Who gets to decide when a person should use the word 'cisgender'? I'm being told what I have to call you, yet this word is thrown around as if I had any choice in the matter.
This article, if read like it's satire, is absolutely hilarious. The only shame is that it's not satire.
> “programs can only have two genders and you can’t change your gender and how people changing their gender broke the university’s system…as though trans and enby folx are an inconvenience to code.”
Any change is an "inconvenience to code". If I have to start accommodating _any_ new fields or _any_ new values in an enum, it's an "inconvenience". Obviously that's relative to the database in question; in some a change would be as easy as ten minutes work, in others such a change would need to be threaded through a thousand different places and so it wouldn't be as easy.
This has nothing to do with the meaning of the field itself.
> The reason for this has to do with both hegemonic heteronormativity and math. Everything you do on a computer is secretly math, and that’s the trouble.
This is a bizzare statement. Computers only work at all because of math; you could not design a functioning computer without something math-like being involved.
Heteronormativity (well, probably what the author means is "cisnormativity", if that's a word either) - I take this to mean the implicit assumption that a 'gender' field in a system only needs to have two values.
> Let’s say that you have an old system where you have a field name Sex, of type Boolean.
This is actually very unlikely to be stored as a boolean, though under the hood a minimal amount of space will be used to store the information. An enum would be more appropriate, or a single-character field perhaps. Otherwise, my gender would be "true"... or would it be "false"? Maybe we can label the field is_male....
Technical quibbles aside, though, the more important thing to note is that it was a completely safe, politically correct, reasonable choice to implement such a 'gender' field until literally only a few years ago. This article castigates and demonizes the "heteronormative" programmer for simply implementing things with what seemed like common sense to everyone then and still many people now, and goes further to insult the entire foundation of, well, everything.
> The messiness of the “real” world and people’s shifting identities are rarely consistent with the sleek empiricism required to effectively do the math that is under the hood in computers. This is most obvious when it comes to the gender binary and binary representation in computer systems.
> In post-structuralist, especially feminist, theory: a structure or style of thought, speech, or writing (often considered as typical of traditional western philosophy, culture, or literature), deconstructed as expressing male attitudes and reinforcing male dominance; phallocentrism implicitly communicated in or through language.
which is essentially a rejection of deterministic meaning in any real sense, combined with a bunch of the typical babble from Derrida that serves to do little more than to attack the very foundations of logic in an attempt to replace it with hand-wavy bullshit.
> “While issues of identity, data, and information systems seem to be—on one level, at least—an interesting conceptual or philosophical problem to ponder, they also expose the urgency of recognizing the very real and lived challenges these tensions and the rapid rise and adoption of data-intensive technologies and platforms generate for already vulnerable trans and queer populations,”
Like, honestly, if your biggest problem in life is the value recorded about you in a database somewhere, and this is causing you "lived challenges"... well, sorry, but get...
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 11.5 ms ] threadWho gets to decide when a person should use the word 'cisgender'? I'm being told what I have to call you, yet this word is thrown around as if I had any choice in the matter.
> “programs can only have two genders and you can’t change your gender and how people changing their gender broke the university’s system…as though trans and enby folx are an inconvenience to code.”
Any change is an "inconvenience to code". If I have to start accommodating _any_ new fields or _any_ new values in an enum, it's an "inconvenience". Obviously that's relative to the database in question; in some a change would be as easy as ten minutes work, in others such a change would need to be threaded through a thousand different places and so it wouldn't be as easy.
This has nothing to do with the meaning of the field itself.
> The reason for this has to do with both hegemonic heteronormativity and math. Everything you do on a computer is secretly math, and that’s the trouble.
This is a bizzare statement. Computers only work at all because of math; you could not design a functioning computer without something math-like being involved.
Heteronormativity (well, probably what the author means is "cisnormativity", if that's a word either) - I take this to mean the implicit assumption that a 'gender' field in a system only needs to have two values.
> Let’s say that you have an old system where you have a field name Sex, of type Boolean.
This is actually very unlikely to be stored as a boolean, though under the hood a minimal amount of space will be used to store the information. An enum would be more appropriate, or a single-character field perhaps. Otherwise, my gender would be "true"... or would it be "false"? Maybe we can label the field is_male....
Technical quibbles aside, though, the more important thing to note is that it was a completely safe, politically correct, reasonable choice to implement such a 'gender' field until literally only a few years ago. This article castigates and demonizes the "heteronormative" programmer for simply implementing things with what seemed like common sense to everyone then and still many people now, and goes further to insult the entire foundation of, well, everything.
> The messiness of the “real” world and people’s shifting identities are rarely consistent with the sleek empiricism required to effectively do the math that is under the hood in computers. This is most obvious when it comes to the gender binary and binary representation in computer systems.
There's not that much math involved here, though, is there? This really touches more on the "phallogocentrism" concept ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phallogocentrism ):
> In post-structuralist, especially feminist, theory: a structure or style of thought, speech, or writing (often considered as typical of traditional western philosophy, culture, or literature), deconstructed as expressing male attitudes and reinforcing male dominance; phallocentrism implicitly communicated in or through language.
which is essentially a rejection of deterministic meaning in any real sense, combined with a bunch of the typical babble from Derrida that serves to do little more than to attack the very foundations of logic in an attempt to replace it with hand-wavy bullshit.
> “While issues of identity, data, and information systems seem to be—on one level, at least—an interesting conceptual or philosophical problem to ponder, they also expose the urgency of recognizing the very real and lived challenges these tensions and the rapid rise and adoption of data-intensive technologies and platforms generate for already vulnerable trans and queer populations,”
Like, honestly, if your biggest problem in life is the value recorded about you in a database somewhere, and this is causing you "lived challenges"... well, sorry, but get...