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Show HN: Flip gender in Python

stfwn 8y ago
Nice one! Original, sharp and funny.
- Old_Thrashbarg 8y ago
  Thanks, you should try reading one of the epub's, it's quite entertaining, and you some interesting assumptions that you may otherwise would have overlooked.
mattigames 8y ago
This doesn't "examine gender norms" it just creates a lot of non-sense per book like "She had to go to war like most women and like many ended up amputated and homeless"
- roywiggins 8y ago
  Well, that's still examining gender norms, isn't it? Like, Jabberwocky is nonsense but it is also examining what language is.
- mreome 8y ago
  Isn't the fact that you labeled this sentence as "non-sense," just because the sex of subject has changed, kind of suggesting that this can easily lead to a discussion on gender norms?
- scotty79 8y ago
  Why is that nonsense?
- Old_Thrashbarg 8y ago
  Would love to hear more about why you call that nonsense. I think that's a great example though. I'm male, and I think a common misconception is that gender equality is only for the benefit of females. But feminist issues effect everyone. Like women being allowed to join the workforce increased productivity which also benefited men from having cheaper products. Or this example you point out, men are typically the ones being drafted into war or at least the ones serving on the front lines. I think that raises a lot of interesting questions too. Is that fair? Should women more often be included in drafts or mandatory service? Should women be included in the decisions to go to war? Would we have less wars if that were the case?
  - asdkhadsj 8y ago
    > Or this example you point out, men are typically the ones being drafted into war or at least the ones serving on the front lines. I think that raises a lot of interesting questions too. Is that fair? Should women more often be included in drafts or mandatory service? Should women be included in the decisions to go to war? Would we have less wars if that were the case? I'd question - aside from medical needs, when should men and women not be treated the same? Which is a round about way of saying, of course women should be drafted into war.
  - core-questions 8y ago
    > Like women being allowed to join the workforce increased productivity which also benefited men from having cheaper products It also nearly doubled the labour force without actually doubling the number of jobs available, which arguably resulted in the stagnation of wages to the point where dual incomes became necessary for families to maintain the same standard of living as they did decades ago. There are advantages, but let's not pretend it has been some panacea. Dropping birth rates in the first world may largely be to do with women deferring pregnancy for career advancement. > Should women more often be included in drafts or mandatory service? War is war. The military needs to be distinct from other fields as it is not an experimental playground for egalitarianism, it is the profession of targeted death and destruction. Changes to the military have to be evaluated in the context of "what makes the most efficient military unit", not "what military unit represent everyone back home best". It's not a representational game, it's a crudely real necessity for the security of a country. On that front, real study can show what makes a more cohesive unit. If adding women helps, do it. If it hurts, don't do it. Doing it to make a point may endanger real lives. > Should women be included in the decisions to go to war? Aren't they already? Plenty of female politicians, advisors, representatives. Of course they should be involved, but on their own merits and through their own career advancement, please. Trudeau-style arbitrary enforcement of representational quotas promises no guarantee of better decisionmaking. > Would we have less wars if that were the case? Do women have fewer interpersonal conflicts with their peers than men?
    - DanBC 8y ago
      > War is war. The military needs to be distinct from other fields as it is not an experimental playground for egalitarianism, it is the profession of targeted death and destruction. Changes to the military have to be evaluated in the context of "what makes the most efficient military unit", not "what military unit represent everyone back home best". It's not a representational game, it's a crudely real necessity for the security of a country. NASA used to have a requirement that astronauts had to have experience as military test pilots. The military said that test pilots could only be men. This meant that women could never become test pilots nor astronauts. Then someone put a few women through the NASA tests and found they performed at the same level as men, and sometimes better than men. Too often "let's be careful, we need to test this" is used as an excuse to continue discrimination even though that's objectively worse. https://history.nasa.gov/printFriendly/flats.html https://history.nasa.gov/printFriendly/flats.html
apu8812 8y ago
Could you perhaps make a simple but user-friendly website that lets people convert their epubs?
- Old_Thrashbarg 8y ago
  I have thought about that. I will do if there's demand since I would really love for people to be actually using this and right now only developers can use it. Will require a bit of simple front end work. For example, translating an epub really needs to involve the user (which is currently available in the terminal) since it's very difficult to automatically translate names. For example, "April" can be a month, a town name or a person's name. It needs flipping if it's a name, but not otherwise. Even context sometimes doesn't help: "We were worried about April."
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
sadamznintern 8y ago
“If Ivan weren’t my son perhaps I’d be dating him” Loved the examples, can’t wait to try it!
- Old_Thrashbarg 8y ago
  Great, and feel free to leave a comment if you do use it in some interesting way!
apu8812 8y ago
The whole gender issue has been very well covered and is now overrated. Much more important is to get people (especially typical parochial Americans) to realize that there exist other human beings in other countries. Even the most sexist American male is aware of gender issues (even if he doesn't agree with them). But even "liberal", "soft-hearted" Americans don't much care or know about the life of someone in say Bangladesh or Indonesia. So maybe you could also think of changing nationalities. E.g. change Anglo-American names to Bangladeshi or Indonesian ones.
- Old_Thrashbarg 8y ago
  That's an interesting point. I wonder to what extent it is a zero-sum game in terms of people's attention and capacity to care about problems. I wonder if there were less attention on the sexism problem in the US whether Americans would really turn to other problems or would their attention be caught by, say celebrity news or something useless. I suppose it's somewhere in the middle like most things.
- mr_bojangles 8y ago
  Perhaps on a macro level gender issues have been covered at a surface level. However most people don't grasp how ingrained gender biases exist in everyday situations or in this case, literature. This is an interesting project to bring those more nuanced or subtle biases to light.
  - 1000units 8y ago
    Everybody already knows about the missing tampons in the men's restroom. Tell me about the little kid's life I could have saved with five dollars.
    - kwhitefoot 8y ago
      What does any of this mean?
      - 8y ago
stared 8y ago
It is interesting and close to some things I have been thinking about (vide http://p.migdal.pl/2017/09/30/dating-for-nerds-gender-differences.html http://p.migdal.pl/2017/09/30/dating-for-nerds-gender-differ...). Did you try making some interactive version? I think this could be inspiring for a large audience. Did you try using things like word2vec, to find word “analogies”? (They are often biased, like doctor - man + woman is nurse.) Comparing two “translations” could be interesting.
- Old_Thrashbarg 8y ago
  That would be interesting to try to add word2vec. I wonder if I was successful, and the analogies are biased like you mention, then the book would be flipped but still feel "normal". So, "the nurse walked in and she said hi" would presumably get translated with word2vec to "the doctor walked in and he said hi". That's not the effect I was going for, but it would be really interesting to compare the differences like you mention.
saghm 8y ago
> Dawn Quixote Not sure if this is intentional or not, but "Don" in this case isn't a name, but a title. Does the library attempt to determine whether a name that can also be a word is in fact used as a name in a given instance? (Not blaming it for getting this one wrong if it does, since it's a Spanish rather than English word)
- Old_Thrashbarg 8y ago
  Actually, that was intentional just to be funny. There are indeed many words which can sometimes be names (some months, some town names, I even know a woman who's birth name was America). I let the user control which names are translated (and they select a name for each unique identified name) and allows the user to mark a suspected name as not a name. This is the `--interactive-naming` flag. I added that after the first iteration and reading through an ePub on my Kobo and found tons of random proper nouns "flipped".
  - latexr 8y ago
    > I even know a woman who's birth name was America I know an “Africa” and know of a “Madeinusa” (“made in U.S.A”, which she was not).
    - jerkstate 8y ago
      Sounds like the Miranda musical where one of the main characters is named "Usnavy" after the inscription on a ship..
  - saghm 8y ago
    Cool! I must not have seen that flag from my quick glance at the README
Old_Thrashbarg 8y ago
The biggest problem I have right now with this is "her". The 3rd person possessive and objective cases are identical for female ("her"), but different for male ("him" / "his"). So these 2 sentences flip "her" differently: It was created by her very quickly It was created by her very own child I'm no NLP expert so if anyone has some ideas, please see this issue: https://github.com/Garrett-R/gender_bender/issues/2 https://github.com/Garrett-R/gender_bender/issues/2
- bdr 8y ago
  Have you tried nltk’s part of speech tagging?
  - Old_Thrashbarg 8y ago
    Experimented with SpaCy, didn't work too well, but will try nltk.
1000units 8y ago
Excuse me, but this "flipping" business only further reinforces the idea of gender as a binary construct, which is problematic.
- backpropaganda 8y ago
  Not sure if you're trolling but a tool which flips between two popular genders doesn't deny existence of other genders. Not everything related to gender has to be about the gender spectrum.
  - Old_Thrashbarg 8y ago
    Agreed, you can tackle one problem at a time. And I think progress on one might spread over to the other also.
  - rectangletangle 8y ago
    A k2+ gender version would be an interesting expansion on the idea though. Since the notion of a complementary or inverse gender isn't universal to all genders, maybe cases where there's no clear inverse the gender could be swapped with a randomly chosen gender. Or just swap any explicit gender reference with a different randomly chosen gender. This becomes a bit more challenging if you want to keep the output cohesive though, since you'd probably have to introduce some sort of entity linking scheme. Another issue is finding an appropriate k for genders, assuming this package is implemented with some sort of hard coded gender mapping. This becomes more complex when accounting for different cultures, which probably just ends up multiplying k by m cultures.
- Old_Thrashbarg 8y ago
  True, I was originally going to name it `gender_flipper`, but someone made the same point, so I called it `gender_bender`. This way, the name will still make sense if the ability to go from gendered pronouns to genderless pronouns ("singular they" or "ze") is added. PRs are welcome! For now, I just put "Flip gender" in the title of this HN post to more accurately reflect what the package does today.
- deleted 8y ago

Nice one! Original, sharp and funny.

Old_Thrashbarg 8y ago
Thanks, you should try reading one of the epub's, it's quite entertaining, and you some interesting assumptions that you may otherwise would have overlooked.

This doesn't "examine gender norms" it just creates a lot of non-sense per book like "She had to go to war like most women and like many ended up amputated and homeless"

roywiggins 8y ago
Well, that's still examining gender norms, isn't it? Like, Jabberwocky is nonsense but it is also examining what language is.
mreome 8y ago
Isn't the fact that you labeled this sentence as "non-sense," just because the sex of subject has changed, kind of suggesting that this can easily lead to a discussion on gender norms?
scotty79 8y ago
Why is that nonsense?
Old_Thrashbarg 8y ago
Would love to hear more about why you call that nonsense. I think that's a great example though. I'm male, and I think a common misconception is that gender equality is only for the benefit of females. But feminist issues effect everyone. Like women being allowed to join the workforce increased productivity which also benefited men from having cheaper products. Or this example you point out, men are typically the ones being drafted into war or at least the ones serving on the front lines. I think that raises a lot of interesting questions too. Is that fair? Should women more often be included in drafts or mandatory service? Should women be included in the decisions to go to war? Would we have less wars if that were the case?
- asdkhadsj 8y ago
  > Or this example you point out, men are typically the ones being drafted into war or at least the ones serving on the front lines. I think that raises a lot of interesting questions too. Is that fair? Should women more often be included in drafts or mandatory service? Should women be included in the decisions to go to war? Would we have less wars if that were the case? I'd question - aside from medical needs, when should men and women not be treated the same? Which is a round about way of saying, of course women should be drafted into war.
- core-questions 8y ago
  > Like women being allowed to join the workforce increased productivity which also benefited men from having cheaper products It also nearly doubled the labour force without actually doubling the number of jobs available, which arguably resulted in the stagnation of wages to the point where dual incomes became necessary for families to maintain the same standard of living as they did decades ago. There are advantages, but let's not pretend it has been some panacea. Dropping birth rates in the first world may largely be to do with women deferring pregnancy for career advancement. > Should women more often be included in drafts or mandatory service? War is war. The military needs to be distinct from other fields as it is not an experimental playground for egalitarianism, it is the profession of targeted death and destruction. Changes to the military have to be evaluated in the context of "what makes the most efficient military unit", not "what military unit represent everyone back home best". It's not a representational game, it's a crudely real necessity for the security of a country. On that front, real study can show what makes a more cohesive unit. If adding women helps, do it. If it hurts, don't do it. Doing it to make a point may endanger real lives. > Should women be included in the decisions to go to war? Aren't they already? Plenty of female politicians, advisors, representatives. Of course they should be involved, but on their own merits and through their own career advancement, please. Trudeau-style arbitrary enforcement of representational quotas promises no guarantee of better decisionmaking. > Would we have less wars if that were the case? Do women have fewer interpersonal conflicts with their peers than men?
  - DanBC 8y ago
    > War is war. The military needs to be distinct from other fields as it is not an experimental playground for egalitarianism, it is the profession of targeted death and destruction. Changes to the military have to be evaluated in the context of "what makes the most efficient military unit", not "what military unit represent everyone back home best". It's not a representational game, it's a crudely real necessity for the security of a country. NASA used to have a requirement that astronauts had to have experience as military test pilots. The military said that test pilots could only be men. This meant that women could never become test pilots nor astronauts. Then someone put a few women through the NASA tests and found they performed at the same level as men, and sometimes better than men. Too often "let's be careful, we need to test this" is used as an excuse to continue discrimination even though that's objectively worse. https://history.nasa.gov/printFriendly/flats.html https://history.nasa.gov/printFriendly/flats.html

apu8812 8y ago

Could you perhaps make a simple but user-friendly website that lets people convert their epubs?

Old_Thrashbarg 8y ago
I have thought about that. I will do if there's demand since I would really love for people to be actually using this and right now only developers can use it. Will require a bit of simple front end work. For example, translating an epub really needs to involve the user (which is currently available in the terminal) since it's very difficult to automatically translate names. For example, "April" can be a month, a town name or a person's name. It needs flipping if it's a name, but not otherwise. Even context sometimes doesn't help: "We were worried about April."

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

sadamznintern 8y ago

“If Ivan weren’t my son perhaps I’d be dating him” Loved the examples, can’t wait to try it!

Old_Thrashbarg 8y ago
Great, and feel free to leave a comment if you do use it in some interesting way!

apu8812 8y ago

The whole gender issue has been very well covered and is now overrated. Much more important is to get people (especially typical parochial Americans) to realize that there exist other human beings in other countries. Even the most sexist American male is aware of gender issues (even if he doesn't agree with them). But even "liberal", "soft-hearted" Americans don't much care or know about the life of someone in say Bangladesh or Indonesia. So maybe you could also think of changing nationalities. E.g. change Anglo-American names to Bangladeshi or Indonesian ones.

Old_Thrashbarg 8y ago
That's an interesting point. I wonder to what extent it is a zero-sum game in terms of people's attention and capacity to care about problems. I wonder if there were less attention on the sexism problem in the US whether Americans would really turn to other problems or would their attention be caught by, say celebrity news or something useless. I suppose it's somewhere in the middle like most things.
mr_bojangles 8y ago
Perhaps on a macro level gender issues have been covered at a surface level. However most people don't grasp how ingrained gender biases exist in everyday situations or in this case, literature. This is an interesting project to bring those more nuanced or subtle biases to light.
- 1000units 8y ago
  Everybody already knows about the missing tampons in the men's restroom. Tell me about the little kid's life I could have saved with five dollars.
  - kwhitefoot 8y ago
    What does any of this mean?
    - 8y ago

stared 8y ago

It is interesting and close to some things I have been thinking about (vide http://p.migdal.pl/2017/09/30/dating-for-nerds-gender-differences.html http://p.migdal.pl/2017/09/30/dating-for-nerds-gender-differ...). Did you try making some interactive version? I think this could be inspiring for a large audience. Did you try using things like word2vec, to find word “analogies”? (They are often biased, like doctor - man + woman is nurse.) Comparing two “translations” could be interesting.

Old_Thrashbarg 8y ago
That would be interesting to try to add word2vec. I wonder if I was successful, and the analogies are biased like you mention, then the book would be flipped but still feel "normal". So, "the nurse walked in and she said hi" would presumably get translated with word2vec to "the doctor walked in and he said hi". That's not the effect I was going for, but it would be really interesting to compare the differences like you mention.

saghm 8y ago

> Dawn Quixote Not sure if this is intentional or not, but "Don" in this case isn't a name, but a title. Does the library attempt to determine whether a name that can also be a word is in fact used as a name in a given instance? (Not blaming it for getting this one wrong if it does, since it's a Spanish rather than English word)

Old_Thrashbarg 8y ago
Actually, that was intentional just to be funny. There are indeed many words which can sometimes be names (some months, some town names, I even know a woman who's birth name was America). I let the user control which names are translated (and they select a name for each unique identified name) and allows the user to mark a suspected name as not a name. This is the `--interactive-naming` flag. I added that after the first iteration and reading through an ePub on my Kobo and found tons of random proper nouns "flipped".
- latexr 8y ago
  > I even know a woman who's birth name was America I know an “Africa” and know of a “Madeinusa” (“made in U.S.A”, which she was not).
  - jerkstate 8y ago
    Sounds like the Miranda musical where one of the main characters is named "Usnavy" after the inscription on a ship..
- saghm 8y ago
  Cool! I must not have seen that flag from my quick glance at the README

Old_Thrashbarg 8y ago

The biggest problem I have right now with this is "her". The 3rd person possessive and objective cases are identical for female ("her"), but different for male ("him" / "his"). So these 2 sentences flip "her" differently: It was created by her very quickly It was created by her very own child I'm no NLP expert so if anyone has some ideas, please see this issue: https://github.com/Garrett-R/gender_bender/issues/2 https://github.com/Garrett-R/gender_bender/issues/2

bdr 8y ago
Have you tried nltk’s part of speech tagging?
- Old_Thrashbarg 8y ago
  Experimented with SpaCy, didn't work too well, but will try nltk.

1000units 8y ago

Excuse me, but this "flipping" business only further reinforces the idea of gender as a binary construct, which is problematic.

backpropaganda 8y ago
Not sure if you're trolling but a tool which flips between two popular genders doesn't deny existence of other genders. Not everything related to gender has to be about the gender spectrum.
- Old_Thrashbarg 8y ago
  Agreed, you can tackle one problem at a time. And I think progress on one might spread over to the other also.
- rectangletangle 8y ago
  A k2+ gender version would be an interesting expansion on the idea though. Since the notion of a complementary or inverse gender isn't universal to all genders, maybe cases where there's no clear inverse the gender could be swapped with a randomly chosen gender. Or just swap any explicit gender reference with a different randomly chosen gender. This becomes a bit more challenging if you want to keep the output cohesive though, since you'd probably have to introduce some sort of entity linking scheme. Another issue is finding an appropriate k for genders, assuming this package is implemented with some sort of hard coded gender mapping. This becomes more complex when accounting for different cultures, which probably just ends up multiplying k by m cultures.
Old_Thrashbarg 8y ago
True, I was originally going to name it `gender_flipper`, but someone made the same point, so I called it `gender_bender`. This way, the name will still make sense if the ability to go from gendered pronouns to genderless pronouns ("singular they" or "ze") is added. PRs are welcome! For now, I just put "Flip gender" in the title of this HN post to more accurately reflect what the package does today.
deleted 8y ago