When Binary Code Won’t Accommodate Nonbinary People
This article, if read like it&#x27;s satire, is absolutely hilarious. The only shame is that it&#x27;s not satire.<p>&gt;  “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.”<p>Any change is an &quot;inconvenience to code&quot;. If I have to start accommodating _any_ new fields or _any_ new values in an enum, it&#x27;s an &quot;inconvenience&quot;. Obviously that&#x27;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&#x27;t be as easy.<p>This has nothing to do with the meaning of the field itself.<p>&gt; 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.<p>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.<p>Heteronormativity (well, probably what the author means is &quot;cisnormativity&quot;, if that&#x27;s a word either) - I take this to mean the implicit assumption that a &#x27;gender&#x27; field in a system only needs to have two values.<p>&gt; Let’s say that you have an old system where you have a field name Sex, of type Boolean.<p>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 &quot;true&quot;... or would it be &quot;false&quot;?  Maybe we can label the field is_male....<p>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 &#x27;gender&#x27; field until literally only a few years ago. This article castigates and demonizes the &quot;heteronormative&quot; 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.<p>&gt; 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.<p>There&#x27;s not that much math involved here, though, is there? This really touches more on the &quot;phallogocentrism&quot; concept ( <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Phallogocentrism" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Phallogocentrism</a> ):<p>&gt; 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.<p>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.<p>&gt; “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,”<p>Like, honestly, if your biggest problem in life is the value recorded about you in a database somewhere, and this is causing you &quot;lived challenges&quot;... well, sorry, but get over yourself. This implies to me that a lot of bigger problems have been solved, and it&#x27;s time to work on smoothing off the last remaining edge cases; surely if there are still big problems to be solved (like, actual social exclusion, or access to medical care issues) these sorts of minor concerns can wait, and don&#x27;t need the entire structure of programming, mathematics, logic, and basic epistemology to be attacked in order to justify adding a field to a database.<p>It would be one thing if an article like this was just written to say &quot;Hey! People with non-standard gender labels want to have some freedom in your database! We don&#x27;t like it when we have to pick! You can make us feel better easily by planning your database a little bit differently!&quot;, then fine, sure, whatever.<p>Instead of doing that, the author has to blow the wrong thing out of proportion, likely due to their lack of understanding of how these kinds of systems are built and how implementation decisions are made. The entire thing is chalked up to malice, specifically malice committed by the evil men who build everything.<p>&gt; trans and gender nonconforming people are excluded from or subjugated to information systems is a phenomenon she labels data violence<p>There is no violence here.<p>It&#x27;s a tired argument, but using the word &quot;violence&quot; in conjunction with extremely minor perceived slights that cause no measurable harm makes people tune out, and having tuned out, when _real_ violence happens they&#x27;re less likely to care. We educate children about this concept by telling them stories like &quot;chicken little&quot; and &quot;the boy who cried wolf&quot; - don&#x27;t abuse your personal ability to summon everyone for help or it will not work when you really need it.<p>If you must have a concept of &quot;data violence&quot;, it seems like it would be much more applicable to someone hacking into your personal data and violating it, changing it, or exposing it to others. Having to select an option on a form that doesn&#x27;t completely describe your existence is not even remotely comparable to this.