>>> [!note] Migrated issue <!-- Drupal.org comment --> <!-- Migrated from issue #1354764. --> Reported by: [jackalope](https://www.drupal.org/user/143220) >>> <p>I'm bringing up this much discussed topic (<span class="drupalorg-gitlab-issue-link project-issue-status-info project-issue-status-7"><a href="https://www.drupal.org/project/webmasters/issues/752452" title="Status: Closed (fixed)">#752452: Expand options in the "Gender" profile field</a></span>, <span class="drupalorg-gitlab-issue-link project-issue-status-info project-issue-status-7"><a href="https://www.drupal.org/project/webmasters/issues/756132" title="Status: Closed (fixed)">#756132: Change gender field to "preferred pronoun" field</a></span>, <span class="drupalorg-gitlab-issue-link project-issue-status-info project-issue-status-7"><a href="https://www.drupal.org/project/webmasters/issues/756386" title="Status: Closed (fixed)">#756386: Add an "About me" textarea to user profile pages (and potentially remove the Gender field in favor of it)</a></span>) again after seeing <a href="https://drupal.org/node/756132#comment-5216862">arianek's closing comment on a related issue</a>. arianek states that the gender field's current state as a single-select dropdown with the options "male | female | transgender | other" is an improvement over the old "male | female" field.</p> <p>This is an improvement only in that it acknowledges that people with genders other than "male" or "female" exist; however, the new options are not actually more inclusive, more respectful or more useful unless the goal is simply for non-trans folks to give themselves a pat on the back for being "aware."</p> <p><em>Transgender</em> is most commonly used by trans communities, activists, academics and allies as a political umbrella term to describe the many disparate classes of people who are the targets of discrimination based on sex/gender variance. <em>Trans</em> is most commonly used to describe someone who has transitioned from the sex assigned to them at birth. Both <em>transgender</em> and <em>trans</em> are most commonly used as adjectives to describe one aspect of a person's identity. For example, just as a Latina woman is a woman who is Latina (not an entirely new category separate from either Latina or woman), a trans man is a man who is trans.</p> <p>By including "transgender" as an entirely separate category from "man" and "woman," Drupal.org is putting all trans folks, both men and women, into a separate, inaccurate, and disrespectful lumped group of transgender. This further implies that folks who choose either male or female are inherently non-trans and that people who are transgender are inherently not really male or female.</p> <p>If a trans woman was filling out her profile and wished to indicate that she is both trans and a woman, she would have no way to do that with the current field. She would either be forced to pick "female" which by implication would lump her in with non-trans women and erase her trans identity OR pick "transgender" and therefore go along with the implication that she is not really a woman.</p> <p>If a goal of these changes to the gender field is to recognize, respect, and include trans people in the Drupal community, then the field fails to meet that goal. If a goal is to more accurately understand the gender demographics of this community, the field also fails there because it provides inaccurate and meaningless choices.</p> <h3>So how do we fix this?</h3> <p>If one of the goals is to acknowledge, include, and respect a variety of gender identifications beyond non-trans female or male, then this seems to say that the Drupal community should look to people who are <em>not</em> non-trans women and men for guidance on how to shape this fields. Unfortunately the voices, opinions, and discomfort of non-trans people are what have been most privileged in conversations on Drupal.org to date. Fixing the gender field therefore necessitates the much bigger and much more important task of addressing this imbalance of power and privilege in our community.</p> <p>Here are my suggestions for how to address that imbalance and implement a gender field that is both more inclusive and more useful for understanding the demographics of our community:</p> <p><strong>Use a multi-select list that is as inclusive as possible and that uses terms as they are commonly used by trans communities, activists, and allies.</strong> My suggestions for this list:</p> <p>female<br> male<br> genderqueer/bigendered/other<br> trans<br> non-trans/cisgendered</p> <p>This would allow someone to just pick female or male if they were confused by the other options, or to, say, identify as both trans AND a woman, using my example above.</p> <p><strong>Let a team of volunteers from the Drupal community who are <em>not</em> non-trans people decide on a solution.</strong> This would privilege the voices of trans and genderqueer folks in this conversation and would probably involve a lot of folks who are know a thing or two about fields and option lists and the technical challenges we face (this is Drupal, after all!) However, this would require people to out themselves which is often unsafe other otherwise undesirable, and it would put the burden of the work on folks who have to deal with related burdens far too often and probably have a lot of other things to worry about. This would also require the wider Drupal community to grant them authority and agree to accept and respect their agreed upon solution, which I doubt would happen.</p> <p><strong>Ask trans organizations for their suggestions.</strong> They might already have a great solution. In fact, I might task myself to do this regardless.</p> <p><strong>Change the field to "male | female | other."</strong> This removes the explicit separation of transgender and male/female by eliding the question of non-trans vs trans entirely. Not great but possibly less invalidating of trans folks than the current options.</p> <p><strong>Remove the field entirely.</strong> If it's going to be neither accurate, inclusive or respectful, why bother at all?</p> <p><em>I pull heavily from Julia Serano's <a href="http://www.juliaserano.com/whippinggirl.html"><em>Whipping Girl</em></a> in my concepts and definitions above. For definitions of terms see <a href="http://www.juliaserano.com/whippinggirl.html#glossary">Serano's glossary</a> or <a href="http://transequality.org/Resources/NCTE_TransTerminology.pdf">this PDF from the National Center for Transgender Equality</a>.</em></p>