GenderHack/Draft
From GetSemantic
Contents |
[edit] The Problem
Gender is often defined on social networks as a binary choice of male or female. There are a significant number of people who do not see the world in simple binary choice between male and female, but see gender as more like a continuum or an array of different choices and flexible, culturally-bound identities.
There are people who consider themselves intersexed, transexual or transgendered. Some think of the concept of gender to be meaningless. If you had a question when signing up for a social network of "What race are you?" and you had the choices of only "black" and "white", you would have reactions like "I'm Asian" or "I don't think it's appropriate to list my race" or even "I don't believe in race". All are appropriate reactions.
[edit] Guidelines
- There are some distinct categories which hold in the sphere of gender - these are not mutually exclusive, nor are they definitive. Some people may accept them, others may blur them or reject them. The only solid guide for those implementing gender concepts is to ask for and follow user feedback.
- Do not force a gender choice. If you must have a binary choice, make the answering of it optional.
- Have an "other" option which allows users to enter a string describing their gender.
- Gender, like other information, is not 'obvious'. Allow gender to be different for different sub-communities. For instance, a user may wish their profile to say "male" when their boss sees it, but "F2M transsexual" when friends from the F2M transsexual community views their profile. There is not one obvious answer, as gender is a relational 'act' to whoever is asking.
- Talk to users within gendered communities within the social network in order to make your service more usable for communities of gender.
[edit] Avoid "user hacks"
Some users, in response to limited gender options, have taken to using other meta-data fields to insert information about their gender (just as underage MySpace users will list their age as "104" as "14" is not allowed). Some have used the location field to insert words like "Queer" so that when the data is presented to the viewer, Queer is prominently listed near their supposed gender.
Such 'user hacks' are imaginative, but should be prompts for network owners to make gender and sexual prefences more flexible attributes, since the limitations force users to 'hack' other fields, which may cause problems with other functionality. If you've listed your location as "Queer" rather than, say, "Paris", it makes it quite difficult to use the service to talk to other people in Paris! This is something social networking sites should work to prevent by supporting their users in expressing non-mainstream identities.
[edit] Approaching good practice
The network [Pownce is a particularly good example. They provide a wide array of different gender options, some of which are simply variations on the "male/female" theme - "lady", "gentleman", "bloke", "bird" etc. - but they also provide a "transgender" option and a "none of the above" option. Once you have chosen this, you are then described thusly across the network as, for instance, a "22-year-old gentleman from the United Kingdom".
