5 ms·

What is non binary? I haven't heard that before. Can you share some experiences?

faitswulff 8y ago
You should search for the term + "gender", but the long and short of it is that certain folks don't feel particularly compelled to identify as "male" OR "female" and thus identify as a non-binary (!(M|F)) gender.
- mmmeff 8y ago
  Honest question: what does this have to do with software development?
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - Pfhreak 8y ago
    Great question. It's more of a workplace concern, as I'm sure that nonbinary folks experience these issues in other workplaces. However, software development is definitely a male dominated environment and there's a lot of discussion in the industry about how we make that environment more inviting to women. So there's a shared experience there of being a gender minority within software, but also the difference that some of our concerns are very different than women's concerns. And software rules our world. My company lets me declare my pronouns on the internal org chart tool (yay!) but required me to select man or woman to receive health benefits (boo!). As an engineer, I can help inform system design and provide feedback on the software that gets written to handle cases like these, which makes our software better.
    - UnFleshedOne 8y ago
      Men and women have different insurance risks. I expect it will take a while for insurance companies to build up risk profiles for new pronouns once those stop changing. They will want to know your biological sex and whether you are in or after transition into one of them. Depending on whatever effects social genders might have they will want to know those as well. And as a third separate item they will want to know your preferred pronouns for communication purposes.
      - Pfhreak 8y ago
        They sure do! And trans people have different insurance risks (and presumably nonbinary people do too.) Rates of suicide, for instance, are considerably higher in trans populations. But, in this case, my insurance company basically said, "Pick either one, and you can change it whenever you want" when I asked how I should pick as a genderfluid person. I asked if I could change it daily, they said, "Sure." shrug I think you are right, we'll eventually settle out a couple of forms for things like pronouns/gender identity/sex characteristics/etc. But having a member of the minority who is also an engineer can help make sure we build those tools in a way that doesn't leave small integer N% of people feeling left out.
  - willio58 8y ago
    It was in the survey results.. the actual topic of this post.
  - jacksnipe 8y ago
    Most professional software development is about working with a local (your team/the people you directly collaborate with) and global (your stack’s ecosystem) community as much as it is about writing code, so it stands to reason that a high visibility social characteristic like gender identity might affect other aspects of the professional experience. Case in point, demographic information like gender identity is a useful feature to contextualize or find patterns in the data — like how the blog post points out that more than half of respondents wrote their first line of code before age 16, but that this statistic varies by gender and country. If it really doesn’t matter, it will be borne out in the statistics (i.e. the gender identity feature will give you no additional information).
  - apta 8y ago
    Nothing. Some people want to make a fuss and get offended at anything.
  - faitswulff 8y ago
    Sometimes software developers are humans.
Pfhreak 8y ago
Ok, this is a HIGHLY abbreviated overview that I'm sure other LGBTQ+ folks would say doesn't get it exactly right: If we decouple the idea of gender (societal expectations for men/women -- e.g. boys like blue, girls like pink. Boys wear shorts, girls wear skirts.) from the idea of sexual/genetic characteristics, then we can start to discuss what it means to be a man vs what it means to be male. Manliness and femininity are both spectrums -- you can imagine folks who are real tough manly men and folks who are not. We call these two spectrums the gender binary -- people typically fall into the manly spectrum somewhere, or in the feminine spectrum somewhere. Nonbinary folks feel excluded by those spectrums for one reason or another. Nonbinary is an umbrella term that can include people who are agender (e.g. I don't identify with any gender), genderfluid (e.g. sometimes I feel masculine, sometimes feminine), genderqueer (e.g. I'm going to take the elements from each spectrum I like and make my own thing), etc. For a more concrete example, people like David Bowie are often held as icons for the nonbinary community (again, not everyone agrees with me here). Eddie Izzard also famously played with gender. Ruby Rose and Tilda Swinton identify as genderfluid. There's a lot of different people under the broad umbrella of nonbinary. > Can you share some experiences? I've been told, "Your pronouns don't matter". I've had my bathroom use policed (I often feel uncomfortable in mens/womens restrooms and strongly prefer gender neutral spaces). I've had coworkers ask, "So does that mean you fuck men?" in a way that is clearly a set up to a joke. Every day I make a conscious choice on my presentation (clothes, hair style, etc.). I typically choose to present in a masculine way because it makes my life easier, even though it's a presentation I am less happy with. There's a surprising amount of cognitive load for me for something that's relatively mindless for most people. Do I dress in a way that makes me happier, but results in a lot more sideways glances (and possibly violence?) or do I dress in a way that keeps me safer but less happy? I understand that they/them pronoun use is not common, and I'm never upset when I correct people, but some people have told me, point blank, "Your pronouns are wrong and gross" or "I will use they/them, but you should know I'm lying to your face when I do so." These sorts of experiences are distractions from what I really want to do, which is build awesome engineering teams and solve hard technical problems. But they're unfortunately a reality of (at least) the software world in the US and most likely in the broader workplace.
- stothrow 8y ago
commandlinefan 8y ago
> what is non binary Analog.
- Pfhreak 8y ago
  I can dig it. Does that mean we get to avoid the gender autotuners and highly produced studio gender? :D
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

You should search for the term + "gender", but the long and short of it is that certain folks don't feel particularly compelled to identify as "male" OR "female" and thus identify as a non-binary (!(M|F)) gender.

mmmeff 8y ago
Honest question: what does this have to do with software development?
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- Pfhreak 8y ago
  Great question. It's more of a workplace concern, as I'm sure that nonbinary folks experience these issues in other workplaces. However, software development is definitely a male dominated environment and there's a lot of discussion in the industry about how we make that environment more inviting to women. So there's a shared experience there of being a gender minority within software, but also the difference that some of our concerns are very different than women's concerns. And software rules our world. My company lets me declare my pronouns on the internal org chart tool (yay!) but required me to select man or woman to receive health benefits (boo!). As an engineer, I can help inform system design and provide feedback on the software that gets written to handle cases like these, which makes our software better.
  - UnFleshedOne 8y ago
    Men and women have different insurance risks. I expect it will take a while for insurance companies to build up risk profiles for new pronouns once those stop changing. They will want to know your biological sex and whether you are in or after transition into one of them. Depending on whatever effects social genders might have they will want to know those as well. And as a third separate item they will want to know your preferred pronouns for communication purposes.
    - Pfhreak 8y ago
      They sure do! And trans people have different insurance risks (and presumably nonbinary people do too.) Rates of suicide, for instance, are considerably higher in trans populations. But, in this case, my insurance company basically said, "Pick either one, and you can change it whenever you want" when I asked how I should pick as a genderfluid person. I asked if I could change it daily, they said, "Sure." shrug I think you are right, we'll eventually settle out a couple of forms for things like pronouns/gender identity/sex characteristics/etc. But having a member of the minority who is also an engineer can help make sure we build those tools in a way that doesn't leave small integer N% of people feeling left out.
- willio58 8y ago
  It was in the survey results.. the actual topic of this post.
- jacksnipe 8y ago
  Most professional software development is about working with a local (your team/the people you directly collaborate with) and global (your stack’s ecosystem) community as much as it is about writing code, so it stands to reason that a high visibility social characteristic like gender identity might affect other aspects of the professional experience. Case in point, demographic information like gender identity is a useful feature to contextualize or find patterns in the data — like how the blog post points out that more than half of respondents wrote their first line of code before age 16, but that this statistic varies by gender and country. If it really doesn’t matter, it will be borne out in the statistics (i.e. the gender identity feature will give you no additional information).
- apta 8y ago
  Nothing. Some people want to make a fuss and get offended at anything.
- faitswulff 8y ago
  Sometimes software developers are humans.

Pfhreak 8y ago

Ok, this is a HIGHLY abbreviated overview that I'm sure other LGBTQ+ folks would say doesn't get it exactly right: If we decouple the idea of gender (societal expectations for men/women -- e.g. boys like blue, girls like pink. Boys wear shorts, girls wear skirts.) from the idea of sexual/genetic characteristics, then we can start to discuss what it means to be a man vs what it means to be male. Manliness and femininity are both spectrums -- you can imagine folks who are real tough manly men and folks who are not. We call these two spectrums the gender binary -- people typically fall into the manly spectrum somewhere, or in the feminine spectrum somewhere. Nonbinary folks feel excluded by those spectrums for one reason or another. Nonbinary is an umbrella term that can include people who are agender (e.g. I don't identify with any gender), genderfluid (e.g. sometimes I feel masculine, sometimes feminine), genderqueer (e.g. I'm going to take the elements from each spectrum I like and make my own thing), etc. For a more concrete example, people like David Bowie are often held as icons for the nonbinary community (again, not everyone agrees with me here). Eddie Izzard also famously played with gender. Ruby Rose and Tilda Swinton identify as genderfluid. There's a lot of different people under the broad umbrella of nonbinary. > Can you share some experiences? I've been told, "Your pronouns don't matter". I've had my bathroom use policed (I often feel uncomfortable in mens/womens restrooms and strongly prefer gender neutral spaces). I've had coworkers ask, "So does that mean you fuck men?" in a way that is clearly a set up to a joke. Every day I make a conscious choice on my presentation (clothes, hair style, etc.). I typically choose to present in a masculine way because it makes my life easier, even though it's a presentation I am less happy with. There's a surprising amount of cognitive load for me for something that's relatively mindless for most people. Do I dress in a way that makes me happier, but results in a lot more sideways glances (and possibly violence?) or do I dress in a way that keeps me safer but less happy? I understand that they/them pronoun use is not common, and I'm never upset when I correct people, but some people have told me, point blank, "Your pronouns are wrong and gross" or "I will use they/them, but you should know I'm lying to your face when I do so." These sorts of experiences are distractions from what I really want to do, which is build awesome engineering teams and solve hard technical problems. But they're unfortunately a reality of (at least) the software world in the US and most likely in the broader workplace.

stothrow 8y ago

commandlinefan 8y ago

> what is non binary Analog.

Pfhreak 8y ago
I can dig it. Does that mean we get to avoid the gender autotuners and highly produced studio gender? :D

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]