A data point is easy. Putting data points together is hard.

[garote]

Quoting from a comment on some source code by the venerable Thomas J. Webb:

There isn't a single, coherent legal gender for all people. For example, in the US your birth certificate, your passport, your driver's license could each say different things and the procedures to change each are different. All states allow changing gender on your driver's license, but many don't allow changing the birth certificate. Some states allow non-binary option (X instead of M or F) for driver's license. The federal government allows changing the gender on the passport and the procedures is easier than some conservative states have for changing driver's license but doesn't allow third option (like some other countries do, including Malta and Bangladesh). Transgender children will sometimes be in the public school system as their gender but won't have changed their legal gender anywhere else as they are minors and can't do so. So even from a government perspective, it's not clear cut and actually generally not a simple matter of birth assignment. Even your birth certificate could say something different if you had it changed.

So this isn't just an ideological thing like some people try to make it - if you as a programmer assume that a record from two different databases must not be referring to the same individual simply because the two databases have different gender markers, you are making a bad assumption.

Observations worth noting, for anyone who thinks that gender is a straightforward concept even in the most dull and apolitical of situations.

Personally I think there should be a more Gen-X sensibility applied to this situation: Any organization that puts a "gender" field in a form should stop and ask themselves, "why is this any of my business in the first place?"

Comments

[juan_gandhi]

Good point.

[garote]

I think the world is going to miss us Gen-Xers when we're gone. :D

The world already seems less of a place now that my Dad's generation (the "silent generation") is gone, but in his case, the world isn't really "missing" them, because their whole deal was that they quietly did their jobs and tried to do the right thing without comment or fanfare.

[juan_gandhi]

Gen-Xers are just the best. Most of my friends are X.