{"id":514,"date":"2008-12-20T12:33:37","date_gmt":"2008-12-20T19:33:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sarahdopp.com\/blog\/?p=514"},"modified":"2008-12-20T17:15:08","modified_gmt":"2008-12-21T00:15:08","slug":"genders-and-drop-down-menus","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sarahdopp.com\/blog\/2008\/genders-and-drop-down-menus\/","title":{"rendered":"Genders and Drop-down Menus"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"juiz-outdated-message jodpm-top\">Heads up, this content is 17 years old. Please keep its age in mind while reading.<\/div><p><strong>Dear Silicon Valley,<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>First of all, I don&#8217;t know if I&#8217;ve told you this lately, but I love you.\u00a0 We do great things here, and this life is pretty damned fun.\u00a0 You&#8217;ve taken very good care of me, introduced me to brilliant people, given me the tools to stay connected with a world of friends, and even started paying my rent.\u00a0 I&#8217;m forever grateful that we found each other.<\/p>\n<p>And I have a favor to ask.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m noticing that the stuff we make here &#8212; these websites and tools and communities &#8212; can influence the rest of the world pretty significantly.\u00a0 It used to be that only the geeks were using the Internet, but now it&#8217;s becoming &#8220;pretty much everybody.&#8221;\u00a0 And here&#8217;s the powerful thing:<strong> when a website is considered &#8220;good,&#8221; whatever that website displays as content, images, default settings, or options is considered &#8220;normal&#8221; by its users.<\/strong> <em>You have the power to influence &#8220;normal.&#8221;<\/em> I could give you examples, but I know you already know what I&#8217;m talking about.<\/p>\n<p>The favor I want to ask is this: <strong>please think about how you&#8217;re handling race and gender on your websites.<\/strong>\u00a0 Just look at it.\u00a0 You don&#8217;t have to change anything.\u00a0 Just make a mental note in your head about what your saying to your users about the importance of race and gender, and the categories that exist for them.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ll give you a hint: If you&#8217;re still asking about <em>race<\/em> in a required drop-down menu, you&#8217;re way behind.\u00a0 Because doing it that way says to a user:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>You have a race.<\/li>\n<li>It&#8217;s really important to me.<\/li>\n<li>It&#8217;s one (and only one) of these listed here.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Seriously, I really don&#8217;t think you&#8217;re doing this, because it would be horribly weird.\u00a0 My friend with the half-Jamaican-half-Chinese father and Irish immigrant mother would either laugh hysterically at you or be extraordinarily offended.\u00a0 <em>&#8220;You want me to tell you what? WHY??&#8221;<\/em><\/p>\n<p>The way we build a profile page matters.\u00a0 You get that it matters.<\/p>\n<p>So&#8230; this next part&#8217;s gonna sound a little weird, but hear me out for a minute.\u00a0 <strong>I think <em>gender<\/em> is taking the same path as<em> race<\/em>.<\/strong>\u00a0 It&#8217;s still visually defining, but people are starting to acknowledge that there are grey areas. And those grey areas are growing.<\/p>\n<p>There&#8217;s a longstanding argument that &#8220;male&#8221; and &#8220;female&#8221; are a biologically-defined and relevant way to split our population in half. But if you&#8217;ve ever met a feminine man or a masculine woman, you know that these categories are way too rough to mean anything more than a stereotype sometimes.<\/p>\n<p>It goes deeper than that.\u00a0 For example, within lesbian communities, &#8220;butch&#8221; and &#8220;femme&#8221; have been considered separate genders for awhile now.\u00a0 Yes, they&#8217;re both female (well, sometimes), but they have different roles both in the community and in relationships (except when they don&#8217;t, which is true for any gender).\u00a0 There&#8217;s also a growing presence of people who are living today as a different gender than the one they were assigned at birth. Sometimes you notice them and sometimes you don&#8217;t.\u00a0 (Hint: You won&#8217;t know how many you aren&#8217;t noticing &#8212; that&#8217;s the point.)\u00a0 There are people born intersex &#8212; with the biological features of more than one gender (and there are more of these than you might expect).\u00a0 And you may have noticed this in cities and among young people &#8212; there&#8217;s also a growing presence of folks whose genders you just can&#8217;t identify.\u00a0 Some of them, if you ask them respectfully, will tell you they feel like both genders.\u00a0 Or neither gender.\u00a0 Or a gender that needs a new name.\u00a0 They might answer to both &#8220;he&#8221; and &#8220;she,&#8221; or they might prefer something different.\u00a0 They&#8217;re in-between, and that&#8217;s where they belong.<\/p>\n<p>Just for a minute, try to imagine yourself in the shoes of someone who has spent a lifetime feeling just as uncomfortable in the men&#8217;s locker room as in the women&#8217;s locker room &#8212; for whatever reason.\u00a0 Imagine having to dress in clothing that <em>just feels wrong<\/em> to you, everyday, because you know it means you&#8217;ll be treated better than you would if you wore what you like.\u00a0 Imagine walking through the world knowing that everyone&#8217;s first assumptions about how you see yourself, who you love, and what feels right for you  are completely wrong.<\/p>\n<p>Now imagine signing up for a cool website, and then being <em>required<\/em> to select an option from a drop-down menu that doesn&#8217;t include <em>anything<\/em> that represents you.\u00a0 If you don&#8217;t decide to close the browser window right then and there, you&#8217;ll probably pick the gender of the restroom you still use in public when you have no other choice (even though people might stop you to tell you you&#8217;re in the wrong one no matter what), and you&#8217;ll feel defeated. You&#8217;ll want to argue that whatever they think they&#8217;re learning from that drop-down menu, it&#8217;s not really true. You&#8217;ll want to tell them that they&#8217;re adding to your humiliation by making you do this. You&#8217;ll want to tell them that they&#8217;re missing a huge part of you by boiling this rich and beautiful characteristic down into a two-option drop-down menu.<\/p>\n<p>Okay, you can come back now.\u00a0 That&#8217;s all I needed from you &#8212; just to think about it. The truth is, there are no perfect solutions to this problem right now.\u00a0 Gender is still relevant (except when it&#8217;s not) and drop-downs are still the cleanest way to gather data (except when they&#8217;re not).\u00a0 To quote Facebook (a site that&#8217;s only <em>sort of<\/em> doing it wrong), &#8220;It&#8217;s complicated.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>So just keep an eye out.\u00a0 Be aware of what you&#8217;re calling <em>normal<\/em>.\u00a0 Make a mental note of who it might be excluding.\u00a0 Make conscious choices about how you handle things.\u00a0 And please remind the web developer in the next cubicle to do the same.<\/p>\n<p>Thanks and love,<br \/>\nSarah Dopp<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Heads up, this content is 17 years old. Please keep its age in mind while reading.Dear Silicon Valley, First of all, I don&#8217;t know if I&#8217;ve told you this lately, but I love you.\u00a0 We do great things here, and this life is pretty damned fun.\u00a0 You&#8217;ve taken very good care of me, introduced me [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[44,33,167,70],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-514","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-philosophy","category-politics","category-sarahs-soapbox","category-social-media"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarahdopp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/514","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarahdopp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarahdopp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarahdopp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarahdopp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=514"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sarahdopp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/514\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1361,"href":"https:\/\/sarahdopp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/514\/revisions\/1361"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarahdopp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=514"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarahdopp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=514"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarahdopp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=514"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}