Change gender field to "preferred pronoun" field

Maybe an example, so they can pick the sentence that looks right?

When referring to me, please use:
He said...
She said...
[username] said...

If you want to avoid people going "wtf?" perhaps a simple introductory sentence such as, "To be respectful of all gender variations, we are asking instead for people to identify how they would like others to refer to them in conversation."

Though that may be too long of a sentence for non native English speakers.

Michelle

+1 for Michelle proposal. The sentence doesn't seem too long to me; I would get non native speakers (in which I am included) have more problems with short sentences (or phrases) than longer sentences.

The challenge here, as I see it, is that you not only have cultural challenges, you also have class and profession challenges. "Mr." is going to be a de facto insult to a man who is a medical doctor or university professor, for example. Are we going to have a drop-down that includes "Baron" and "Shaikh" and "Sister" and "Mahatma" and so on?

I think this would probably be more political than a gender field.

Yeah, I kind of agree with Dave Reid. IMO this will just make people scratch their heads and go "Why don't they just ask my gender?" Since the author advocating for this change is someone against d.o being involved in politics, I'm not sure that drawing more attention to this field serves that end. bangpound's points here and in the other issue about non-native speakers and usability are also worth looking into.

But, subscribing to see how this discussion plays out.

I don't politically or deeply, but I don't see the advantages to this, as it presents the same issues in not being able to cover everyone, and either a need for data migration or loose all the previous values. Ie, "Ms/Mrs/Mr"/"He/She" is nearly the same as "Male/Female". [username] is not necessarily what people would be preferred to be called if not called he or she.

If there was to be a data migration, that would the similar issues too; as you'd have to assert that male => he and female => she, which is not necessarily the case, though is the likely case.

(Just to clarify, the third option considered is "Transgender", not "Transsexual;" I'm not sure transsexual was mentioned as an option yet in it, as transgender covers transsexual, [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgender].)

Any change to the current field involves data migration and it won't be perfect. That includes the change already (prematurely?) made as it didn't automatically move people from male/female to transgender or other if they so chose. Male => He / Female => She is a perfectly reasonable guess that will be accurate in the 99% case, and the other 1% is perfectly capable of changing a select box. So I really don't see data migration as an issue worth considering either way.

In short: I refuse to make drupal.org a playground for political games of any sort.

@killes: This statement is incredibly dismissive, belittling, and loaded with privilege. People who are requesting that more gender identities be recognized in Drupal.org profiles are not trying to play political games; they are seeking inclusion and visibility for people who are currently rendered invisible.

As to the substance of this topic itself:

If the Drupal.org community decides that it wants a way to know how to refer to members using English pronouns, then a "preferred pronoun" text field is sufficient and in fact necessary. It is not possible to correctly assess preferred pronouns for everyone using a gender identity field of any sort.

By the same token, if the Drupal.org community wants to track demographic statistics around gender identity, a preferred pronoun field falls completely short. Gender identity and preferred pronouns do not correlate exactly or neatly and any attempt to render information on preferred pronouns into accurate demographic information about gender on Drupal.org would be flawed from the start.

Subscribing.

Personally I'd suggest #756386: Add an "About me" textarea to user profile pages (and potentially remove the Gender field in favor of it) as an alternative to this proposal.

What is the purpose of the data collected by the field? Without knowing the purpose of the field coming up with the best setup will be difficult.

For example, if it is to collect statistics on d.o users I would argue that opt-in stats are not going to be useful. There will be a high +/- on the result because of the lack of opt-in.

Is it for other users to identity the proper pronoun? That would be different and you would need a different list.

So, what is the purpose of the field?

subscribe

subscribe

jackaponte wrote:

@killes: This statement is incredibly dismissive, belittling, and loaded with privilege. People who are requesting that more gender identities be recognized in Drupal.org profiles are not trying to play political games; they are seeking inclusion and visibility for people who are currently rendered invisible.

There are a couple political games at play here. There is nothing dismissive in recognizing them.

1)
A political game appears when two people who consider themselves neither male nor female respectfully argue which words define them.

2)
Webchick, the person who started the 'gender' issue/topic, exhibited pretty clear political intent. Webchick clearly wants to promote women in Drupal. (I support Webchick for seeking gender equality - I just cannot see how the benefits of the gender field outweigh the problems).

after further consideration...my vote would be to keep the gender field as is. though i think a pronoun field is probably more practical, it really can't be as fine grained as a gender field.

and to reiterate i also disagree with removing the gender field - mainly based on the issue of demographic info, which i do value. (i do support the idea of providing an option to hide the field from public if one wants to only provide demographic info but not publicly state their gender.)

For that, someone could see if http://drupal.org/project/profile_privacy is d.o worthy.

Michelle

The field currently has:

- male
- female
- transgender
- other

I'm going to mark this as fixed, as it's been improved. If anyone wants to reopen, feel free.