this earlier this week/late last.
IN general, name changes are tracked: however, in the specific instance where a grc is in existence, that more or less rewrites the birth certificate details.
Its complex: have recently seen probs over at the crb over just this issue.
jane
Shocked I tell you!
That not ONE of you lot has proposed the obvious selection for bikers the world over.
...
Yes Please!
...
Also a very good friend from my prior life in the north east of england decided he was
the "Dr. Rev" - the unlitmate biker title.
Yup that was his nickname so when he filled in his driving licence he filled in the title box
and ended up with this on his "green" licence. No idea if he still has it!
p.s. Hi Ian :-)
Surely if we're talking about identifying someone properly, which may mean different uses for the m/f field for the police (born with - in case of grisly accidents) and marketers (tough - it's up to them to sort out their data quality).
If you really want to be PC you can add a "notes" free-form field where you can put:
I like to have sex with: men/women/animals/people dressed as animals/myself
I like to dress as: male/female/furry
I've altered my appearance to look like: male / female / cat / dog / Spock / Frodo / Dark Elf
Better quality information is better. Don't rely on just what people call themselves.
My name is one which could be used for men or women, and it did cause but I'm pretty sure I've never been psychologically damaged because someone said "oh, I wasn't expecting a man."
Get over it. If you want to dress differently or have elective surgery, to drastically change your appearance, you have to expect that not everyone can keep up.
As for passports, just allow for extra pages with name/photo identifiers, as they already do (or used to do) when you renew a child's passport.
The Canadian Government has, for some years, omitted sex identifiers which is fine until you have to reply. The best solution is to simply include the whole name: Dear M Jackson, for example. Personally I am quite happy to have no appendage, too. My name is quite sufficient.
The Vietnamese language uses the word 'Thi', as in Nguyen Thi Minh Khai, to help users where names are interchangeable between male and female.
What DOES confuse people is where Nguyen becomes Miss Khai after the first use of her complete name!
/
This whole thing about how to store genders in databases has been around for a while. I recommend reading the following (quite old) article on "Gay marriage: the database engineering perspective", as it covers gender issues nicely in steps 9 and 10 (read the whole thing from the start, it's a nice exercise in logic).
http://qntm.org/gay
As one of those people who have gone through a transition, I'd like to add further mud to the water.
There is a difference between Sex and Gender. The correct term for a transsexual is just that, "Trans" has transitioned "sex" the sex. If you extrapolate my current position, my birth certificate recorded my physical sex as male. The fact that my gender wasn't recorded, and indeed couldn't be checked by taking a look between my ears, is almost fair enough.
Society is in flux. In some cases it now values and responds to a person according to their apparent gender, but still segregates on the basis of physical sex. I'm probably going to get flamed to hell right now, but I can't see that segregation ever going away as long as the human race is, physically, what the human race is.
Enter on the scene, the gender fucker troup and those of the ilk that take things further, we should relate to a person as a person and not burden people with such a catagorisation. On the face of it, I can see where they are coming from; much of our social interaction is based on such segregation; ie. how we congratulate each other, whether with an air kiss or a hearty slap on the back.
If such social guidence is removed, then many peoples social interactino rule sheet gets a flame to its bottom corner ... and you can have fun watching peoples faces light up in horror as they suddenly lose their grip as to how they are supposed to interact with other people.
So, in my humble opinion, if you're going to do the job properly, you remove the M/F entirely; you don't add a new catagory, or you'll be adding catagories for every group of people that identify themselves outside the standard classifications.
Sex is straightforward. Meat and two veg, or a camel toe? Yes, there are exceptions, good old Mother nature does enjoy making life interesting. Gender ... now there you're really entering a world of catagorisational pain.
If it needs, there needs to be more than one
Genetic ie XY XX or the rarer ones, what about mixed embryos?
Birth sex Male Female Hermaphrodite or Indeterminate
Brain gender & how they are presented
I am sure there are more
Important one for everyday is the last
Important one for medical is all of them
As to honourifics, do we need them, if we do free text field, copes with everything, not everyone is British.
Several people have pointed it out already, and I suspect that no amount of thrashing with the clue stick will get it into some people's heads, but "gender" is a grammatical concept, not applicable to people and not a synonym for sexual identity.
I observe, however, that the abbreviation "Mx" was historically used to designate the Middlesex Regiment. Of course, that was before they were amalgamated into the Queen's.
All the best,
John.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
