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Salutations Congress. Nice of you to show up. I'm very glad to be here. I'm Linda Todaro and I can't see you anymore. Very good. I'm usually of findable at the Acme Labs assembly and I have come to you to talk about gender. I know. Interesting topic, right? So a couple of things about me, I am many things among them nonbinary and master of science in intelligent systems currently. So my background is in computer science, currently a Ph.D. at the University of Ellingham, and I also do science labs. And basically, this is just another one of those for me, and I've been doing this for roughly while I've been pondering this topic for roughly 10 years. That doesn't make me necessarily an expert, but at least it makes me enough of an expert so that I think I can stand up here and tell you something, OK? Why is this talk? This talk is about this exact thing. We this is a form that a good friend of mine who wanted to partake in a scientific study had to fill out. And it's in German. I'll translate. It's a question on a scientific survey that asks you for your gender, and it gives four options male, female, other and no answer. And while that is not technically the worst thing you can do, it was the motivation of for asking myself of how can we do better in this type of situation? So this is a talk about our responsibilities as software craftspeople, what we can do to reflect these things and what responsibilities we have and how the tech itself by itself, just by the virtue of being tech is not neutral. There there's some contact notes I want to hit on first. This talk will deal with descriptions of transmis here, so hatred against trans people, intimacy and involuntary surgery. If that's not something you want to deal with, there will be a recording if you want to see this at a better time for you. And otherwise, I want to follow roughly this the split. I want to do one part education, one part form design advice and one part fun. Because even though it is the year 2019 an
d you really think that by now, the basics would be down, you still sometimes get forms on the internet like these. I must say at this point, none of these screen grabs that I will show you are made up. I have done exactly zero of them. They were all found somewhere on the internet. OK, a few things. This talk is not. This talk is not an invitation to debate the human rights of people, especially trans people or people in a different culture. So if you want to yell about attack helicopters and please, there's your fish, do your extremely unfunny jokes somewhere else. All right. So why are forms important? Why is it important that we deal with this at all? Well, if you do sloppy work, it hurts a lot of people. First of all, your data if your input form for anything. But in this talk, we'll use gender as an example. But if your input form doesn't let people input the correct form or the correct answer to a given question, then that hurts your data because you will get incorrect data. It hurts your users. And I can tell you from first, second and third hand experience that it is really, really, really frustrating. If you're supposed to tell somebody something about yourself and the correct answer is not an option, and it also hurts yourself because someone somewhere down the line, these people will complain to you or not use your service when they otherwise would have. So nobody likes this extra frustration. Let's see how we can do better. That brings me to my conclusion slide, which I like to put in front of. The central points are as follows Make the model fit the user. You are modeling your user if you know it or not, and it's important that you make your model fit the actual users in the world and don't chuck any model out there and say that the user has to conform to that. The next one is humans are moving targets. Humans change. Their names change. Their gender sometimes changes its. Really, really, really difficult to just get everything right the first time. An
d so we change and your model should reflect that. Of course, the easiest thing to do is just not ask a certain question because with that, you make the fewest mistakes. But sometimes if you do ask something, be at least very precise and upfront about what you're using the data for, just so people know which is the correct answer to give you. All right. Now that we got the boring stuff out of the way, we can talk about the fun stuff. The talk is titled Hello, I'm Your Edge case, and that is based upon mine and others. Some of my friend's experiences at university when whenever we wanted to sign up for something like a sports club or a student union or something whenever there was like a little field that says, Oh well, please select your gender, male or female. Then we would not be able to give the correct answer, and we would have to go talk to an actual person. And the introduction, usually when something along the lines of Hello, I'm the person that doesn't fit your system or hello, I'm your edge case and the format the rest of the talk will take is that we will go through some of the. Maybe incorrect or maybe a bit biased, or maybe a bit. Well, let's say updatable functions or preconceptions you might have and then talk a bit about the facts and about the problem and see what we can learn from that. The first one is maybe the most popular one. It's there's only two genders. Well, some people don't even manage that. And again, these are not made up of some people apparently still believe that, well, there's just one. And it's male, so you're all the same. I mean, while I appreciate generally that the the the the the impetus into the direction of everyone is everyone being equal. I don't appreciate just everybody calls it being called male instead. But no, seriously, there's a there's a lot of non-binary people that are neither male nor female. Non-binary people have been part of almost every culture for almost as long as we have records going back. This is not a 
new phenomenon. This is not just a trend, and it's gotten so far to the point that even some countries you can see here have started adding legal recognition to non-binary genders as well, including Germany in some sense. We'll get to that a bit later on. But the list is there. It's not very short and it's only ever getting longer. So maybe don't store gender in a Boolean anymore. I beg of you, please don't. It is just not enough. It can only hold two things when there's clearly more than two things. OK, now that we've done that, the next step that somebody might take is OK, OK, OK, OK, OK, I get it. Not to it. Three, Right? Three. That's what you said. That's like male, female and all of the others or the other. So I'll just do three instead that I can do. And of course, first of all, I would like to ask of you if you're designing a computer system and you want to give a third option in gender. Please, please make sure it's actually a gender. This thing was given where you have female, male and LGBT. LGBT, of course, stands for lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans, and none of those genders. You're trans if your gender doesn't match the gender you were assigned at birth, otherwise you're cis. But it's not a gender in itself. It's not the third option. Please, please never do male, female, trans. It's it just shows how ignorant you are. OK, but if you don't do that, even some corporations have caught on to that. There might be more than just those or just three options of male, female and other. Tinder has thirty seven by now. And of course, thirty seven is a lot. But the thing is, is that now the exact number. And of course, it isn't. Whenever you get to a finite number, there will somebody there will be somebody on Earth and probably somebody within your user base that doesn't fit into any of those boxes you've laid out. I mean, just from the thirty seven here, we also have gender fluid, and I think this is gender, queer, sorry, gender, queer and gender fluid and age,
 gender and neutral. And we have by gender transgender. We have poly, gender and transgender and a range of other non-binary identities. And the idea is just whenever you get to a certain certain finite point, it is always some somebody who is also beyond that. Don't just put out a limited number of boxes and say everybody fit into that, OK? And the next step, of course, would be OK. You said 37 and then you said some others. I'll just build all of those. And is the interactive part of the talk. I don't know if we can get the room lights a bit up. If not, that's also not probably whoever here has heard of something called a demi boy. That's a gender identity who has, um, that's around half a dozen people that I can see, and there's at least 100 people here. So that's a perfect illustration of why you would need a text box because you don't know all of the possible answers that you can give. And for that, this slide is gives a, you know, it's a reasonable approximation, and it's also a little bit of a humorous take on something extremely serious. Human humans still change. Humans are still a moving target, even if you know about all the. Genders that exist today, you might want to add another one tomorrow because you get a new user that has that gender. And for that, it would be ideal if you can have a a text box where people can just add their own gender. It's not a statistical outlier. If enough people do, it is, of course, a little bit of a funny take. But it's also an invitation. If you if you are non-binary yourself and you feel safe in a certain space, please. If somebody gives you a text field, do enter your true gender. Because if, if more people do it, it will create more visibility. All right. So from that, we've seen that maybe don't store gender in an enum either. OK. Next up, this is also a bit of a contentious subject, but a lot of people come to me and say, Well, I learned in school that there's only two biological sexes, right? Well, you might have le
arned that in school. I won't dispute that, but I can tell you from my side of things that I once learned in school that there's no gravity in space. Well, that is obviously wrong, even though it's a simplification, something that my younger self was or needed to be told. So I couldn't understand or have my understanding move forward a bit. So I can then later understand the more complexities that, of course, there's gravity in space, but it behaves differently than the one, you know, and it in same things goes with biological configurations. And as that relates to gender, there's something called intersex people. And that is, if you are born with any configuration of your biology, that might be your gonads, that might be yours, that might be your chromosomes. That might be a lot of things. Your hormone levels a bunch and any of these can fluctuate so that you don't fit into the two classical categories. And if you are, if you are born such, then you might find yourself into the label. Intersex and intersex people don't necessarily be our don't necessarily become non-binary automatically. They are not non-binary automatically, but some of them might claim that label. It's up to them. Of course, gender is something you know best what you are. So please just let people talk for themselves while I'm on the topic. Also, there's a very serious thing that I want to mention where a lot of intersex people, when they are born and people notice that maybe their genitals don't conform to one of the two classical categories, then people are still being subjected to unnecessary surgeries like there's no medical need for them. But just to make it easier for the person, a functioning set of testes as a removed or the clitoris is reduced. And that is still happening today in Germany, too, and in the US and in a lot of other places. And if you're maybe social justice adjacent and looking for a good cause to spend some time in, maybe read up on this and learn about that and see how y
ou can affect that. It's definitely something extremely troubling to me. OK, so biology, maybe bimodal, that is the distribution that Mesa has two peaks with the most common with the most common outcomes, but it's definitely not binary either. OK. Also, you probably don't need to know unless you're a doctor and making some input form for very specific medical procedures, then you probably don't need to know if you're just a social media site or something. You do not need to know your uses biology. Yeah, well, this I also hear a lot there's so many options now you've you said there's at least 37 or might be more that sounds like work. And sure, but I don't buy that. There's a here's a form from the German military interest union or something, and they give you two options for gender and they give you seventy one options for academic title. I could read them all to you, but I literally do not have enough time left in the talk. And with that, I just don't believe you that it's too much work if you do something like this. So if you don't want to deal with the whole thing BS, please be advised that not asking is always an option. You can always just not ask about it. The information is either needed or not act accordingly. If it's needed, get the right one. If it's not needed, maybe just don't ask. Some people also say, Oh well, I'll just ask for preferred salutation and inferred gender from that. Yeah. Spoiler alert. Guessing gender doesn't work. Not from name, not from face, not from the tweets from you. There's nothing that you can guess gender from, except a field where the user can input the agenda. And so you will get this wrong. Even if there are some online services who tell you that they can, they only give you a best guess. And that's usually not enough if you want to do salutations. Sure. More power to you, but at least include, like, a neutral option. This is one from lobby control. I like that a lot. They have two options and they have a third one that just 
says hello in German. And the English language also has mics for not Mr Not Mrs, not Miss, but mixed. That's gender neutral is in the dictionary. But when whatever language you're using, hello just works everywhere. OK. Quick case study in the case and you're working in Germany in particular, we have for gender markers and our passports. We have numerous options in biology and we have countless options in gender. And I wanted to see, OK, political parties, how do they do this? Who have them shapes up the best? And well, to nobody's surprise, the Social Democrats do it the worst. They just ask for binary gender, nothing to do about it. And since Germany has the third entry, I'm pretty sure that's illegal or at least legally questionable by now. So. Hmm. Next up, also, to nobody's surprise, the two conservative parties just ask for binary salutation. That's not very good. We have the free Democrats that ask for male, female or diverse. At least they mention all of them. The Green Party has male, female, entire or diverse or no answer, which is basically OK. And the Left Party, the socialists, they don't ask at all, which I think is really the best way the empty model makes the fewest mistakes. Yes, thank you. OK. My time is running to an end, but you kind of also came for this next slide. No, seriously. How do you ask people for their gender? So here's my best take before asking. Make sure you need the information. Make sure this is the information you need and you're not really asking something else. Make sure it's mutable in your model. Make sure you can change it. And then just ask either tell them. Definitely tell them what they need, what you need the answer for it and definitely tell them that they can just enter a freeform answer in a text field. But then you can give either no options and have everybody use the text field or give as many as reasonable possible. That's more than two, and then also have some text field for the ones that are not in the boxes list
ed above. This is very popular with the target demographic. I also would very much like that more seen, even though there's no text field. Of course, this applies to other questions too. I don't know if you could be Danish, but apparently you can. But generally, this is not just gender, it's not just sexual orientation. It's also names, addresses all of these things. Not everybody has one, even if you think they do. And it can be really, really complicated once you get down to it. My conclusion slide is this again, if you wanted to talk to me again, you can come up after or meet me at the Acme Labs assembly. Here are some recommendations if you want to read more. That's all I have. Thank you for your attention. APPLAUSE, applause, applause, applause. And on the left and on the right are the usual microphones, if there are any questions from the audience. It's now the time or perhaps from the internet, so somebody is running. It's a good sign that kind of sir. But um. Yes. Yes. Hi. Hey, ah, is there? You said that in the beginning there there were bulletins to store gender, which is not recommended. Do you have any data on whether there was a preference to give the true and the false to male or female or vice versa? Well, the thing is, both are false. I don't know what you are. The thing is, there's not enough answers in to most polls. It was just idle curiosity as to whether there is some preference in the data as to in which direction they got it wrong. My preference is to not give the wrong answer. Good. OK, second question. Or anyone from the internet. No question that means thanks a lot. Another applause for Lambda tutorial.