If you work with a transgendered programmer on programs meant for kids do you enforce normative gender roles?

I know two transgender kids (both around 10 years old). Allowing for “other” is the right thing to do. We have moved beyond the male/female thing.

It’s also doesn’t affect anyone’s use of the system to have the 3 choices. If the vast majority are going to choose male or female, what does it matter that there is this option.

Unless your superiors told you otherwise, I don’t see what the big deal is?

@Blackberry Nobody said otherwise. But they were wanting me to make the call.

Which I did week ago, I am just curious how other people would have gone.

Then it’s time to set the standard :) If you don’t include “other”, it’s kind of ignoring the reality of the world. It’d be like only having a few selections for race when there are clearly much more races.

I write software for schools. We have gender completely configurable. You can (each school district) enter as many genders as you want.

By just providing “other”, it seems to be a safe, conservative choice. You’re not hard-coding “cis female” or making decisions about which gender identifications to include. “Other” is safe, while being more inclusive and less-alienating to kids who do not identify with either male or female.

I would rather you removed the gender requirement altogether, or added a choice for “Prefer not to state gender”. It shouldn’t be required.

@dappled_leaves I am tracking gender to ascertain how many females we are encouraging towards STEM fields vs. the general population. If you think I am wasting my time with that please let me know

@Imadethisupwithnoforethought Yeah, sorry. I question your ability to actually track these kids to find out if they go into STEM fields. How are you doing that?

Is this strictly a marketing tool, or do you tailor the content of the program (whatever it is) to the specified gender?

The only way to track gender is to let people say what their gender is. So if you don’t have “other” as an option—or, even better, an open field that can be filled out as the person chooses (as @hominid suggested)—then you cannot claim to be accurately tracking gender. Therefore, the only way to do what you were assigned to do is to make sure the kids aren’t restricted to “male” or “female.”

Nobody is going to see the other box and be all, “maybe I should get rid of my penis.”

And Facebook has 58 gender options.

Having the “Other” box will be instructive.

I think having the “Other” box is a good idea for a variety of reasons, not least of which being that it’s better to cause a little minor confusion that will at worst lead to an awkward discussion than to implant a false dichotomy that has to be removed from their brains later on in life before they can comprehend the concept of gender being non-binary.