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 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.
Daisy Leigh
Al
Platonides
Jonas Schäfer
sabik