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.
@daisy I legally changed my name in January and got a new personal email address at the same time (the old one used my deadname). I am now stuck in an administrative maze of twisty passages, all alike, as I try to update every organisation I ever interact with.
Favourite so far is the shopping site where the script to update your details just permanently hangs...
(Plus my surname has an apostrophe in it and despite it being 2023, so many sites still can't handle it.)
Not really solving the problem, but maybe a way to bypass parts of it: In many instances, there are little to no drawbacks to closing/phasing out an old user account and opening a new one (as needed).
I try to avoid customer accounts, and usually use throwaway adresses from #simplelogin. Every now and then, I switch to a new alias, and once the warranty phase for my last purchase at some place has passed, I delete my account with them and/or chuck the old alias.
@DensityPoint @daisy Crazy, in this day and age. People change their names for all sorts of reasons, it shouldn't ever be difficult. And of course names contain all sorts of symbols, accented letters etc. We don't live in a 7-bit ASCII world! My own last name is Scottish so uses camel case: McA... and I'm always amazed at how many sites can't handle the capitalized A.
Also, without being personal, or prying, good on you!
@amca01 @daisy I've sort of more-or-less got used to losing the apostrophe but Oneil rather than ONeil really irritates me.
Wrt my name change: I spent about 18 months using my original initials "TC" as my name whilst I tried to work out what I wanted to be called. Because I'm an academic, I wanted to maintain a connection to my old publications, so I wanted to keep the same initials. It was challenging finding both a first and middle name with the right initial letters that worked together! (And the fact that "Tacey" and "TC" are near homophones is also good.)
@theuni The appropriate way to design your system is going to depend on the system; there's not really a one-size-fits-all solution for that sort of question. The two general principles that apply here, though, are:
• Names shouldn't be used to link a record to a person, nor anything that could be derived from a name (like a username or email address); use a numeric ID, UUID, or something like that.
• If past names, "legal name", or similar is kept, it should be treated as private information.
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.
@daisy When I first started in my industry, the use of "Master/Slave" to describe system topology was very popular. After much effort, the use of this terminology has been greatly reduced.
It takes people standing up and pointing out what's wrong while presenting alternatives. The "being an advocate" is a large part of the process.
Even when it doesn't directly affect you.
@slothdude @daisy Primary? Main?
It's not all that hard to find alternatives.
@RallyVincent Agreed. The migration features are good, but it should also be possible to change your username while staying on the same instance and keep your post history.
No idea if that would be doable without changes to the ActivityPub spec, but I’m sure it’s not totally insurmountable.
@daisy I once pushed for an architecture change in a retirement savings app a client was working on, which would inadvertently have deadnamed customers with no recourse for changing them. The client was actually excited to learn about it and the end result was a better experience for everyone.
I later told that story in a FAANG interview, was told it was a waste of time, and had my offer downleveled for my foolishness. 🙃
@daisy I say this a lot. As a company, I don't care if you put pronouns in your signatures or you add a rainbow to your logo. What I do care about is you've tested how well your databases will update a name change and trained your staff to do it properly and not create needless hurdles.
I'm still pushing on some companies to do this properly 2 years later because they don't realise how important it is for my GRC paper trail and they've never looked at how their databases connect. One place has told me 8 times over as many months they've updated my details yet I still get recipets and marketing under my deadname. I've spent way too much of my transition stressing over this.
The advice I give to others now is always create new accounts and change suppliers because companies don't have proper procedures to change your records reliably. And that's excluding bigots refusing to even process it for you.
@daisy When I designed the free https://taustation.space/ mmorpg, I left out "gender" selection. I'm tired of a boolean being used as a proxy for string-bikini armor.
Describe yourself as you want. Pick an avatar you like (or don't). You get to present yourself as you want (oh, and it's #a11y compliant, too. Probably more than just about any game on the market).
@daisy Was presented a form today which allowed you to pick only a single choice for gender out of a list that looked like this:
*Male
*Female
*Transgender
*Non-binary
*Other
And, on the one hand, good for having more than binary options, but what is a trans/enby woman or a trans/enby man supposed to choose, for example?
@daisy whenever I go to my Amazon page I still get greeted by the first name of my father, who bought something over my account 15 years ago.
My father died 11 years ago :/
@daisy One thing that annoys me is the request on a form for "gender" when one's gender is irrelevant. Like, for example, an airline ticket, or banking. And the drop-down menu might have "Male, Female, Neither" with no options for all the other genders on the spectrum. I've never seem a form that contains, for example, "genderfluid" as an option.
I'm also doubtful about the business of collecting gender information for demographic purposes. The world being what it is, many trans people would rather simply keep to themselves, live their own lives, and not be bothered.
I grew up in Germany, and in school, we were taught that the Nazis had different levels of effectiveness (for the lack of a better word) at killing jews in the countries they invaded, depending on whether the country centrally stored the religion of their citizens.
Your toot above made me for the first time realize that even a (to a binary person) innocent-seeming gender form field can be a major threat in the wrong political climate.
Even if the entity collecting the data means no harm, and will never mean harm, we've seen over and over again that data which has once been collected, can easily end up in the wrong hands (be it due to seizure or a data breach).
So, thank you for that reminder.
Alix Maiden-Baillie (she/her)
Daisy Leigh
Tacey "not very smart" O'Neil
Mr. Teatime
Al
Theuni
Codex ☯️♈☮
J. Jacoby (gender explorer)
Slothdude
Don Melton
Olivia A-C
Rally Vincent 🏳️⚧️
EVHaste
LisPi
Jaelyn 🏳️🌈
Cassandrich
Curtis "Ovid" Poe (he/him)
Finnley Dolfin
Jae
Revoluciana
Bobby
Rico
Platonides
Jonas Schäfer
sabik
Sky