Slashdot Mirror
Transgendered Folks Encountering Document/Database ID Hassles
An anonymous reader writes "Most of us hear the equivalent of 'let me bring up your record' several times a week or month when dealing with businesses and government agencies; sometimes there's a problem, but clerks are accustomed to dealing with changes in street address, phone numbers, company affiliation, and even personal names (after marriage). But what about gender? Transgendered folks are encountering embarrassing moments when they have to explain that their gender has changed from 'M' to 'F' or vice versa. While there are many issues involved in discrimination against transgendered individuals, I have to confess that the first thing that came to my mind was the impact on database design and maintenance."
Please
I think this entire situation is so unique an interesting.
Nothing has really changed...
Binary gender
(seriously, a number of places I've seen that track gender do it with a boolean)
TFS says they encounter embarassing moments when they have to explain why they changed from M to F. Why would this be embarrassing for them? It's something they elected to do. Would having a box saying M -> F or F -> M be less embarrassing?
I could see this being an inconvenience for them, but it's an inconvenience they chose to take on. Supposedly this is more than made up for by the fact they can live the rest of their life how they feel they should be.
No sympathy. Do not change anything.
I used to work for the government of Canada at an agency which I cannot name. I ran into an awkward situation when I was speaking with a woman who had recently gotten married to another woman and as I was putting the info in, the software I was using told me there was an error that needed to be corrected before proceeding. I was both embarrassed and furious. I could not believe our software was not written with same sex couples in mind and I apologized to her and kept on going with the rest of call. I doubt this issue has been fixed yet, this happened about a year ago.
Those poor 0.0000001%. It's so tough for them.
Make the field optional. In addition to male and female, add both and neither. Also, review the reason you even keep that information. It may not be necessary at all.
Why does the gubbmint need to know what our parts are? Unless it involves public health or medical care, it's irrelevant unless you live in Big Brother land.
There is nothing wrong with yr Internet. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are controlling the transmission - NSA
I work with a transgender dude at work and he LOVES this shit. That is the main reason (s)he did it, he wants a LOT of attention.
He is a lot of fun though, he still have beard growth so when he is lazy and cant be bothered to shave he looks a riot! Sometime he comes to work dressed in his old man clothes and claims he is then a transvestite! xD
BTW. Their gender has NOT changed, only their appearance.
Do you have testicles?
Have you ever had testicles?
Please check M if either of these questions are Yes
Databases are annoying, as no-one really models gender changing over time (most glaring to me in the medical industry, where I work). That said, i'd much rather see something done about the reactions of people, rather than the contents of databases. I now live 600 miles from my hometown, because I got tired of being physically attacked for being myself in public. Show me how changing a database table will turn around a truck full of beer 'buzzed' rednecks, and i'm all game.
Anonymous, for all the wrong reasons. I'd rather post as myself, but I've learned not to be honest in public, unless I want death threats. Thanks for the 5 minutes of attention, but we've got trouble all day.
Here everyone gets a "central person register number" at birth, comprised of the birth date and 4 check digits, the last one odd for male even for female, changing a name form john to johanna isn't such a big issue but getting a new new CPR number is not so easy
Recently there was the problem that some government database would only accept two CPR numbers of different sex as parents
Gender indifferent.
... we have a lot of more important problems to work on.
The real problem is that the gender is stored in the database. Apart from medical databases, there are no good reasons (imho) to store the gender of a person. The only even remotely useful reason would be to identify the person (to track kidnapped people or criminals), but cross-dressing has existed long before gender reassignment surgery was even possible.
Well, the other reason is to discriminate against some gender. And if you absolutely want to discriminate, just put unusual people in the currently most discriminated category (which I guess is F in most countries). That works both for positive and negative discrimination.
.. this is an extension of a political agenda.. Politics is the same everywhere, some group of people trying to find a lever to power. Subject is "No Way" meaning no way give in to slippery slope arguments that are backed by a political will agenda by an extreme minority.
Be Unique! Be Free of Harassment - yes!
but collective will for political power, No Way.
I can understand the database keeping track of a salutation like Mr/Ms/Miss/Mrs/Dr/Rev/etc. And a salutation can of course change, a Miss can easily become a Dr or Mrs.
The status of M/F doesn't usually seem necessary for customer service or governments, as using personal pronouns can be ambiguous or unnecessary. But the salutation can be a convenient, comfortable and respectful way to address a person on the phone.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
This illustrates how discrimination is embedded in our society. We want to know details about someone (gender) so that we can assume other things (entitlement to maternity leave, say). But this supports treating people differently. The entitlement should be that anyone who gives birth or (or perhaps adopts) a baby is entitled to the leave. No need to identify gender.
-- Braden's law of data: All data spends some of its lifetime in an excel spreadsheet.
. But what about gender? Transgendered folks are encountering embarrassing moments when they have to explain that their gender has changed from 'M' to 'F' or vice versa.
Transgendered folks are still having to explain to people like the original poster that 'M' and 'F' designate sex, not gender. There's a wide variety of reasons why a person's sex needs to be recorded, at least medically. A transgendered woman will have different medical needs than a non-transgendered woman, and the same for men. But for some reason, despite research going back over fifty years now, we still idiotically only have one field, with two options.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Hmm, on second thought gender is actually a fairly poorly defined concept in medical terms. We tend to classify people based on whether they come equipped with a slot or a dongle, but that's just the most obvious marker, and doesn't necessarily correlate well with several other biological gender properties (as hilighted not-so-recently by that African female olympic runner)
I suppose a more accurate measure would be a floating point value indicating the degree and polarity of genderdness, but that would still have trouble distinguishing asexuals and hermaphrodites. Perhaps two semi-independent values indicating degree of maleness and femaleness? I doubt anyone would want to get a thorough medical exam just to be able to put a number in a box though, much less have any particular desire to share that data. And even if we could formulate the tests I imagine there could be significant personal and sociological fallout from quantifying such a thing on a wide basis, and not necessarily much benefit.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
If it is an Identity database, then gender matters. If it is a medical database, it matters. If its a customer database, it does not matter
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I have no problem with races, sex, political or religion bias, homosexual and many other stuff, but transgenders? Those guys have a serious mental health issues to begin with. I have no moral trouble laughing at their stupid decision.
Computer software "engineers" strike again. "OMG, people can't change gender, so obviously we should filter out these erroneous attempts to change it."
Reminds me of the "only letters and numbers should be in addresses" PITA that gets me every time I try to order something online. Apparently most computer programmers have never heard of a "1/2" address. At least a few weeks ago, walmart.com wasn't accepting 1/2 addresses. The social security administration's web site wasn't accepting "1/2" in address changes a few years ago. So I went into the office to change it, and told them about how I couldn't do it online, and they told me that a few weeks earlier they weren't even able to update such addresses on their computers in the office. For years, ordering from one particular web site caused my packages to "419 1/2" to arrive with two labels on the box, one which read "419 12" and the other which read "41912." It's a miracle the damn things ever came to my house.
If only computer programmers could get it through their fucking skulls that they don't need to filter every field for invalid characters. ...but then, I guess they probably do. They're probably writing shitty SQL code that needs to escape any special characters and so they figure it's easier to just filter it out anything they don't believe people should be typing anyway than to use methods that don't require data to be escaped.
Gender? Words have gender. People have sex.
for legal purposes, if someone starts off one gender are they always legally considered that gender or does gender altering surgeries change your legal gender.
http://interserver.net/
Chopping off your privates does not change 'X' & 'Y' chromosomes. They're *not* transgendered.
Are we going to cater to everyone with mental illness this way?
I'm surprised at all the bigotry here on Slashdot. I hope you guys get a chance to know a transgendered person at some point, it might change your attitudes. I have, and it totally changed my misunderstandings on the subject. I suppose it is natural to be unbelieving in things which seem foreign to our way of thinking, but even if you cannot accept the idea right now, at least give people the benefit of the doubt rather than spew your ignorance as if it were facts. Why not have a look and see attitude? You might be surprised. I feel lucky to have met the transgendered persons I have known in my life, I hope you get the chance.
The level of ignorance is astounding for a site of supposedly intelligent people.
really? you cant think of one good reason?? perhaps a medical issue that only hits men or only hits women?? i mean just because you cut off your dick, you are still a dude.
I know exactly how they feel. The puzzled stares... The uncomfortable questions... It's gnarly.
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screw-em.
cant make up there mind who they are.
yea right.
creating there own space that says i get to do what i want for any reason,screw every one else.
i wont have any reprocutions.
you straight people have it all wrong.
transgender means no rules for me and every rule for you.
skoony
I don't see why you just can't have a field for Sex, which will be your biological sex, and a field for Gender, which is what you identify yourself as.
There you go, problem solved. Was it that big of a deal?
.
A few years ago I was looking for genealogy software. One of my requirements was the need to handle a F-F marriage with kids in the family. Fortunately, The Master Genealogist was up to the task. Amazingly, there were few choices that met an important requirement that I had.
There are good reasons to identify the physical gender of a person rather than their self identified one. Short of an operation, it doesn't change. In medical databases I have worked on, we needed it for health reasons as to what areas exists. We needed it for family medical history. We needed it to help identify people who were injured or killed. For the same reasons, gender neutral identification don't work for us either. If people feel like their physical sex should be kept private, it could be treated as HIPAA info, but we still need to track it.
You'd be amazed at how difficult it is to even change your name out there. The process of legally changing my name was easy compared to some of the hoops I've had to jump through elsewhere.
I fought with one grocery chain over my loyalty card for six months and they never got it right. Wound up just getting a new card.
Should insurance cover amputating someones arm or leg if they have a form of "Body Integrity Identity disorder" ?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_integrity_identity_disorder
A gender identity disorder is another body identity disorder.
Both disorders are real to those that have it, but need to be treated as disorders.
1. Change to "Birth gender". For medical forms, this is likely the right question
2. Remove the gender questions from forms. For non-medical forms, it's not needed, the same way many other questions are note needed.
Some answers to irrelavant questions:
Sex: Y
Race: American, Earthling, beige, or pinkish brown
Religion: No, or Scientific method
Not well, though, since I am uncomfortable around someone even considering gender reassignment surgery, let alone someone who has had it done.
The person with whom I am acquainted showed up at a technical conference over 20 years ago as himself, then over the course of the next two days changed the style of clothing worn until on the last day 'she' appeared wearing a skirt and an over the shoulder purse. 'She' was very unattractive attempting to look feminine and didn't fool anyone except perhaps one innocent person. Years passed, the topic of he/she didn't come up in conversation among those of us who kept in touch, although one person who had heard from this person over the years said he had not had the surgery although he had strongly considered it. Then not too long ago "he"
showed up at a similar event with his wife, as if nothing had ever happened. How much she knew of his past, who knows. As long as they are reasonably happy together, I suppose. I'm no Archie Bunker but this creeped me out, though.
Nothing to do with transgenders, drag queens & kings, ...
I wonder how many Leslies & Sidneys & Lynns have been entered into databases with wrong gender & it couldn't be changed 'cause some stupid coder didn't make it correctable. Then there's the data clerk sitting in a mole-hole cube harassed by a lackluster boss, & the clerk makes a mistake once in awhile.
Plenty of reasons having nothing to do with the stated reason for having gender being correctable in databases.
The biggest problem with transgendered individuals is that many of them get caught up in "gender politics" and insist upon complicating the lives of everyone around them.
For M2F, you'd really need to turn it from a single-bit male/female value into a VARCHAR(255), so they could elaborate on who they like to have sex with... or maybe pack it into a bitfield to enumerate their chromosomal pattern (2 bits... normal/abnormal and male/female), current hardware configuration (3 bits... penis/vagina, boobs, hormones), sexual attraction (2 bits... women and/or men), and public gender (male/female). However, you could probably get away with 4 choices with optional varchar(255) textfield for option #4:
[x] Male
[ ] Female
[ ] Undisclosed/Irrelevant/None of your business
[ ] "complicated" [____attach____]
To really make all the F2M crowd happy, though, you'd have to replace the varchar(255) with a 64-bit BLOB of UTF8-encoded XML that allows inline MIME binary attachments...
(pounds table to get your attention)
Damn it! Put down your phone, pay attention, and quit whoring on Grindr for a lunch-fuck, or I'm going to give the angry F2M users YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS and let YOU deal with their hate mail.
There are various diseases, dysmorphia, accidents and disorders that affect how one perceives one's gender and which affect how other's perceive one's gender.
If we want an accurate Object definition for Class>>Gender it has to be implemented to have a pair of small integers as attributes and presented/interacted with as a pair of Sliders.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Gender is not about having a penis or a vagina.
Gender is about chromosomes. If you've got XX then you are female, XY then you are male. Period.
is that we have systems which are based on the assumptions of hetero couples for marriage, so same-sex data entry will fail, these are validation rules. This has to change, but in the meantime, well, it will cause issues. grin and bear it.
What is this crazy human obsession with needing to know what is in someone else's pants anyway? It just doesn't seem relevant unless mating is going to be involved. Ug!
As a robot, I personally object to being associated with the disgusting organic concept of gender. If your database can't accept "N/A" then you can kiss my big, fat, shiny metal genitalia-free ass!
BTW, the TSA knows aaaaaall about what is in your pants. Heh, fools.
Perhaps a clerk encountering a transgender with incorrect record is a rare enough situation that we can just let the DBA handle it? OTOH for the person that just changed sex, it means a lot of delays, at least if he/she cares to get the record changed.
There is no such thing as trans-gender, just highly surgically modified people - you know like South Park porposes.
There will be certain cases - a lot of medical data, for example - where gender truly is important.
But in a lot of cases, you could reasonably have a person simply refuse to provide the information in the first place, or even just need a temporary value if gender is unknown at the time of record creation. A serious database has to anticipate those cases; this is not a big step.
And a database which needs gender for some legitimate medical purpose already needs to deal with special cases.
(And that's all without worrying about the question of whether those cases are lifestyle choices, genuine metabolic disorders, or something else entirely - the technology does not care about attitudes.)
ALTER TABLE Person DROP COLUMN Gender;
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This isn't a joke. It's about a tiny but very real group of people being able to live their lives safely and in dignity.
Leaving aside questions of what data is needed in the medical profession to handle biology correctly - which is a completely different issue - the attitude that people deserve to have their secrets outed so that other people can entertain themselves by laughing at them is just... not the geek world I grew up in having programmed computers since the age of 8. My mum got me into it, in a family where everyone writes code.
As a lesbian geek girl, I'm disgusted by a lot of the comments here, and really don't know if I even belong on this forum any more. I don't write much but have been reading on a daily basis since the late 1990s.
The transgender community seems to be under attack these days since they're small enough not to be able to fight back in the way that the gay and lesbian community and various ethnic minorities have. Finally all the bigots and religious fundamentalists have found a group of people who it is "safe" to bully.
But please, not on slashdot!!
Surely, as so called "nerds" you would know something about the history of your industry. Have you heard of Alan Turing (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing), who developed the model for the general purpose computer, only to be arrested for being homosexual, clinically castrated, and driven to suicide? You probably have, and I assume he's one of the reasons why a lot of IT companies are very good at accepting gay men and lesbian.
What about Lynn Conway, Professor Emeritus of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Michigan, who literally wrote the book on VLSI design (Introduction to VLSI systems). She's alive, fortunately, but we all lost a lot of her work when she was forced to start again "at the bottom of the ladder" as a contract programmer in mid-career to hide her gender past from your bigotry and intolerance.
What about Lana (formerly Larry) Wachowski who co-produced the Matrix Trilogy? She came close to not surviving the hate growing up, and if she hadn't survived, we would never have gotten to see The Matrix.
And - he might not have been a geek, but - what about Mike Penner, who committed suicide after an unsuccessful attempt at gender transition?
Seriously, wannabe geeks, as tiny a minority as the transgender community is, the IT industry is packed full of transsexuals and transgender people. And many of us here have romantic partners, or parents, or brothers and sisters and friends who are. At least here in Melbourne, Australia, you can't write code and hang out in the industry without getting close to many of them.
It seems that all the gay men and lesbians are too successful and too powerful for you to attack now. So like all bullies, you run off in search of an easier victim.
Getting back to the topic, why exactly do you need databases to say things about people's gender that don't match how they present themselves? To out them and embarrass them because they "deserve" it? How little compassion and caring do you have for other people? Would you want to be treated this way yourselves if you had some type of secret you had to keep from people who would hate you because of it?
If you were in Europe circa World War 2, would you insist that records there included whether or not a person was Jewish, based on genetic testing? With no ability for a person to change their record to say they were, say, Russian, if it could give them a better chance of finding employment or even survival?
In case you think the analogy isn't fair (and yes, I am Jewish, and migrated from Russia with my parents as a three year old), have a look at what the Salvation Army (who the government in Australia got involved in finding jobs for the unemployed a few years ago) are saying and doing:
LambdaMOO's Ten Different Gender Options
This is what players see when they enquire about "gender":
Characters & Gender
Your character, as well as every other character in this MOO, has a gender. The choice of gender determines which pronouns will be used when referring to that character. If you type look me, you'll see a phrase about being awake and alert; the pronouns used there are determined by your gender.
Every character is given the default gender when it is created. In this MOO, the default gender is neuter. Spivak is an indeterminate gender (rather than referring to such a person as s/he or he/she, e is the proper pronoun).
@gender
Your gender is currently neuter.
Your pronouns: it,it,its,its,itself,It,It,Its,Its,Itself
Available genders: neuter, male, female, either, Spivak, splat, plural, egotistical, royal, or 2nd
@gender male
Gender set to male.
Your pronouns: he,him,his,his,himself,He,Him,His,His,Himself
@gender female
Gender set to female.
Your pronouns: she,her,her,hers,herself,She,Her,Her,Hers,Herself
@gender either
Gender set to either.
Your pronouns: s/he,him/her,his/her,his/hers,(him/her)self,S/He,Him/Her,His/Her,His/Hers, (Him/Her)self
@gender Spivak
Gender set to Spivak.
Your pronouns: e,em,eir,eirs,emself,E,Em,Eir,Eirs,Emself
@gender splat
Gender set to splat.
Your pronouns: *e,h*,h*,h*s,h*self,*E,H*,H*,H*s,H*self
@gender plural
Gender set to plural.
Your pronouns: they,them,their,theirs,themselves,They,Them,Their,Theirs,Themselves
@gender egotistical
Gender set to egotistical.
Your pronouns: I,me,my,mine,myself,I,Me,My,Mine,Myself
@gender royal
Gender set to royal.
Your pronouns: we,us,our,ours,ourselves,We,Us,Our,Ours,Ourselves
@gender 2nd
Gender set to 2nd.
Your pronouns: you,you,your,yours,yourself,You,You,Your,Yours,Yourself
In addition to male and female, add both and neither. Also, review the reason you even keep that information.
Sometimes you do need that information for good reasons in which case why not just ask everyone which public toilets they typically use? It moves the question away from their gender identity and is a decision that everyone has had to make!
Really? You cant even read the post?
BTW the reason everyone has a gender is so a computer can send you your junk mail with a proper salutation, Mr. Jennifer.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
Pet Peeve: Coders that bring up the earliest record in history. If a customer with 7 years of history calls up with a problem, likely it's with the latest order, not one they made 7 years ago.
That said, a database should treat all information in it as frangible. Nothing is ever written in stone, and all input can never be 100% validated by rules. The best you can do is say "Did they really go from Male to Female?" or "Customer unique identifier change is not supported on this version. See your supervisor for how to proceed."
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
"a tiny minority of people who knew going into it"
You mean before they were born?
(This is going to sound a lot like the kind of lecture you used to have to give people about sexual orientation, but that's how it goes....)
Being transgender isn't something that someone just decides to do one day, as an adult. It's about people who are designated "male" or "female" at birth (usually based on whether they have an identifiable dick or not) but grow up feeling that they've been miscategorized. The "how"s and "why"s of it aren't especially well understood, but the fact that it happens is (or at least should be) well established and accepted.
Those who go through with legal and/or physical gender reassignment don't do it by "choice", but because they feel a need to. Yes, they know they'll face pointless bureaucratic red tape, and possibly a lifetime of trying to explain to friends, coworkers, employers, and service providers with crappy customer service. They do it for their sense of self-identity and emotional well-being. It can be a nightmare. Even though it doesn't need to be. But it is, mostly because of dismissive jerks like you, who don't want to be bothered by taking it seriously.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Have gnu, will travel.
Don't limit options to M or F. I keep hearing that stat that roughly 1% of people (or 70 million worldwide!) are intersex or sexually ambiguous. Australia's registry gas/had X for people outside of the standard paradigm. http://news.blogs.cnn.com/2011/09/15/australian-passports-now-offer-gender-option-x-for-intersex-people/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersex
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I really do not understand why someone tagged this "Democrats". LGBT issues cross party lines, even if some Republicans oppose these issues.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your politician, and hitting them?"
Like the former Heather Alexander who's now Alexander James Adams, and was and is a kick ass fiddler, filker and songsmith. 'March of Cambreadth' en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_of_Cambreadth has found its way into so many novels....
I apologize and do not set out to offend anyone. But changing the appearance of gender does not equal changing gender in my mind. A man that has his genitals altered and breasts installed and dresses as a woman is still a man in my mind. It is similar to a cross dresser in a way. A man who dresses as a woman will still be jailed with men. A man that has breast implants will be jailed with men as well. I wonder how jails are handling folks who have had penises or vaginas altered as well.
Is we need to define what we mean when we ask for someone's sex or gender on a form. I think part of the problem is different people identify what it means differently. Some in the transgender community say it is 100% about what you personally choose to identify as. So you could be genetically male, have an XY chromosome set, and biologically male, as in have male genitals and body structure, but identify yourself as female and that's what you should mark down. However other people might disagree. If you went in to the woman's dressing room at a rec center the biological women in there might not be at all comfortable with that since they identify you as male, due to your biology.
So one of the things we need to do is clarify the terms, and perhaps have different terms for identifying someone's genetic structure, biological makeup, and sexual identity.
Like when you are talking to a doctor, the genetic definition matters. Reason is that health issues do NOT affect both genders equally, and it has nothing to do with appearance or identity, it has to do with genetics. So even if you've had a sex change operation and all that, proper identification as genetically male could be relevant to medical providers.
For most people it is more about biology, as in what bits do you have between your legs. We visually identify people as male or female, and most are pretty clearly one or the other. That is one of the reasons it gets asked for lots of forms of ID is to help ensure that the ID is for the person holding it. For that, we might want to use your biological appearance. If you undergo a sex change surgery, then you change that identifier.
In terms of the pronoun you wish people to use to identify your gender, that really is up to you, though you need to understand it can be confusing to people if you appear and sound different than you identify.
So as you say we need to review why the information is collected, and then define terms to say what sort of thing we are talking about. We can't just say "Well let people identify as whatever they want," since reality doesn't work that way. However if you are just collecting it for no real reason, then don't and let people identify how they wish.
I had my bank account disabled once. When I called up the bank to find out why my card didn't work, they told me that an unknown woman had called and attempted to access my account. I'm a male, so that action caused them to red-flag my account and disable it until they could determine what was going on. I was understandably concerned, and asked them for more information. Turns out, the "woman" who accessed my account was me, and the underpaid foreign telephone agent had misidentified me as female. Now, I am in no way female (the neckbeard is a dead giveaway), so having my account disabled simply because some idiot thought I sounded like a girl was pretty bad.
Stasis is death. Embrace change.
One issue poisons me completely on transgendered people and keeps me from caring about their other problems. Why is it ok for a 30 year old male prostitute to follow a 12 year old girl into the bathroom at a restaurant? I don't care if he wants to pee sitting down, I don't care if he feels uncomfortable or at risk in the men's room. He does not belong there, regardless of how he feels about his penis, other men's penises, his surgical lack of a penis, or being outed as a fake.
Neither gender or sex belongs in most databases any more than race, sexual orientation, religious beliefs, or any other sort of information that has no bearing on the business or government agency's interaction with the person. Storing more information than you should in your database only leads to headaches and possible legal liabilities.
instead we should just take everyone who don't agree with their gender, indoctrinate them into hinduism, and convince them that they should kill themselves using the ritual suicide method of starvation -- then if they were good people their karma would let them reincarnate as the "correct" gender
there is no valid reason to ever change genitals
if you are a chick who wants a dick, just get a strapon, if you are a dude who wants a pussy just get fucked in the ass, its close enough
Brains are as much physical organs as livers or ovaries.
Due to some unknown error, my normal non-trans mom went to get her license renewed and came home with an "M" in the sex box. Database error? Typo? Mean MVD people? Who knows, but she did have a hell of a time getting it changed back and plenty of funny looks whenever asked for her ID while it was all being sorted out.
... If it was a personal choice, one should not be embarrassed. And if others look at you strange, have confidence in your choice and yourself, and know that you're right and they're goofy...
And then, fully on the topic -- welcome to reality. Change anything, and things get complicated. Try moving. It's as if every single business you ever dealt with needs an update. Change your partner? That's a complicated matter called 'divorce' and for some reason the law and judges are involved. Crazy...
Things are tough all over.
That would be "Rarely", "Damn Rarely", and "What's that?"
Most transgendered people are similar to the most extreme religious fanatics. They have a belief that they were born in the wrong body, just like christian people believes in Jesus.
However, they are convinced that everyone else should believe the same thing as they do and get really angry when someone doesn't
Well, tough luck, I respect them the same way as I respect all religions, but I am too in my right to not believe that. I just can't understand how someone can believe they were born the opposite sex, when they have no way to know what being the opposite sex is like, and as much can imagine it, just as I can imagine myself being rich or being a ninja.
They try to become accepted by society using the analogy of gay people or black people being accepted too, but your skin color or sexual preference is a fact, not a belief. It's not the same!
So, yeah, I'm all for them doing whatever they want, believing what they want, doing surgery, be called as female, not be made fun of, etc, but I'm against them pretending me to accept their belief.
If you have the typical gene pairings that determine that you have balls and a penis, you are man.
Otherwise, you are a woman.
I'm sorry, but gender is not one of those things open to interpretation.
And, to be quite honest, if you don't see it that way, check yourself into a long-term facility with adequate treatment options for dementia.
Anyone else notice this article doesn't really have anything to say?
It just says "Transgenders have problems, too." and leaves all of us burning in the flamewar that must occur.
Gender is not something that is open to interpretation, regardless of modern plastic surgery options.
This is not sexuality. It is gender. And it is genetic. And please, no counterfactuals. I've had enough of this general entitlement bullshit for people that would otherwise be committed for dementia if this society wasn't so intent on "political correctness."
Even the U.S. military is going to have to deal with this issue, since Krintin Beck is presumably still eligible for VA benefits and the other benefits of being a veteran.
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
When I volunteered at a school 25 years ago, I came across a 'change of details' form. It listed the obvious name and address fields. I supposed a "gender" field was being thorough. But I couldn't understand the "DOB" field as one's birth would never change. After a couple of years transcribing paperwork into MS documents I understood. Nearly all (real entity) attributes in a table should be writable, because the data held in the table might be wrong. A few times people on SlashDot have pointed-out there is no way to update the 'no fly' list, credit/rental history, or simply the information some marketer thinks it has about someone.
Why is this embarrassing at all? This is something that the person strives after and makes numerous changes to their lifestyle and body. Why are they not proud of their accomplishment?
grief. i can't believe we've devolved to this level of political correctness.
Perhaps Gender should be input via a slider.
This whole male/female sex is a ridiculous dichotomy. It's not like there's only 2 discrete options. In reality it's a gradient from one end to the other.
There are many things to define somebody's sex, and they are often not all aligned to either end and all combinations are possible and occur naturally.
*sex chromosomes
*existence of
**penis
**testes
**vagina
**ovaries
**uterus
*levels of various hormones (changes with time)
*persons idea of their sex
etcetcetc...
There are people who have e.g. a penis and ovaries. Is that a male or a female to you?
Imagine if the same medieval forms had only two options for your race: black or white. It would be the same thing. This male/female is a very silly oversimplification that needs to go.
Why do the databases need to know the gender to start with?
Maybe it would be better if no database (that isn't explicitly there to identify you) had that information.
It would probably do wonders to gender equality too. Certainly salary databases, tax databases,
residential databases wouldn't need gender.
Maybe not even insurance databases. And they would be more interested in your original gender,
alternatively hormone levels, anyway. (Any studies on that?)
Surely medical databases should have a lot more information about you than just gender, anyway.
Just adding a "T" binary flag to the data would be too simple, right?
We covered this situation in our Human Computer Interaction module back in my undergrad in 1997. From a data(base) storage point of view, the solution is two have two fields, sex (as in phenotype -- male genitalia vs female genitalia vs both) and gender (as in identity concept -- I think of myself as male/female/Intersex/other). These two fields cover male, female, transgender, intersex, and hermaphrodite. What this doesn't solve is the problems of discrimination and lack of familiarity with dealing with changes in these fields on the part of the humans who capture and alter the information, although that's a little ridiculous too. I am a straight male, as in I look male and I consider myself male, and I've been incorrectly captured in a database as female once. Probably a typo. I know a couple of other people to whom this has happened. Fixing it was as simple as phoning up and saying, "err, guys, I'm a guy". I realise this is less of an issue than having a driver's license stating you are male, and then appearing female, but it's not necessarily an information systems problem.
Except most high modded posts here seem rational and not as you describe!
... perhaps they should have a third column, "Mentally ill", or "Deranged enough to want to cut off their penis and testicles", because of course, there's nothing insane about that, the T.V. told me.
Oh, wait... the T.V. didn't tell you, did it - it made sure that nobody talks about what 'transgender' actually involves.
These people are mentally ill and need help for their MINDS, not help to irreversibly mutilate their bodies. Just meet and talk to one of these 'people' and you'll see they're insane.
You'll notice that the men who claim to be 'women in the wrong bodies' have to wear huge amounts of makeup, a wig, ridiculously 'feminine' clothes such as high heels, short skirts, etc. and yet they STILL look like ugly men dressing up in women's clothes, and always will.
They also ALL have a ridiculously sexist stereotype in their heads of what a 'woman' is. I work with loads of women and always have, and even the ugliest among them are still ALWAYS obviously women because of their subtle mannerisms, personalities, voice inflection, tone of voice, etc. all with NO acting, no effort whatsoever, yet a 'transgender' man who has tried to turn himself into a woman still ALWAYS comes across immediately as a MAN dressed in women's clothes.
But because your Jewish 'masters' enjoy nation wrecking, we have to listen to this nonsense every day, change our entire society at the cost of billions of dollars to accommodate these nutters, and the 'useful idiots' among us actually support this crap, instead of trying to actually HELP these people - and you help them not by cutting off their body parts, you help them through therapy, talking it through, showing them why their beliefs are plain and simple bullshit.
Many customer record databases don't seem to allot more than ten characters to given name or surname, with some stopping at eight or nine which make even less sense. How many people are actually named "Christophe", "Stephani", "Angeliqu", "Elizabet", "Gwendol"? Not nearly as many as get mail that way. It's been an issue for a long time, and now you're expecting databases to be updated for gender changes?
Try telling a utility company sometime that you un-duplexed a building and you need service to the whole building under one address some time. They'll typically ask which address you want the bill delivered to and which one gets the service or something equally asinine.
I am not trying to start a politically correct argument or be pro or anti transgender. I think we should back up and look at the bigger problem.
The issue here is the age of many of these databases, with only minor updates occuring over the years. I wouldn't be surprised if some of these databases dated back to the 70s, written in COBOL, living on an System/360 or 370 (or a newer system - 390 or zSeries or something else - with the database just ported over from the 360 and 370 days. Possibly the database was then "ported" over to a server based enviornemnt, but the cores database and information attached was still in place). At the time those databases were written, you were either male or female, or lived in shame. Not sure when sex reassignment surgery began, but you hear stories now of people who were born hemephrodite, and their parents had the surgery performed on them as infants or toddlers.
it probably did not even occure to the database designers to include an option for for changing Gender or for including possibly a third option.
The question should be 1) why has the older systems not been overhauled and 2) where they have been, why is the option no longer there. For systems that have been overhauled, if someone is maintaining the code, you have to ask how hard it would be for someone to go into the code and make that a changable field.
At that point, though, it probably changes from a technical issue to a political / sociological issue. I am not going to guess on the political issue, because I don't follow it, and making an assumption would be stupid (I know, I just made an assumption about the above. Rather, I don't want to get into the political issues to avoid flames and troll baiting). As for the sociological issues, even with media attention lately on transgender issues, we are still a society that breaks things down into male and female. Transgender stories still shock many people (although it is starting to become more understood and accepted - at least in some places).
I am not trying to get into an issue of if it is right or wrong, whether it needs to be changed or not. I am saying that the lack of options in databases shouldn't really come as a surprise.
I've seen a number of posts that paint transgenderism in the same vein as plastic surgeries and other such modifications to self born out of insecurity and dislike of one's appearance. This is a very fundamental misunderstanding of the transgender condition.
You're conflating dissonance with dissatisfaction. They can go hand-in-hand, but you need to realize that they are still two very discrete concepts.
To put it more plainly, body dysmorphia (dissatisfaction with one's appearance) and gender dysphoria (dissonance with the gendered aspects of one's body and social perception) are not the same. The former being so common in our society makes it easy to assume the latter is inexorably tied to it: virtually everyone in our society considers some parts of their bodies flawed or undesirable, and trans people are no exception; in fact, their gender dysphoria is often exponentially amplified by this, especially with trans women, who (if entering gender transition to female after puberty) have the misfortune of nearly irreversible virilization (facial hair, masculine features, etc), which is considered almost universally "unattractive" as far as social expectations for women go. So, it is no surprise that insecurity would result. Our culture is fairly vicious about standards of beauty for females as indicative of their worth to others-- how many overweight, 'plain-looking' women do you see represented as successful (or even just respectable) in television or movies, verses overweight, plain-looking men? Or perhaps just think about the rate of eating disorders among women, many of whom are fairly conventionally attractive to begin with (though not to themselves, given judgmental cultural pressures).
As for my background: I am a transsexual man (meaning I was perceived as-- or was, depending on your choice of definition-- female during my childhood); I won't hide that bias.
While I won't claim to be an all-out leading expert on transgenderism, I've worked closely with some that are, due to having worked on research about the topic during my studies at Yale. My experience with it is fairly extensive, both in an academic (and yes, having studied oppositional and supportive sides) and personal way.
To get back to addressing the point that was being asserted, I'll relate my experience with the difference between these similar concepts.
To be dissonant with the gendered aspects of oneself, as stated previously, does not necessarily mean that one is dissatisfied with one's appearance, or that change is sought for the sake of improving that. For example, in myself, while I certainly experienced insecurity with my appearance when I was younger, this was not at all true by the time I finally came to terms with and acknowledged the gender issues I had continually pushed down out of fear; in fact, having resolved those insecurities had been, in my mind, a prerequisite to even allowing myself to humor the possibility of gendered distress having been anything more than a misinterpreted symptom of a different insecurity (from a misogynistic culture? from a culture critical of appearance? something else?). In fact, I wanted desperately for it to have been one of those things-- I spent countless months of soul-searching and written self-analysis on each possibility hoping to uncover that it was, in fact, just some kind of misplaced dissatisfaction with my body on some aspect of attractiveness, or just some kind of bitterness with mistreatment of women in society, even some consequence of some sort of abuse (that I can't recall, given that I have not actually experienced that), etc, etc. I wanted that, because it would have been so much simpler, easier, more understandable. To have a deep and intractable dissonance with the sex and gendered characteristics of one's body is terrifying, largely because there is no way to address it-- or even really acknowledge it-- that is even remotely socially acceptable. Even without any relation to sexuality (having existed since my earliest memories as a toddler, as
Just delete the column already.
I think a lot of folks on slashdot that have problems with these people do so simply because while they don't care about transgender/gay/whatever, they _do_ care about calling a spade a spade. Since saying that a man is a woman clashes with things pretty hard.
Having behaviours typically ascribed to women does not make you a woman. Same with men.
It's actually been found that some Transgendered people have different brain chemistry than "typical" gendered people. There's also theories that certain hormones or conditions in the womb can cause a predisposition towards transgenderism.
There's a whole lot of anti-LGBI bigotry in this mess here on /., but this is the one that keeps coming up. "Transwomen don't get to be women because we decide they're men." This is like the 10th fucking comment that's said that or something similar.
Well, who the fuck are you guys to decide someone else's identity for them!?
"You don't get to spend money on a car, what the fuck do you think you're doing, you're a Jew, you pinch every pinny you get mister! A spade's a spade, har har!"
"College? Boy, you're black, what makes you think you belong at MIT?! Hey now, I'm just saying, a Spade's a Spade. Now you go put on that KFC uniform and know your place, there aren't any black engineers out there."
"Honey, a doctor? You're a woman. You should be a nurse, don't you want to wear a pretty dress? A Spade's a Spade, after all, and you should know your place."
What utter arrogance.
Being Transgendered is not just a choice a Transgendered person makes out of the fucking blue one day. They don't just wake up and go "Well, I feel like a skirt today, and my Kilt is in the wash, guess I'll wear that red satin number."
Transmen and Transwomen spend years if not decades dealing with the knowledge -- not feeling, knowledge -- that they're the wrong gender. When available, they go through therapy that confirms this -- which is often the first time many Transmen and Transwomen realize just what is going on.
That's assuming they don't kill themselves first -- the suicide rate for transgendered people, especially transgender teenagers, is utterly horrifying. Partially because of people saying ignorant anti-LGBI crap like the stuff that's been thrown about in this thread.
And it's not even fucking binary. There's a thing called being "Genderqueer" or "Non-Binary" where people don't associate with either man or woman, at least not 100%.
I know it's a stretch, but I expect less ignorance on /., even though "lol trannies" is still a hiiiilarious joke in the gamer and geek communities. Hell, even Reddit is less of a cesspool than this mess has been.
For further reading I'd suggest starting with these two FAQs about Transgenderism, just as a start.
http://transequality.org/Resources/NCTE_UnderstandingTrans.pdf
http://pub11.bravenet.com/faq/show.php?usernum=940797647&catid=5020
This is old, obvious, and only very tangentially tech-related. This is the second faux-social justice story with very little to do with technology Soulskill has posted in the past 48 hours, I hope this isn't a trend.
I'm in college learning computer programming and while I was planning a database, this problem actually came up. What do I do with the gender field? Do I exclude it?Do I cover the 99.9999% of cases with making it a one time write with no access to changing it? In the end, being in a college with many unique individuals, I opted for a string field with 3 available options through a drop down list (Male, Female, Other) and an option to change it on the profile page. I felt this covered most use cases that I was aware of. (however with database planning, you can be sure someone somewhere will always pull a brand new case out of thin air.)
Ok I'm going to start this off easy
1: Gender Identity is a SELF identity. People should not have a gender identity forced on them that is not the one they use.
2: There is more than just Male and Female. Other identities might include: Intersex, bi-gender, and a-gender. Transgender is not a gender identity in and of itself.
And on to the more technical points
3: When designing systems do not consider gender to be a fixed field for a person. And for that matter remember that names are not fixed either. Also keep in mind that a persons REAL name and their legal name might not be the same
4: In the parts of the system that allow for the update of other personal information, allow for name and gender to be changed.
and on the business process side
5: don't make the requirements for changing a gender marker too restrictive. And especially do NOT require proof of surgery before making a change.
And now I will state for the record that I AM transgender. Documentation changes are one of the biggest hurdles that we face. BTW slashdot will not allow for changing user names, i would like to keep my 5 digit it, but move away from my old masculine sounding username.
This isn't a gender issue, this isn't a gender-politics website. This is a technical issue, this is a technical website.
The problem isn't "people are being mistreated!". The problem is: information architects incorrectly assumed something about an object in the database would never change. Full stop.
It could be gender. It could be height. It could be hair colour. It could be a fingerprint. It could be any number of things that doesn't change from day-to-day for the population of one culture. It could be whether a book in a library's collection is hardcover or paperback. It could be whether a vehicle in a taxicab fleet is diesel, petrol or natural gas. These are properties that don't change from day to day, but they can change, and it's incorrect to assume they never will.
This is a data architecture problem, not a call-out of prejudices.
You may identify with a different gender, but that doesn't change you gender and more then Identifying with a black person makes you black.
This is sloppy 70s pop psychiatry run amok.
To be clear: I don't care if you identify with another gender, I don't car if you want to dress, talk, and hang out with a different gender. DO so, have fun. I would be right their trying to stop anyone who would prevent you from doing those things.
Regardless of chemicals you take, or surgeries you under go; your gender does not change.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
In Australia, passports already allow for "neutral" sex declaration:
http://www.enca.com/world/neutral-gender-identification-wins-court
So if a database is built with Boolean data type, you are in a problem.
Also the database will need to consider that sex information may change during the life of the person.
Just small issues. I'm sure there will be companies that will gladly sell consultancy and handle the projects to change databases to allow for that, on a small budget of a few billions.
Why is this garbage even on Slashdot?
> a woman who had recently gotten married to another woman
It is not possible for two women or two men to marry each other. Marriage was instituted by the Almighty and His Son at Canaa confirmed that it only applies between a (one) man and a (one) woman. Governments do not have the power to change what the Almighty implemented souvereignly.
The so called same-sex marriages are mere "Potemkin villages" as they lack the sacramental character. People should accept with humility that they cannot marry within their own sex, nor can they divorce, just like woman cannot be priests, even if they try hard pretending to be one.
Do we really even need a M/F identifier in most databases? It may be necessary for some medical ones, but do the medical databases, if they contain other biological information (example, bloodtype) assume that this is correct before doing a transfusion? (I'm not a doctor, Jim, perhaps one could confirm this) - My point though, is for most databases, this isn't a useful bit of information.
I mean, seriously, that's not really useful information in 99.999% of the cases where they want you to select.
For example, in genetical studies sex is often important information. It is also used as a quality control measure. If the recorded sex doesn't match with the results of genetical testing, it can cause a lot of trouble. There may be a "witch hunt" to check if somebody has mixed up samples or sample information and the results of whole families may have to be thrown out, if there is suspicion that there is some kind of sample/pedigree mix up. However, it is typically possible to have other values than just male or female as the sex. Typically allowed values are "unknown" and "don't want to tell you".
And there are other valid reasons for recording sex, like doing statistics where you want to do comparision between sexes. And I personally wouldn't like to receive advertisements that are targeted for women as I am unlikely to be interested in them and they just waste my time. However, I think it is good to give the option of not giving the sex, if you don't want to give it. Many people oppose saving any unneccesary personal information, including sex, to different databases, web sites etc.
Is being left-handed - something also caused by unusual neurology - a mental health issue too? If not, why not? What about cases like this - a girl with 5ARD, meaning she's undergoing a natural sex change at puberty - and desperately doesn't want it. Is that a "mental health problem"? http://home.vicnet.net.au/~aissg/2010_FamCA_237.pdf What about boys in the same situation - born looking female, naturally changing to look male later, and welcoming it. Are they "mentally ill" for wanting the change? I note that in the new ICD-11 manual, this whole syndrome is being moved out of the mental health section.
Zoe Brain - Rocket Scientist
Free speech in this country is in a horrible state, because it only applies in a very narrow way to government laws and actions.
Free speech is your right to be free from government sanction for your views. It is not an unlimited license to hold horrible opinions that requires other people, by law, to have to just wring their hands, smile uncomfortably, and pretend that you're a decent person that they'd want to do business with. Outlawing the right of people to refuse to associate themselves with bigots would be in and of itself a form of government control on belief.
You note that it is being moved out, not that it has been moved out. Until then I'll refer to it as it is. That you choose to bring your own biases into the conversation is not something I have control over. If you can read my posts and still somehow manage to conclude that I'm in any way biased then you're not nearly as bright as you'd like to pretend. A person who has lost a leg is still physically handicapped. They're not a lesser person, they're just handicapped and should be judged on their merits not on their handicap. Do, please, try to keep up and leave your biases at home. Slashdot, it may seem so at times, really isn't the place to proudly display your bigotry as though you're a peacock.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
He has had a hysterectomy, has taken T / lived as a man for eight years, and only a handful of people have ever known him as "her." Here in Ohio, he changed his name easily enough, and his driver's license was easy enough to change, but it ends there.
To change federal status you need to revise your birth certificate, which is up to your state of residence. In some states you can easily change your birth certificate, not in Ohio. As I recall, in Ohio you are still required to prove you have had all of the surgical procedures (in his case, doctor's statements signing off on a double mastectomy, hysterectomy, and penile reconstruction) in order to have your birth certificate gender changed. From there you can send in your birth certificate to the department of social security to be issued a new social security card and a new passport.
Alternately, you can lie to the passport people and tell them that your birth certificate has the wrong gender. You send them the copy of your state driver's license as proof, and they correct it, then you send your passport and driver's license as proof to social security, and they correct it. You'll still have the screwed up birth certificate. Thanks, Ohio.
For transgender and intersex people this is archaic. For my state, it's embarrassing. For my friend, it means that a bearded, deep-voiced, guy (in every apparent aspect) still has documentation out there stating that a well-adjusted hetero dude who is obviously a "he" -- believe me you'd never guess -- is still considered a "she."
Get off my virtual lawn, you damned virtual kids!
Definitely applicable to children's medical records. So pediatricians will still want to track gender. The other medical data based on gender is currently suspect, including dosage for anesthetic. But it seems harmless to keep track of a person's chromosomal gender in a private medical database, perhaps including all the complicated rare chromosomal anomalies. You know, information your Doctor would probably like to know, but which your tax auditor, local police officer and boss have no right to know.
Tax breaks for gender? Are you actually suggesting that this is something we need to keep around?
How about maternity and paternity claims being treated equally and with common sense? Also, a man can certainly file a maternity claim, as everyone is free to file most kinds of civil court claims in most jurisdictions. He just won't win it when it becomes obvious he is not the biological mother (duh). On the other hand if he took on a male identity after giving birth, there definitely can be a situation where such filter up front is not only unnecessary but violates basic rights.
Business systems are no longer written in COBOL, using the present tense form of the verb "written". While certainly there exists old software, it's hasn't been actively developed in several years now and is in pure maintenance mode these days. Let's try to look forward instead of backwards. And I'm definitely for making old system obsolete so they can be replaced by new systems, spurring economic growth. (oh I'm sure you can find someone who does COBOL out there. but there are a lot of crazy and unreasonable people out there. for example, I program 8-bit NES games for a hobby)
I'm arguing that the information on gender is generally irrelevant and that as individuals we should consider our gender a very personal piece of information that the vast majority of the businesses and government do not need or deserve. I think we should draw a clear line between the medical condition of a person's gender, and the cultural identity for gender. For 99.9% of people out there, it's the same. No problem, they can have the added bonus of not having to even check an M/F box except on a medical form.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Do, please, try to keep up and leave your biases at home. Slashdot, it may seem so at times, really isn't the place to proudly display your bigotry as though you're a peacock.
Interesting. I ask you some discomfiting questions, you interpret that as bigotry.
Please try answering them instead? Or you may give others the wrong impression.
Zoe Brain - Rocket Scientist
One question I've always had (which may be answerable as there seem a number of TG/TS persons on slashdot) is, how does one form relationships after changing gender? I could definitely see some perils to announcing one's status while looking (attracting those ranging from creepy to curious) but I'd imagine that meeting somebody and not revealing it until later would not go over well in many situations either.
Dating as a straight born-male is hard enough, and from discussions with friends it's harder in many ways to meet people if you're not straight. How does one find a relationship if you've changed visual gender (especially in smaller cities)?
Clearly I'm posting AC because I'm embarrassed about this. Over the last decade or so I've been creating data systems, I generally just use a nullable boolean field for gender. Most times I just name the field female. Admittedly, I mostly write software for sporting events where the women's or girl's events belong to a somewhat protected class. At least that's how I saw it, until Castor Semenya.
I guess I'll start using smallInt for the gender field now. Oh well.