Define your own gender on Facebook alternative Diaspora

By Contributing Writer on Thursday, December 30, 2010 - 21:11

In fact, the developer who contributed this particular feature to the Diaspora project includes this little image of the various gender identities used by her friends:

Image from SarahMei.com

She explains her decision:

Four years ago, at my first rails job, I worked at a company with a mostly-lesbian customer base. It turns out, in that context, knowing if someone is ‘male’ or ‘female’ gives you almost no useful information. The lesbian community has other widely-accepted categories of gender, but the company’s internal order tracking software — a well-known package from a national vendor — offered only male or female.

As a result, the company didn’t even bother to ask for gender when users created accounts.

That was my first real-life experience with the limitations of the gender binary. It was certainly interesting, but it was essentially academic. Not long after I left that job, though, one of my closest family members told me that he’s transgender. That made the whole subject way more immediate.

She also spoke to Sarah Dopp — who identifies as an ‘Androgynous Queer Girl’ — who had written this in her blog:

Now imagine signing up for a cool website, and then being required to select an option from a drop-down menu that doesn’t include anything that represents you. If you don’t decide to close the browser window right then and there, you’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’re in the wrong one no matter what), and you’ll feel defeated. You’ll want to argue that whatever they think they’re learning from that drop-down menu, it’s not really true. You’ll want to tell them that they’re adding to your humiliation by making you do this. You’ll want to tell them that they’re missing a huge part of you by boiling this rich and beautiful characteristic down into a two-option drop-down menu.

Diaspora is still in very early days, but it’s good to see that the services of the future are considering the needs of users who don’t identify with the standard options on drop-down lists. Of course, taking on Facebook is a David and Goliath situation if there ever was one. It remains to be seen if users really value their privacy and right to self-identify as much as they do the convenience of a service they’ve used for years.