Today is the annual #TransDayOfVisibility.
*waves at all the lovely trans people here*. I am delighted to share this space with you.
There is still so much more than we - cis people - can and must do to make the world safer and friendlier for trans people.
Practical thoughts:
1) actively encourage trans people into your community and spaces. Be explicitly clear that they are welcome.
2) promote and enforce robust codes of conduct, and ask for this in events to which you contribute.
3) report anti-trans content to your own instance admins, and to the hosting instance admin if it makes sense to do so.
4) buy stuff (if you are in a position to do so) from trans people. Loads of trans people in the fediverse have small shops selling cool bits and pieces (drawings, books, jewellery, and more).
5) if you control the design of forms and systems, do not collect gender information unless necessary (and I don't have a good example of when this might be, but someone might)
6) push back against laws and policies which discriminate against, or make life harder for, trans people. Write to your MP, and be vocal in your support.
> Outside of medical or sex work contexts I can not think of a reason you really really need to know someone's gender.
I didn't think of sex work contexts, but I was going to suggest that the medical context is only common context where I think knowing the gender and biological sex information is an absolute requirement (hormone effects on medication, birth control, etc etc)
Speaking as my employed-persona, it can help human data stewards with entity resolution, but it's really not a requirement (and isn't really, overly that helpful from a statistical pov because it's ~50/50 that it's mistakenly entered in the first place)
Pronouns, absolutely!
Medical stuff: happy to be told that I am wrong, but I'd have thought that gender was less relevant, than knowing which organs etc someone has, or what drugs they were on? (Ensuring that a trans woman with a prostate still gets offered screening, trans man with breasts etc.)
I can't say for certain because I don't work in medical settings - but from an analyst perspective, knowing the proportion of patients with non-matching sex and gender can help policymakers ensure appropriate service provision and funding is in place (if we had a kinder government in place)
For our Nuclear Energy Workers we collect gender info due to the possibility of pregnancy and the required lower radiation exposure during a pregnancy.
I have already changed the form from Male/Female to Assigned Gender at Birth.
I am going to float the idea of changing the form to a checkbox with the question, « Does the possibility of you becoming pregnant or breastfeeding exist? »
Neil Brown
Persephone
Yer Feff
Giamedin
pfriedma
suzanne