Mastodawn

Daisy Leigh Feb 25, 2023

If you want to help trans people, and you work in tech: think about how your product handles names and genders. Can users change them? Is it a self-service? Do traces of the old name remain?

Then, fix it. Push back against resistance. Advocate for us.

It won't fix bigotry, or healthcare access, or w/e. But updating our details is a process full of hurdles that we have to go through at a really vulnerable point in our lives, and you can make a small improvement for a large number of us.

Show thread

Codex ☯️♈☮

@daisy

Thinking flexibly in this way improves your overall code anyway. Don't tie users to selected names or emails or things like that. Give them an internal ID, let them change their names, display names, emails. Let their account name be different from their display name. Let them have different personas in different contexts in your app. Let them pick pronouns, skip gender unless you actually need it. Let them pick display metrics, timezones, currencies, number formats, languages.