Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Gender

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1. There are two and only two genders.
2. Okay, then there are two and only two biological genders.
3. Gender is determined solely by biology.
4. Okay, it’s mostly determined by biology, right?
5. Please tell me it’s determined by DNA.
6. Gender can be reliably determined through visual means. After all, no man would ever wear a burka.
7. Once gender is set, it never changes.
8. Even if the gender can change, it will only change from the one value to the other value.
9. Only one gender can be “active” at the same time.
10. We’re tracking gender now, so we’ve always tracked it.
11. I only need to be concerned with human gender.

Source: http://www.cscyphers.com/blog/2012/06/28/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-gender/

"this isn't political"
"this isn't ideology"

what if i told you that everything is political and critically structuring ideas is good actually?

my existence is political. all ethics emerge from ideology. stop fearing these words just because fools use them like bludgeons.

@BU-AWolfe

The reason this looks like alt-sex propaganda is that very few of these 'myths' have to do with programming. ...

Dang. I never thought I'd see the day when a CS lecturer at Boston U, clearly old enough to know better, would start throwing around inane terms like "alt-sex propaganda", as if they were some paranoid villager somewhere in the hinterlands of a totalitarian kleptocracy.

@thomasjwebb

but many don't allow changing the birth certificate.

Almost all do, there are only a handful that do not.

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

The US federal government opened up applications for passports with X as the sex marker to the general public on April 11th 2022. They are also now issuing cards for trusted traveler programs (e.g. Global Entry, Nexus, Sentri) with X as the gender marker as well.

Change the title to: things some programmers say and I don't like.

@muhammadmp97, these are things some programmers say and then write code that enforces their opinion on their users. Everyone on this thread is arguing about whether "gender ideology" belongs in a developer's head, but that's missing and proving the point. Regardless of whether you agree with the original 11 points, these are things that a developer, regardless of whether they personally agree with the point or not, should know is not universal and is not a fundamental "truth". It doesn't matter if gender is an int or a bool or a string, it matters that if you are writing a database that doesn't allow people with "X" instead of "F" or "M", the you are no different from the developers that don't allow people with the last name "Null".

I've seen people use a boolean for gender. True = male and false = female, or vice versa.

Just, no. No no no.

I’ve distilled these falsehoods down to the following:

1. Gender is bool
2. Gender is enum
3. Gender is const
4. Gender is static
5. Gender is public
6. Gender is readonly

(the rest of the falsehoods listed in this thread are valid but not programmer specific)

Edit: Typo "Liston" instead of "listed in" 🤦

I've seen people use a boolean for gender. True = male and false = female, or vice versa.

Haha yeah that's definitely something I can picture a programmer who thinks they're being clever doing. No ability to even encode "unknown" and unclear unless it's named something like is_male which would lump unknown and non-binary with female.

(the rest of the falsehoods Liston this thread are valid but not programmer specific)

I would argue that my point about there not being a single gender value would also be relevant to programmers and not necessarily covered by this list. You could say that's just point #2, but practically speaking it's not that gender should be a python Dict but that we shouldn't assume database entries or struct instances are describing different people just because the gender fields are present and don't match.

(the rest of the falsehoods listed in this thread are valid but not programmer specific)

I would argue that my point about there not being a single gender value would also be relevant to programmers and not necessarily covered by this list.

Of the original 11 falsehoods, only 1. There are two and only two genders (i.e. Gender is bool), 7. Once gender is set, it never changes (i.e. Gender is readonly), and 11. I only need to be concerned with human gender, (which I've mentioned that in a previous comment) could be seen as developer specific. The rest are just falsehoods that everybody (in the 21st century anyway) believes.

...we shouldn't assume database entries or struct instances are describing different people just because the gender fields are present and don't match.

That's a valid point that isn't covered in my reduction. I'll have to think of a way to fit it into the "Gender is keyword" format. Maybe "Gender is IComparable<Gender>"?