author gender

I noticed the options for gender - or the headings on my breakdown in my meme - were male or female or other/contested/unknown or simply not set -- can other options be chosen? (or is that already the case that other options can be chosen but do not show up in the headings?)

There is also "n/a" (not applicable), which would be used for museums, corporations, publishers, etc.

There's also n/a, but those are the only options.

Maybe break other/contested/unknown into two options? Like contested/unknown and other/non-binary.

>1 tonikat: What other options do you seek?

It’s well known there are other options, it occurred to me some may want them.

>5 tonikat: It would be helpful to be more specific. Do you mean cis- or trans-(fill in the blank) or something else ?

>1 tonikat: There's a thread on this from 2007-2008 at https://www.librarything.com/topic/21657, including input from Tim.

The obvious would be to separate "other" out from "contested/unknown", i.e. we know a person's gender, and it is neither male nor female. Further subdivision probably isn't worthwhile - there are *so many* options, after all. "n/a" is already there to capture authors who aren't individual humans. But it was like *pulling teeth* to get Tim to even have options other than male and female, back in the day, so I wouldn't be optimistic about that. Still, times have changed, and maybe Tim has too.

>7 Cynfelyn: thanks -- I did look through but had not spotted that (was mobile browsing), thank you. I sent LT an email too to see what they thought then remembered this section which I don't visit too much. I have scanned the thread - I may even have read it before. Obviously things have changed quite a bit since 2007.

>6 krazy4katz: it occurred to me from the trans point of view -- and also awareness of having heard of research that suggests a huge diversity of descriptors people choose (far more than I'd ever have thought), so the choice suddenly struck me as possibly limited in that light and the current climate.

You may notice that my question was not framed to be critical nor meant to be - though things have changed a bit there is a lot of precedent for the binary, it is very understandable, of course, that it is in the current format. I am also aware this is a subject of sensitivity, that deserves respect on all sides. It's a wider issue of course and one of differing controversy in different parts of the world, I get that. I can also appreciate there may be issues for LT, far wider than I may appreciate. I suppose sometimes now we meet highly inclusive approaches in such choices, which may be why I noticed it. I had only gone to my author gender meme to see the breakdown of my collection (how many female authors in it - and who as I want to read a better gender balance). None of this is meant anything other than constructively. Neither is such classification something which I claim any expert knowledge of - and in fact classification in general is something that does not thrill me.

6> Most trans people I know would very much not like being separated out as a separate gender; I wouldn't be in favor of "trans man" and "cis man" as a general practice (but thanks for suggesting that terminology rather than the patently offensive "trans man" and "man").

>10 lorax: exactly, very true - and I didn't mean to advocate that.

I think more than anything the question is prompted by recent experiences of form that offered other choices. I'm still not clear whether other options can be put in in free text but may be grouped in the meme under a heading?

I shall also think more carefully next time I ask any such question/ think out loud, I can see others are far more up to speed on these things - who'd have thought on a library based site. I'm but a reader.

>11 tonikat:

Yeah, grouping "other" in the meme but allowing free-filling in would be one approach. The trouble here, though, as opposed to on Facebook, is that this is populated by others, not generally by the authors themselves. So while we may know a particular author is non-binary, we don't always know the details. And I fear that free-form would allow for exactly the "trans man" sort of thing that neither of us wants. (I believe Tim mocked free-form years ago as well, suggesting it would just lead to things like "dude" and "bloke" replacing "male", but it was long enough ago that he may have evolved in this thinking on that particular issue.)

I do definitely think separating "known, other" from "unknown" would be worthwhile.

>10 lorax: There is nothing patently offensive about the term man. There is a perfectly well established and understood meaning for the word man, or woman for that matter, it does not need to be prefixed in order to understand it better, if you need to generate a new term to describe someone who chooses to be different that's fine but you've already made your distinction, why do the rest of us need to be relabeled?

>12 lorax: yes I think that last idea may be a very good one.

I also see the problem of free text - and not to mention authors' wishes/feelings.

>13 bernsad:

There is nothing patently offensive about the term man.

It's not the term "man" that's offensive It's suggesting that a "trans man" is not a "man".

See lorax's comment here: http://www.librarything.com/topic/269603#6284075

>15 lilithcat: Fair enough, if they want to be a man call them men, I just don't understand where all this cis nonsense comes from.

I guess I think "other" is OK, but perhaps I'm wrong. We would need input from people who are not "male" or "female" to know what they would prefer.

Thinking more about my response in #6, I can see >10 lorax:'s point about trans people not wanting to be differentiated from the sex of their choice. What someone identifies as is probably more important than how they got there. That still leaves me not understanding what other options should be included.

>17 krazy4katz: As a non-binary person, I think having "other" separate from "unknown/contested" would be pretty nice. I clearly can't speak for everyone like me, but there's a pretty big difference between those two catagories, so I would quite like to see them separated!

>18 nonil: That makes sense to me. Thank you!

I mostly agree with Lorax, above.

1. I would be okay with splitting "other" from "contested/unknown."

Addition 1: I'd add to this I think we should remove unknown--they should be left blank. (If an author's gender is unknown, but people keep putting one in, I'd put that in the disambiguation field.)

It could be counter-argued that "unknown" is a positive and useful determination for some authors, such as anonymous authors with a male pen name but no true proof they were male. If so, "undetermined" or "no evidence" might be better than "unknown."

Addition 2: Should we remove "contested" too—if contested, leave it blank and make a note elsewhere? That is, I'm suggesting other/contested/unknown just become "other," and we handle the rest with blank and/or author notes.

2. I agree with Lorax's point that "further subdivision probably isn't worthwhile." It was suggested elsewhere we have a non-binary category, but if that, then why not many others? And if we go there, this has to be free text. I'm not the gender police, coming up with the list of 32 real genders, and getting angry emails from both lumpers and splitters no matter how I chose.

That said, I remain opposed to free text. If we do that, we will get "trans man," we will get "living as man," "male-to-female." We will also get "man," "male," and "boy." Ratty and inconsistent data can't be used for anything, and is a bitch to clean up. And I'm not even imagining deliberately obnoxious data.

3. If we make a schema change, splitting other from contested, I'm going to need to get some people on record that, if I provide a UI, they will go through all the affected authors. I don't want to change the schema and have it only half in effect.

>20 timspalding: I agree with this - I think my reaction was prompted by the way that choice was framed and in comparison with other forms I've come across recently.

>20 timspalding:

1 & Addition 1: Oh, thanks, those would be great.

Addition 2: "Contested" -- I don't recall names offhand, but I vaguely remember controversies about certain historic figures.

2. re: saying No free text -- Too messy is right. And too easily misused.

3. On it already, in fact. (I've just spent a week and a half adding info to 93 author pages, starting from the Author Gender "Not set" list for my own catalog.)

>20 timspalding:

2. Other possible terms: nonbinary, agender, third gender (a legal status in India), and two-spirit people (for some First Nations traditions). (I am not an expert, I am simply aware of a fraction of the conversations around gender.)

So maybe we'll want to revisit the categories again, in another few years?

>24 karenb: They're all terms that people use, but none of your suggestions are really umbrella terms, so I think "other" would work better to cover all bases. I'm also a little wary of people who aren't the author making the decision to categorize someone a certain way (as >12 lorax: pointed out).

You could use the same functionality that 'other' uses in the author role drop-down - selecting 'other' brings up a free-text box, but presumably you can set any export to only export 'other'.

I like the idea of separating "contested/unknown" and "other" - those are two different things that it would be nice to be able to filter on, and we need them both.

"Other" would cover people whose gender is known but not on the list (including everyone for whom it is possible to ask "What's your gender?" and get an answer, or who gave a definitive answer while they were alive, and it isn't male or female;
"Contested/Unknown/Undetermined" or some variation on that could cover both cases where the author's gender is completely unknown (like Anonymous or B. Traven ) or the subject of argument (Dr. James Barry, say, whose wikipedia article has now been rewritten, I note, to not use any pronouns at all) or even rather more complicated cases (like Fiona Macleod).
And we need to keep "N/A" for corporate authors and so on.

I don't think replacing "unknown" with blank is a good idea; "nobody knows" is distinctly different from "nobody has filled it in yet", and with contested authors that's just asking for trouble, even with a note.

A free-text option to go with "other" as the main category might be nice, but I think I agree with people saying it's great when websites let people identify *themselves* that way, but it may not be a good idea when it's other people putting the labels on for them - the meaning of nonbinary gender names is really not settled enough right now for that to be a great idea. In cases where we do know, that seems like something that could go in a note.

Tim, in terms of people going on the record that they are prepared to help, do you have a rough idea of how many authors are likely to be affected?

I poked around and there's currently 971 authors in other/contested/unknown in CK - about 1% of the total number of authors.

But based on the three of them that are in my catalog, a fair number of them should either just have a blank field (i.e., super-obscure authors with gender-neutral names) or need other cleaning up (one of the anonymouses in my library showed as "other/contested/unknown" in my stats but "male" in my CK, so there might be some kind of issues with splits or languages).

Also based on that, I now say we should definitely move away from "unknown", because that does seem to invite people to just use it as an alternative to "blank" - I like "contested" or "uncertain" or "undetermined".

But with only 971, I don't know if we'd even need a special interface, a dedicated team just going through the CK could probably get through it pretty quick, knowing LT users.

>27 melannen:

I hadn't previously heard of "Fiona Macleod"; what makes that case complicated? The wikipedia article just makes it sound like the very-not-complicated situation of a cross-gender pseudonym, with no indication that the author writing as Macleod had a complicated (or, indeed, non-binary) gender identity.

As far as "helping", I already keep a close eye on the non-binary authors in my catalog. People don't move them to "male" or "female" as much as they used to, which is encouraging. Of course, I've put disambiguation notices on some of them, which may have helped.

>31 Collectorator:

You'd be surprised at how often people ignore disambiguation notices. Or maybe not, you do a lot of CK edits. Still, it's no guarantee. Especially when some people seem to be personally offended by the idea that non-binary gender is a possibility.

The Wikipedia article makes it sound simple, but I listened to this podcast awhile back and followed up on a couple of their sources, which made it sound like he talked about her like she wasn't a pseudonym, she was his "feminine other self" in a very psychologically present way, and if he was living in the modern day, he would probably be considered something like genderqueer or genderfluid or even multiple; iirc he actually used the word "two-spirit" to describe them sometimes completely independently from the modern usage. But of course they didn't have those terms then, and maybe she was just a really intense cross-gender pseud the way it was treated for a long time. Hard to say!

I wouldn't start a fight about whether "male" is wrong there, but I think it's an interesting example of how things can get really complicated once you start looking back in time without an assumption of binary.

(Which is another reason I don't like the idea of going into more detail on "other" and I think we need an "unclear/disputed" - because when you look back into history, all the categories change.)

>33 Collectorator:

I've never met anyone who was personally offended by non-binary

You're fortunate, then.

>33 Collectorator:

"although I do encounter many non-binaries who seem to be offended by absolutely everything."

Perhaps sensitivity in minority groups is something to do with a lifetime's experience of minor and sometimes also major exclusions, prejudices and many another thing as a result of being different (whether this is shown or hidden to the world), not to mention being fundamentally misunderstood and judged by criteria that may not be entirely relevant.

edit - and I say a "lifetimes experience", which also means a day to day experience.

it may also apply to groups that are not in fact a minority at all, numerically.

>37 Collectorator:, sure. It was just you pointed that out of some particular others. But I don't mean to get too judgemental in response.

>34 melannen:

I read much the same elsewhere. I think we have to go by less ambiguous, public indications.

>34 melannen:

Thanks for the additional context!

I'm not a fan of the term "other" as it has stigmatising connotations of being "the other", which is a big factor in discriminatory language and behaviour.

I know that this is a cultural minefield, especially on a global platform, and there will never be 100% concensus, however it seems to me that this is an important issue to resolve sensitively.

"Non-binary" seems like a useful term to me (taking into account >35 lorax:).

From the Stonewall website:

Non-binary – an umbrella term for a person who does not identify as only male or only female, or who may identify as both.

https://www.stonewall.org.uk/help-advice/glossary-terms

I was coming here to request this type of change and searched and found this old thread - I've been updating authors in my books recently and had two who explicitly identify as "nonbinary" and it makes me feel pretty gross to classify them in the same category as "contested/unknown." Because they aren't contested or unknown! So I would volunteer to help were this change to occur and, importantly to me, it would make me feel more comfortable entering data on new authors as well.

I think "non-binary" is a better option than "other" personally. "Other" has a dismissive flavor to it, even if it's not intended as such.

We have a plan to change this soon. I'll let you know more details soon.

>44 g33kgrrl: I get you, and I agree. "Other" is also used for corporate authors and such though.

"n/a" is for corporate authors - at least currently

>47 r.orrison: Ah, yes. My mistake

>45 timspalding: Thank you!

>45 timspalding: yes, thank you

>45 timspalding: great!

Exciting! Thank you!

Is there any word on making the change to other/contested/unknown? I would be happy to do the ground work of pulling the list of all authors currently listed under that radial and sorting who we have credible sourcing to attribute to a more appropriate category and who we do not - I will gladly cite my sources in bio or links as well. Indeed, I would consider such a task something an honor, a small contribution to preserving queer history.

This is a very important topic to me, and it has been a bit of an emotional roller coaster reading both the 2007/2008 thread and this one, but I felt much better reading the "soon", even if it is a year since then. :)

>53 Faranae: Tim's "soon" can span several years. Don't get your hopes up too high. I had the same feelings about the old threads then this one last year. But it could be a long wait until we see anything but blanks and Other/contested/unknown fields.

In the meantime, the disambiguation notice on an author's page is a good field for notes for everyone to reference later. There's a links area for off-site author pages. I recommend watching both to ensure someone spiteful doesn't go through deleting your work unchecked.

There doesn't happen to be an easy way to watch for changes to author CK that I'm unaware of? I suppose I could create an LT shelf that I could periodically check in on.

Developer "soon TM" claims are notorious, I just felt better knowing that it seemed like intentions had gotten better.

>53 Faranae: This is a subject close to my heart. So if / when it comes about, I would be glad to help out.

Instead of N/A for corporate etc. would "not a person" make sense?

That would be fine with me too.

>57 Avron:, >58 Nicole_VanK:

In the United States, a corporation is legally a person.

"Not a human", then. Though I think most people understand the difference between a legal fiction and an actual person.

But some of N/As are humans, just not a single person. Two or more use a single pseudonym and those also get N/A

>60 lorax: That's a risky wording. You'll get some very politicized edit wars. :-p

>59 lilithcat: "The law is an ass."

They are multiple humans, not a single human.

I mean, honestly, I prefer "Not a person", since I think that the chances for either legitimate confusion or pigheadedness on that front are small, but there are alternatives.

Why can't we just leave it as N/A?

Not a single person

Not organic

that'll do till we have bioengineered AI?

N/A (not applicable) is perfect for any and all cases where it is used, whether it's a group of authors, a legal entity, editorial office or whatever else might appear. Why the need to reword it?

>64 lorax:

They are multiple humans, not a single human.

Not necessarily. An individual can incorporate. That’s frequently the case with sole proprietorships.

I prefer N/A for groups. "Not a person" an option invites arguments for no benefit. My biggest concern would be its disingenuous use for single authors.

>67 tonikat: that arguably would exclude multiple organic beings writing under a shared name.

>70 aspirit: depends how ypu read it, I think, they'd be all organic behind it? seems different, but maybe not

>59 lilithcat: That had slipped my mind. Sorry.

For group authors and corporations, would "group" or "collective" work?

composite author?

Except in rare cases that can be marked with existing (or potentially discussed) options, an author's gender is not "group", "collective", or "composite". (Although, I might try out "composite" somewhere comfortable.)

I don't understand the problem with "N/A" for author entries for which the gender field is not applicable. >57 Avron: can you explain?

There was discussion of more possible entry types. Beyond the four(?) already in use.
Male
Female
N/A
Other/Contested/Unknown

There's a difference between a person not having a gender (or being outside the binary), and a work being attributed to a corporate entity like a magazine, or even two or more people writing under a pseudonym (L.A. Graf comes to mind immediately, not a single person, it's two (initially three) women writing together).

Someone without gender, or having gender not typically understood as such, is going to currently get assigned to the wrong gender or N/A or the last option. Having "Not a Person" as an option would make the "Other" option more obviously someone that doesn't fit the binary. There would still be issues between "Other" and "N/A" for some people I expect.

Avron (#76):

That wasn't the question.

People are suggesting the following:

Male
Female
Nonbinary (or "Other" which is problematic)
N/A
Unknown/Contested

It seemed that you were objecting to N/A in this situation.

I mean, bigots (Note: I am not referring to any LT member either specifically or in general, but to the general concept. Don't flag this message.) of the sort who would say "Nonbinary people don't really exist, so I'll deliberately misgender this person" aren't going to be deterred by having "Not a person" rather than "N/A", and merely clueless sorts can google "Nonbinary" and become less clueless.

Personally I think n/a is perfect for authors to which gender is not applicable. Perhaps reorganze the list and separate "other" from "contested/unknown":

o male
o female
o other
o contested / unknown
o n/a

There's room for more explanatory text when editing, too:

o male
o female
o other (non-binary)
o contested / unknown
o n/a (group or corporate)

Edit: lorax types faster than me

Edited: Should go in a separate thread, sorry.

So, we had a staff proposal that we didn't implement, largely because it would require development--a new "menu" format for CK, and we haven't found the time.

The proposal was as follows:

1. A menu, but "underneath" it's text.
2. The menu would have

Not set
N/A
-------
Woman
Man
Non-Binary
Two-Spirit
Genderqueer
Genderfluid
Intersex
Agender
--------
Other…

3. If you selected "Other" you could enter arbitrary text. This arbitrary text would be used, but it would not change the base options or appear elsewhere as a suggestion, as is the case with some other CK fields.
4. There would be guidance. The proposed text was: Please enter only a gender; avoid modifiers like “trans” or “cis.” See LINK for guidelines.

We would only have one value, and the general rule would be that it goes by the author's last expressed view.

Then and more over time I've grown to have qualms about this proposal. They are:

1. I don't want to develop a menu UI for one field of CK. Whether I do or don't, we don't have the time. That's the simple fact.
2. I don't like deciding that there are 8 first-tier genders, with everything else an other. It's a "kick me" sign around our neck. It should be free text.
3. I don't like deciding what is and what isn't gender. This is what Facebook originally did, albeit with some 50 (later 70?) genders available to choose from. Many of these would have been forbidden under the policy above. This includes everything with "trans" in it, "male to female," "CIS Man," etc. Many would insist that, if "trans*" is part of gender, trans women are not really women, etc. At the same time, many humans, when asked their gender, include such things. At its limit, we'd be taking an interview with an author where they were directly asked their gender, and not accepting their answer. Facebook eventually scrapped this policy in favor of free text. And I think that's the right approach.

I think the best option now is simply to convert the radio-button to free text.

This is the only option that has any chance of happening in the near future. And it doesn't have the definition problems of the above. We'd need some "Suggested" text underneath and, I think, a Wiki page. If the issue was contentious, we'd ask that supporting documentation, such as citation or URL, be added to the bio.

At the same time, I'm worried about edit wars, on authors and on the Wiki page. An easy solution to author would be to allow multiple options. But not so easy, since they would be used to track gender identification over time, which would itself be a highly contentious edit war.

So, let me know what you think.

>80 timspalding: I am not entirely comfortable with calling intersex a gender. It's more about biological variety which (surprise) isn't binary either. Most IS people I know identify as men, or women, or non-binary.

(Yes, I am part of that community).

>81 Nicole_VanK: In other words, whatever you do won't be right for some people. I would point out that by current LT standards, those who identify as men or women would be entered as such.

While I can see the argument for separating recently or currently alive people from long dead authors we don't know much about, in my stats this means two groups of four instead of one group of eight.

I guess I think that non-binary/other really does belong separate from contested/unknown. But any further break down is not very helpful.

What I would really like to see is all the gender choices on https://www.librarything.com/profile/MEMBERNAME/stats/gender be included in the percentage breakdown, and not just male/female.

I agree with you on the "you can't please everybody."

We really need people to start understanding that gender and sex are not the same thing though, even though for many people there is enough overlap not to be bothered

>80 timspalding:

I agree with >82 MarthaJeanne:'s comment here: I guess I think that non-binary/other really does belong separate from contested/unknown. But any further break down is not very helpful.

I would add that terms such as "genderfluid", "genderqueer", "agender", are not, at this time, in sufficiently common use and do not have sufficiently agreed-upon definitions so as to avoid confusion and edit wars.

With regard to free text, I can see the appeal, but if your goal (or one of them) is to provide users with a percentage breakdown such as we have now, it's going to be a mess. You're going to see, for instance, the same author described as "woman", "female", "MTF", "transwoman", "trans woman", and that way madness lies.

I love the idea of free text, even recognizing that edit wars are likely to happen. We already get edit wars with other fields in the CK, and we cope. It also sounds like this might be the simplest solution from a tech perspective, which makes it more likely to be implemented. I already add citations to the bio for anything I think is likely to be contentious (whether for gender, or nationality, or whatever).

I do wonder how this will affect the pie graph and percentages, but that's a lower priority to me.

>83 Nicole_VanK: Nicole_VanK I personally don't find it helpful for folks to think of gender and sex as different. It just seems to lead to other problems, like folks assuming all nonbinary folks are intersex, or that a trans person who doesn't undergo medical interventions is therefore "actually" their assigned gender, or that sex is a biological imperative and gender is a choice and trans folks are "choosing to be difficult". But this is neither here nor there to the matter of improving LT's handling of author gender CK.

I am not entirely comfortable with calling intersex a gender. It's more about biological variety which (surprise) isn't binary either. Most IS people I know identify as men, or women, or non-binary.

Thanks. This is the kind of problem I want to avoid. Now, my question for you is "What do we put for author X if, when asked their gender, they say they are 'intersex.'?"

I would add that terms such as "genderfluid", "genderqueer", "agender", are not, at this time, in sufficiently common use and do not have sufficiently agreed-upon definitions so as to avoid confusion and edit wars.

So, the situation I want to avoid is where author X says in an interview or in their book promo material that they are gender Y, and we say "No, we're going to make it Z!"

With regard to free text, I can see the appeal, but if your goal (or one of them) is to provide users with a percentage breakdown such as we have now, it's going to be a mess. You're going to see, for instance, the same author described as "woman", "female", "MTF", "transwoman", "trans woman", and that way madness lies.

So, no. My goal is to get the data in there. How the chart works is really a separate issue, and can remain a matter of interface and design.

My probable choice there would be to take all genders below what could be easily shown as a "slice" and group them together as "other," but with the actual list and breakdown given in text below. That way you get a chart that doesn't have 20 lines coming out of it making it impossible to read or actually breaks the pie-chart UI, but you also get the full data. But, again, this is a UI detail. We need to start from good data.

>86 timspalding: "What do we put for author X if, when asked their gender, they say they are 'intersex.'?"

I understand your dilemma. And it's a fair point. Personally I would never overrule anybody telling you how they identify. If somebody made my author page say my gender is intersex, I would change it back. But beyond that, it's not about what makes me feel comfortable.

(Edited for clarification - I hope it worked).

As I see it, the situation is that terms like "genderqueer", "genderfluid", and "agender" are not rigorously defined and in fact overlap - the people I know in this category will use any one of those terms depending on the situation and context (or it may evolve with time!). And while it may be obvious to determine that an author uses "they" pronouns which in absence of other evidence suggests that their gender is not "male" or "female", absent direct comments on the matter it could be very difficult to determine which of the more nuanced terms they prefer, and unlike Facebook most information here is not entered directly from the author. I really suggest keeping it simple here, the previously-suggested "male, female, non-binary" (non-binary is the most commonly used and understood umbrella term) rather than trying to account for all possible variations within the latter. It's the DMV approach - you get M, F, or X.

When I get a chance I may go take a peek at the web presences of the non-binary authors in my library and see what terminologies they use, though one is extremely reclusive and hasn't had a web presence since long before "non-binary" or "genderqueer" were in wide usage.

What >88 lorax: said. Plus such definitions, if established, are not necessarily the same world wide. (I foresee chaos if it's made complicated)

So, here's one example. Luz Calvo uses they/them pronouns (Amazon's information is incorrect here):

https://twitter.com/luzcalvo?lang=en
https://www.csueastbay.edu/directory/profiles/es/calvoluz.html

That's enough information for me to confidently place them in whatever non-binary option we are given. But if I had to choose between agender, genderqueer, genderfluid? I have no idea. And when it comes to gender I believe that leaving something blank is a lesser offense than getting it wrong, so I probably wouldn't choose anything.

Likewise Sarah Gailey is clearly non-binary, but more specific identification is difficult to find:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_Gailey
http://www.sarahgailey.com/
https://twitter.com/gaileyfrey

Tim, I realize you mean well, and I do appreciate how far you've come from when the only options were male and female. But please listen to those of us who have actually been advocating for a third real option here, and especially to those with a non-binary identification (which, to be clear, does not include me! If someone speaks up saying that they are agender and find "non-binary" as bad as male or female, I will listen.)

>80 timspalding: Free-text sounds better than what the site has now, though there definitely should be good instruction on the announcements, wiki page, and field to minimize confusion and abuse.

>90 lorax: It's in medicine and some governments that gender and sex are labeled the same, often to devastating consequences. As long as I've been on this site, I've been thinking it's creepy how members are encouraged to guess what external sex organs an author might have based on pronoun use. I'd be grateful if we stopped doing that.

Basically, anytime the author's gender isn't clear, as in stated in an interview or in a public listing that is author-approved, we can leave the field blank. Bonus: we'd have fewer edit battles.

By the way, "non-binary" is the person's gender when they say it's their gender. We wouldn't have to leave Sarah Gailey's gender blank on LT. Gaily has provided their gender to readers.

And Luz Calvo is genderqueer. They state that in the bio on the same Twitter account you'd linked.

>80 timspalding:

Not set
N/A
-------
Woman
Man
Non-Binary

etc.



Apologies for the digression--I just want to say how much I appreciate you're listing "woman" first, it's so refreshing to have the usual sexist ordering abandoned at least a little and at least somewhere. Doesn't have to be all the time, but since even parity in this matter is almost inexistent, generally speaking, every such "little" thing is significant and encouraging. Thank you.

>90 lorax:

But please listen to those of us who have actually been advocating for a third real option here

Wait, aren't I providing that? Are you saying you want ONLY that third, non-binary option?

>92 LolaWalser:

Except I'm not, because I'm proposing to abandon that list and make it free text…

Well, Tim, you could accept the good feelings, since if there were a list your mockup at least put "woman" first (in the subjunctive space).

>93 timspalding:, >94 paradoxosalpha:

Heh, yeah, I was gonna say--OK, the next time there's a list...

>94 paradoxosalpha:

KJ gets the kudos for that, but thanks.

I think free entry with visible help is definitely the right call, by the way.

I don't know why anyone thinks people will pay attention to any instructions on this CK field. They don't on others.

(Yes, I'm feeling a bit curmudgeonly this morning.)

>99 Collectorator:

An attitude that would be fine if not for a long history of marginalisation of queer writers, or PoC writers etc, and of women writers (although that is better these days). By highlighting their gender or race or whatever we are pointing out to possible readers that they may possibly have a different take on things to the usual middle-aged, middle-class male writers that are the norm. We are pointing out to potential new writers that there is space in the publishing industry for them.

Is it possible for there to be a link to definitions on the Common Knowledge page to help those of us who do not see these terms frequently? For example, I know what male, female and nonbinary mean, but am clueless about intersex (different than nonbinary?) and the other terms (gender fluid, gender queer etc.). I also do not understand the statement that gender and sex are not the same thing. Does this mean the gender that one is born with is not the gender that one identifies as? Please forgive my ignorance. I really want to understand.

Also, it may be that we don't know, as the author prefers to keep that information private, so then we might mistakenly code them as male or female because that is the way they look, rather than their personal preference.

I appreciate anyone's willingness to enlighten me. If you consider this off-topic, please feel free to discuss this with me by comments on my profile page rather than here.

Thank you.

>102 krazy4katz:

but am clueless about intersex (different than nonbinary?) and the other terms (gender fluid, gender queer etc.). I also do not understand the statement that gender and sex are not the same thing.

"Intersex" refers to the state of having both female and male physical sexual attributes (what used to be called hermaphroditism). Intersex individuals are not assumed to be of "nonbinary" gender, although some may be/are.

Sex is physical, gender has a psychological and social component. It's not that we are born with a gender, but that we get gendered on birth--based on sex--and then typically raised as belonging to the assigned gender.

>101 Collectorator:

We record various things about authors. Where an author died, for example, is not about the book. We don't log everything. I am not opposed to logging other things about them. It's all about difficulty and interest.

timspalding (#93):

Yes, precisely. The single most important thing to change about this field is to acknowledge that there are more than two genders (How many? Does it even makes sense to have an integer value here? Good question. But the right answer is sure as hell not two) and that the additional option is every bit as real and valid as "Female" or "Male" and does not deserve to be shoehorned in with "Nobody knows this anonymous author's gender". Fragmenting the non-binary option makes people far less likely to fill it in and contributes to othering here - if you're going to do that, should you also split "female" - not, of course, into "cis female" and "trans female" but into actual gender-based options like stone butch, soft butch, femme? I'd be fine with keeping three (non-binary, female, male) top-level options and optional splitting below that, but let us record the information that's most likely to be available.

krazy4katz (#102):

Also, it may be that we don't know, as the author prefers to keep that information private, so then we might mistakenly code them as male or female because that is the way they look, rather than their personal preference.

If you don't know, don't guess. Being non-binary is not a whim or a "personal preference" any more than being male or female is. If someone is not out about their gender identity, that doesn't mean you get to randomly misgender them because they have long hair or because every "Sarah" you personally know is female. (And if they're publicly using pronouns that they don't use for themselves, nobody's going to blame you for going with that. It's doing zero research other than saying "Well, looks like a woman to me!" that's the issue. You're even going to get cis folks wrong sometimes if you just base your ID on your own stereotypical ideas about what a woman looks like.)

Honestly, for currently active authors, go check their promo material or Twitter bio or whatever. If you can't find pronouns, leave it blank. This is 101-level stuff and is why I mentioned Google upthread for people unfamiliar with the idea of non-binary gender.

"If you don't know, don't guess." This. Please. As a fairly well known example, even if every George you ever met was male, the author George Eliot was a woman.

>105 lorax:

should you also split "female" - not, of course, into "cis female" and "trans female" but into actual gender-based options like stone butch, soft butch, femme

You misunderstand, I think. There will be no first-class options—woman is neither split nor fragmented. If someone identifies as stone bunch, let's honor that.

Fragmenting the non-binary option makes people far less likely to fill it in and contributes to othering here - if you're going to do that, should you also split "female" - not, of course, into "cis female" and "trans female" but into actual gender-based options like stone butch, soft butch, femme? I'd be fine with keeping three (non-binary, female, male) top-level options and optional splitting below that, but let us record the information that's most likely to be available.

Okay, so your proposal is four first-class options—man, woman, non-binary and N/A (for corporations and such)?

Then we could have a free-text field underneath. What would the label be?

I feel this would be unacceptable to many. We'd be replacing a binary with a trinary. There are, for starters, many who identify as agender. The objections would not stop there. I don't think anything is be gained by creating a list of real genders.

Honestly, for currently active authors, go check their promo material or Twitter bio or whatever. If you can't find pronouns, leave it blank. This is 101-level stuff and is why I mentioned Google upthread for people unfamiliar with the idea of non-binary gender.

I don't think we should mix gender and pronouns. A little Twitter-bio searching for gender and pronoun combinations would reveal the statistical impossibility for moving from one to the other.

This would be where I propose it go:

- female
- male
- non-binary
- other
- unknown
- n/a

I think keeping contested is asking for trouble. But keeping unknown allows people to fill in where there is a true question.

Then it has a simple menu that can be translated over to the gender meme that was half built.

>107 timspalding:

I don't think we should mix gender and pronouns.

Too true. What gender is an individual who chooses to use "they"? Or "it" (yes, I've seen that)? Might be a man. Might be a woman. Might be non-binary. One cannot make any assumptions from the choice of pronoun.

There are people who use one pronoun to identify themselves by, but who have stated they don't care what pronoun other people use. Big Freedia uses "she", but describes herself as a gay man.

OK, thank you >103 LolaWalser:, >105 lorax: and everyone else. I will ponder. k4k

timspalding:

If you're not going to create a list, how do you let people answer questions like "How many authors who are neither male nor female are in my library", which is pretty damn basic?

>111 lorax: you want a selection list of sexes with the gender field?

Per >86 timspalding: the free text field would generate a chart and a list of the author genders in a library. That seems easy enough to understand to me.

If you're not going to create a list, how do you let people answer questions like "How many authors who are neither male nor female are in my library", which is pretty damn basic?

You can still group the results and produce a list or chart.

>113 timspalding:

Right.

Maybe the confusion comes in the notion that it's not a list, so you can't make a list? Think about how LT can produce lists of your authors by country or whatever without a defined list of countries.

Think about how LT can produce lists of your authors by country or whatever without a defined list of countries.

It can't do that. I've been asking for it to do that for checks on old threads seven years now (http://www.librarything.com/topic/144601#3958303) with a thread dedicated to the request for five (http://www.librarything.com/topic/189257) and you haven't done a simple aggregation on data that is already there, or even *exposed it*. That's without the complication of somehow asking LT to understand, without being told, that "agender, non-binary, genderqueer, genderfluid" all should be rolled up to an umbrella category? By analogy to the non-functionality of the country field, this would tell us that 48% of our authors are female and 47% are male, without identifying how the remaining 5% are distributed or who is in what category. No thanks, if that's the offer on the table I'll stay with what we have now.

Just to add to >114 lorax:

It is very hard to get from the export file to the author pages in any automatic way. The export file says "Stephen King" with no indication of whether it is https://www.librarything.com/author/kingstephen-1, or 2 or 3 or 4 or 5 or 6 or 7 or ...

So to compile the data that lorax and I ask for, we'd have to go to each book and for each of the authors of the book click on the author link and note the nationality. Quite a bit of work with thousands of authors in your library.

>113 timspalding: "Think about how LT can produce lists of your authors by country or whatever without a defined list of countries."

Que? While a "defined list of countries" would be nice, I don't think it is possible. You'll have all sorts of no-longer-used names for countries, just for starters.

I would like to vote for the proposal in >108 gilroy: . That seems to cover everything that needs covered, and do it well. Nonbinary has been settling into an accepted umbrella term for, well, nonbinary people of many genders, and if there's an author for whom that absolutely isn't acceptable, it still has an "other" option. Also, if a different umbrella term(s) becomes more accepted later, it would be easy enough to just switch out the text of the umbrella term option, as opposed to dealing with constant terminology shifts over a long list.

Also, in terms of usefulness as a data field, I think that is the best compromise. If we aren't interested in it being useful as a data field, than we should go by the principle of "if you aren't using the personal data, don't track it in the first place" and drop the gender field. We need to keep some non-freetext way of sorting out corporate etc. authors (though I would be okay with moving to a separate field if we drop gender) and "unknown" is useful.

I would 100% be in favor of free-text for a user profile, or if this was a website for authors where all author profiles were controlled by the author. But it's not. And I am super, super uncomfortable with a free-text gender field that is being filled by people other than the person in question. That is full of too many traps and issues.

There's a ton of problems with letting other people fill freetext genders even leaving aside the fact that a huge number of the authors in our database have never been alive in a world where free-text gender, or any of the things in a long dropdown, were an option, even if they were from cultures where other forms of nonbinary gender were. And then you start thinking about translations for the freetext entries!

(And once you start looking cross-culturally, you get into arguments as to what counts as "gender" at all and, look, it's very very very complicated very very very quickly even compared to how complicated it is even if you look at just the self-identities in modern queer communities. Your real options are compromise with a list of reasonably universal options that are useful for stats, or you accept that gender is a fuzzy cloud and don't try to track it at all.)

>116 melannen: Paragraph 3. Would this be a way forward?

Anyone can click on male / female / nonbinary / unknown / n/a (corporations etc.) / make blank / other (free text).

But only LibraryThing Authors get to use the "other" free text function. Or perhaps also the cataloguers of Legacy Libraries?

>117 Cynfelyn: I would be happy with that one!

Or even a freetext option that doesn't require clicking"other" that's only visible for "claimed" author pages. I don't know how much Tim wants to go down that road of giving extra privileges to authors, but that's one that makes a lot of sense to me. And that way if any living author feels very strongly, they can claim it.

I have no problem with a person putting whatever the heck they want for their own gender (I put "lawful neutral" if given freetext as an option), I am just super uncomfortable with random internet passersby doing it for them. And I think a freetext option only available for LT Authors would still result in a much more useful data set.

Are we REALLY saying that if an author openly and expressly identifies as something outside of man, woman, non-binary, they need to be a LibraryThing author to have that show up? Bizarre.

We are saying that the majority of people who openly identify as something outside of male or female are happy with non-binary as an umbrella term, and the risks involved in opening up the field outweigh the problems of having a limited set of options, and a closed field might be one compromise between the two. Limiting edits for controversial things is not a new concept. If you can come up with a way to otherwise let only trusted editors use the freetext field, I would also be okay with that.

(I will also note that there are a fair number of people who consider "male" and "female" to also be umbrella terms that include lots of other genders within them. It wouldn't be a case of just lumping all nonbinary people into an umbrella term, it would be offering a variety of umbrella terms and letting people choose the best fit. In the genderaware communities I'm in, it's also not rare for people to ID as more than one of male/female/nonbinary at the same time, if given the option, so maybe also consider checkboxes instead of a dropdown?

If you aren't comfortable with using umbrella terms, I vote you remove the gender field from author pages entirely, because all gender terms are umbrellas.

Also, "male" and "female" are not equivalent to "man" and "woman" as gender identifiers. There are significant numbers of people who are okay with being gendered male or female but not man or woman. Or vice versa. I am one of them.)

ETA: We have separate "Nationality" and "Country" fields because that is a field that can result in a lot of controversy and it was the best compromise. We don't log race or religion, re: the discussion in >100 andyl: , presumably for similar reasons. A solution that factors in that gender is at least as complicated and controversial as any of those works for me. I don't think a single open freetext field or a long dropdown menu does. That said, freetext is definitely better than a long dropdown.

>120 melannen: why would we stick to the practice of LT members guessing the gender of each author when Tim is offering a way to enter the actual genders?

So that some members believe there's a better chance of a gender chart for each library?

Omg.

I'd be happier with Woman, Man, Non-binary, Other/Unknown, and N/A options than with everyone who doesn't have a binary gender going into an Other/Unknown/Contested category. But I'm not seeing why it's a terrible idea to skip over a weak compromise for us all to learn to either type in the gender identification each author has publicly provided last or else leave the field blank.

As for that graph, we're only going to get a working one if Tim and his team care. That's true no matter whether we're using the free text field, a drop-down list, or both.

>121 aspirit: What I'm objecting to *is* LT members guessing the gender of each author. I think LT members guessing the gender of each author is a bad idea.

I have attempted to track down the stated/identified genders of nonbinary authors - even ones that are, say, being published in anthologies for nonbinary authors only! - and it's not easy, and often people want to use different versions of gender ID in different contexts, or deliberately make it difficult. Some people make it easy as possible.

Also, again, I would say at least half of the authors on LT are dead, and did not ever have a chance to state a freetext gender identity for the modern context. I think forcing those authors into a field designed for a modern context is a bad idea. With a freetext field, there's a level of implied precision that isn't there with a selection between wider categories.

I think LT members sorting them under accepted umbrella terms is likely to work better, if we have a gender field.

If the data's not going to be searchable, translatable, or used for stats, I think we're better off not listing it at all. Don't ask if you're not going to use it is always the best policy for things like that. We link to offsite biographies if people want to know more. It is increasingly the policy being used for gender fields on official forms.

I have been in discussions like this before where there seems to be a largely invisible split, even among people who aren't men or women, between people who want very strongly to have a person's specific concrete chosen gender identifier broadcast as loudly and as universally as possible, and people who would really prefer that specific concrete chosen gender identifiers not be forced on them at all. I obviously fall into the second category. People in the first category are, for obvious reasons, generally more visible. Umbrella terms are a compromise between the two, among other compromises they are. It's going to have to be a compromise.

Maybe I am wildly overestimating the amount of controversy and uncertainty that would happen with a freetext field and it would be fine; I'm reacting at least partly out of my own visceral dislike of the idea of someone else filling in a freetext gender field for me.

>121 aspirit: A graph is much harder to make from free text than from a limited drop down.

"the gender identification each author has publicly provided last"
Having searched for the gender of several recent authors, in many cases it isn't that easy. Not every person who publishes a book has a website. Not all of those websites are well kept up. Often the only indication of gender to be found is a pronoun on a publisher's website or in an article in a local newspaper about the book (10 years ago). In fact very few author's websites come right out and say 'NN identifies as male.' 'OO identifies as female.' They say something like 'PP was brought up in New York, but now she divides her time between London and Southern France.'

>122 melannen: In my library over half are labelled alive, and more of the rest are unknown than dead. Trying to find birth and death dates is even harder than gender.

Hey all, KJ here. I'm on staff here at LT, and in what is relevant to this discussion, I'm non-binary (they/them). In my spare time, I do a lot of work with trans activism. Tim asked me to contribute my thoughts. They are not, obviously, the be-all end-all thoughts—nor are they going to be representative of All Trans People's Thoughts or all staff thoughts—but I do have a unique place in this discussion. In developing my proposal here, I also consulted with the state trans organization in LT's home state for their recommendation that would balance questions of inclusivity, data usability, and UI constraints. Here we go.

I'm advocating for a multi-select list like this:
W
M
N/A
X

Where:
W = Woman
M = Man
N/A = corporation, committee, robot, 3 monkeys smacking typewriters, etc
X = /free text field/

/free text field/ would be just that: a free text field, with suggestions that are not strict. Different elements separated out by commas.

You can select multiple options from this multi-select list of choices. I will get into why that is important further down.

As someone who is proudly rocking an X state ID but also has waded into Facebook comment fights about intra-community nuances of gender identity, I get it. This is not a solution that covers everyone perfectly, but rather one that bridges a logistical data gap and gets useful, respectful, and manipulatable data out of the singular field we are working with. Is it the ideal, wonderful solution for a world where transphobia and LT edit wars miraculously don't exist? No. But it's a solution style I’m clearly okay with, judging by the sheer amount of grinning selfies I took at the DMV when I changed my license.

Some examples:

Andrew McAnyName is an author who died in 1947 and there are no citable indications in the historical record, or ongoing arguments, whether or not he was cisgender. Pick “M, X /cis/”

Lilyanne Robinsname is a transgender woman, still alive. In her Twitter bio or in a public author event someone could easily find, she introduced herself as a trans woman or otherwise with her own words clearly indicates that identity. Pick “W, X /trans/”

The FDA, not a specific human that wrote a particular book. The organization. Pick “N/A”

Sage T'Appelle identifies as a non-binary person. Pick “X, /non-binary/”

Morgan Readsalot uses they/them pronouns and there is not relatively accessible information on what gender they identify as. Pick “X”

You don’t know. Pick “X” or don’t fill out the field.

Some Immediate Questions/Pushback I’ll Answer Upfront:

“We have to write if the author is cis? Every time? But that’s most authors!”
Well, yes. Because ‘cis’ should not be the presumed/normative adjective for someone’s gender just because it’s the majority.

“Doesn’t it devalue the concept of ‘trans women are women’ to have to add ‘trans’ as a qualifier?”
First, what a wonderfully nuanced question that acknowledges that trans women are women. Second, not if it becomes an LT site norm to add ‘cis’ to all the cisgender authors, too. And third, I think that making someone choose between being trans or being a woman is a larger invalidation of identity than adding an adjective. There will be people who disagree with me on this point.

“But how do I see my author gender in data on LT? Especially the author gender split pie chart?”
This does seem to be the point of contention in this thread. In this case and because yes, there is the fact that most of the authors on LT were, are, and will be cisgender, we could acknowledge that reality in the data when we compute the chart and have a “plus/minus cis” marker going on. Eg cisgender and transgender women are both marked as women, but you could also click to see “W,-X/cis/” to just see transgender women or “M,+X/cis/" to just see cisgender men. I think both of those examples could be very useful data to see about your catalog, and in other places around LT.

“Doesn’t having the concept of cis/trans alongside genders outside the binary in the ‘X’ category a) make this data messy, b) invalidate genders that aren’t W or M, but are equally valid?”
So, a) see above question for where I think a lot of the data might be messier, sure, but in a weirdly useful reality, cisgender people are such an overwhelming population majority that it makes it easy to edit them in or out of a data field. And b) yeah, it does conflate them and yeah, that is weird to mix them, but I did say this was a compromise solution. I’m not throwing a parade about it, but I think it solves the “we only have one field for this” problem.

“Why are we even collecting author’s genders anyway?” Because data is interesting. Because LT uses data! We're all here at some level because data about the things we read is a concept we find interesting and/or useful. I can see many cases where I would love to be able to see the books in my collection by transgender authors of all genders, or by cisgender women, etc. It’s useful and interesting information to have, much like many other elements of CK.

***

I’m sure there are more questions and also that this has gone on too long, and I look forward to comments. In some (many) cases, the answer might be “I don’t know.” Thanks for reading my suggestion and for taking the time to hash this all out so conscientiously.

NO! Andrew McAnyname cannot be assumed to be male without some indication that the person who published under that name really was male, or at least lived under that name presenting as male. In a time in which men found it a lot easier to be published and sell books than women, you cannot just assume that the name on the book was the real name of the author.

kjgormley:

Thank you so much for your voice here. I'm listening, and I think your suggestion is spot on - let us have the umbrellas and also get nuances underneath.

I appreciate trying to stop 'cis' from being the unmarked default, but there are lots of trans folks who aren't super out about being trans, and may not be okay with someone labeling them as such because of some early promotional material somewhere on the web that uses an incorrect old gender identification. Can we have say 'M' or 'F' without also specifying cis or trans, when we don't know the answer or when we do know and know the author doesn't want it widely publicized?

I would also say that if you don't know, leave it blank, rather than filling in X - if I see someone has filled in X I'm going to assume they know the author to be non-binary and won't go researching. (And it will also contaminate the statistics.)

Congratulations on your X!

>124 kjgormley:

Why are you assuming, without evidence, that Andrew McAnyName was "cis"?

Frankly, I'm offended at the idea of calling someone something other than they call themselves. If someone says, "I am a woman", then it ill becomes any of us to require that she be called "trans" or "cis".

I apologize again for my confusion but I thought cis, trans and bi were orientations, not genders. Do we want to get into that too?

By the way, after lorax and LolaWalser replied to my question, I looked at Facebook and they had 58 genders that one could choose from. That is good for people filling out their own gender but if you are filling it out for an author whom you don't know personally, I think someone like me would not be able to do it with any reliability - even after a google search. For example, the difference between non-binary and gender fluid is not clear to me. It would require some kind of expert in gender to fill in these fields if we go with plain text. Without asking the authors, it might not be possible unless they have clearly stated their preference. I won't presume the solution, but if there is an umbrella term for people who do not identify as male or female , such as non-binary, so that the field doesn't become unweildy, that would be helpful.

Do you think that would be OK, or would that be insulting or upsetting to people?

One note: If we can't make any assumptions based on name and date, but must have a clear expression of gender from the author, then we've going to have to eliminate 90% or more of the data we have and never add most of it back in.

To take only pre-modern authors, I think it's okay, meaningful, even important and to say that Sappho was the greatest woman poet of antiquity, or that Anna Comnena is the first surviving woman historian in the Greek tradition, but we have no hard evidence about how the former identified, and the latter depends upon assuming the gender of dozens of historians with male names.

Modern authors aren't much better. I suppose popular authors might be doable, but the majority of authors on LibraryThing are pretty much only names. They wrote some devotional in 1840 or some cookbook in 1992 and that's almost all we can say with certainty. Only though extensive research, probably offline, could we know more.

This data has a small number of key uses, and this would break them. If we can't make any assumptions, we won't be able to answer "What's he gender breakdown of the books in my library?" And I think it is useful data. For starters, many members are a bit shocked at how slanted their libraries are toward men. But if we aren't to make assumptions, we won't know that. Libraries of any size with even a majority of authors marked would be rare.

I would add one other use of this data—it plays a small role in recommendations. LibraryThing's recommendations have a number of such fiddles. You don't want to have six popular books in a row, or six obscure ones. You don't want to have too many books by the same author. The system tries to mix it up. It does this with gender too, to a modest degree. So if some Civil War history book recommends twenty male authors, the fiddle-factor of gender will boost two women from below the unaltered 20th rank. The end result is a lot fewer books that recommend only men—and indeed somewhat fewer that recommend only women. I think it would be height of folly to eliminate that factor because we decided to make no assumptions. It would make the recommendations less interesting, anyway.

>128 krazy4katz: Facebook eliminate its 58 genders. It's free text now. Bounded lists of genders are trouble; there are always people who want to identify in ways other people think should not be permissible to identify as.

Since author pages/gender are getting a rework, could I ask if split authors would get their gender assigned in the stats. Currently, they all show as if it isn't filled, even when all the splits have them assigned. Ditto for dead or alive stats.

>128 krazy4katz:

"Bisexual" is an orientation, like hetero- or homosexual.

Cis is a term used to denote someone whose gender identity matches the gender they were assigned at birth, while trans denotes someone whose gender identity differs from the one they were assigned at birth.

>120 melannen: the majority of people who openly identify as something outside of male or female are happy with non-binary as an umbrella term

Citation needed other than your own anecdotal authority. "Non-binary" has only seen widespread usage as a gender label in the last decade, and I'm dubious about how much identification buy-in it has across the diversity of gender non-conformism.

I'm baffled that >108 gilroy: is apparently not widely acceptable. If there can be no consensus on a limited number of genders, would indicating author's sex, rather than gender, be a more reasonable piece of data?

>133 SandraArdnas:

No.

>133 SandraArdnas:

1) In this sort of conversation, "sex" is an older way of saying "gender." This usage is out of date and no longer functional. It supposedly refers to a person's plumbing, which a) isn't actually binary but a spectrum (biology is messy), and b) isn't anyone's damn business but the owner of said plumbing. Using "sex" instead of gender is, alas, not reasonable.

2) KJ came up with an eminently reasonable suggestion in >124 kjgormley:. I think it's a rather elegant solution, combining data collection with flexibility. KJ is also has direct knowledge of many of the questions under discussion. Is there a reason that you are harking back to >108 gilroy: and ignoring >124 kjgormley:?

> in general

If you aren't sure that you understand some or all of these issues (gender, sexuality, biology, terminology, etc.), there are excellent resources readily available online. For example, there's Sexual orientation & gender identity 101 from the Unitarian Universalist Association. Please, read as much as you can about it, because it affects people you know and love (whether you know it or not).

Easy graph/image - the Genderbread Person:
https://www.geneseo.edu/sites/default/files/sites/lgbtq/Genderbread-Person.jpg

Perhaps the author CK except for disambiguation notices could be locked for some or all LT Authors. It is rather strange, but some people feel that they can change what an author has entered to information that is just plain wrong.

This is done for venues.

>124 kjgormley: I think I like that solution. I'll have to ponder it a bit.

(By the way, nice to meet you. I'm a trans / intersex activist myself, but on the other side of the pond).

One of the problems I foresee, beside the language involved changing fairly rapidly, is that many of the words are used differently or have very different connotations in other languages. And there are huge cultural differences too. I think there will be translation difficulties on the non-English versions of the site.

>136 ScarletBea:
Thank you for that graph.

>133 SandraArdnas: I think some people have me blocked because I responded "rudely" to them. *shrug* whatever

>124 kjgormley: I think my big issue is with the free text field. For non-LT authors, that will lead to an edit war. No, I'm not going to soften that. Edit. War. We already have edit wars in CK for the way character names are entered. We already have problems with people NOT reading the help text (in the light gray beneath the box. Too Small and Hard to Read even for someone who's been here forever) and just putting things in however. For that matter, even for LT authors, I suspect someone who doesn't agree with the gender spectrum concept will purposefully change it to one of the binary options and again -- edit war.

Honestly, since the meme is broken -- and I've gotten more versed in what is and isn't -- I've avoided the whole item where I could.

I'd be even more happy if the field and the related meme went away. Then maybe focus on fixing the myriad things that are half completed or broken.

>137 MarthaJeanne:

The problem I see with locking author CK is that authors have been known to use CK for inappropriate purposes, such as lengthy promotional material in the "brief biography" section. We need to be able to edit that kind of spraint.

This would be a particular problem with "drive by" authors. We've run into such issues with "locked" venues when the info needs editing and the person claiming the venue is no longer around.

>131 lilithcat: Sorry! I don't know where my brain was. Thank you for the correction. I will now stay out of this, since I obviously don't know what I am talking about. Also, >136 ScarletBea:, I too want to thank you for the graph. It is very helpful.

As someone with skin in this game (non-binary), watching the thread evolve since my zombie revival has been interesting...

Anyway, like Tim, I like the idea of just a free text field like all the other author CK. I know that's going to result in some edit wars, but I don't want to be an enemy of the good holding out for the perfect. Edit wars happen with the radial as it is. Treating the gender CK like all the other CK would theoretically mean that multiple entries would be possible. I am also okay with reasonable assumptions, particularly for non-living authors. Mistakes can always be corrected.

I don't like the idea of being paralyzed by the fear of what sorts of mistakes or bad faith behavior people will engage in.

In keeping with the notion of the perfect being the enemy of the good, I would say that the biggest pain point for me in the current arrangement is firstly, lumping in anyone outside of male/female with "contested/unknown", and secondly with the term "other". Any solution which respectfully addresses that is a huge improvement that I will be very happy with and glad to help implement. That would include simply improving the existing radial, or going with KJ's proposal. All three of these seem good to me. Are they perfect? Of course not, we live on Earth in 2020 CE. Nothing's going to be perfect. But they all are good proposals with points for and against them. If, however, you want to avoid edit wars, the only way to do that is to eliminate the field entirely, and that's throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

>143 krazy4katz: krazy4katz You learned something new today, and that's awesome!

>130 SandraArdnas: Since author pages/gender are getting a rework, could I ask if split authors would get their gender assigned in the stats. Currently, they all show as if it isn't filled, even when all the splits have them assigned. Ditto for dead or alive stats.

A dozen messages have whizzed by without anyone saying "Hear, hear!", so let me say it.

Yes, this, please!

Treating the gender CK like all the other CK would theoretically mean that multiple entries would be possible.

No, it's a setting. Some fields allow multiples, some do not. I favor NOT because I worry about people using is as a "history" of gender identification. But I don't know.

I have a number of qualms about KJ's proposal on a content level. Some of these others have stated. As for UI, however, I don't see how it's not a whole new UI that would really only function for this.

>135 karenb: The reason for 'harking back' is reasonable vs unreasonable. To illustrate my point, in the last two censuses, I declared my ethnicity as hobbit, yet I'm perfectly aware that that data is lumped with many others of similar kind and is represented in a single group as other, miscellaneous or something of the kind. Similarly, if there can be no consensus on a relatively limited set of genders, a reasonable expectation here would be having a group that encompass all the various non-traditional ones, whether it will be called non-binary, or something else.

Please refrain from condescending me and focus on lack of coherence in arguing on the one hand that gender and sex are not the same, only to claim that sex is an older way for saying gender.

>146 timspalding: timspalding I can understand that concern. It's good to know it's a setting! I wasn't sure how it worked (hence "theoretically"), since most free text CK allow multiple entries. There are some people who use multiple gender identities, but I don't know how that weighs against the trouble of someone tracking gender history. I myself use multiple gender identifiers, but generally just use non-binary as a convenient shorthand especially in non-queer spaces and would be fine with it for CK were I an author being cataloged, particularly if giving up my collection would protect others from harassment in the form of gender history tracking. But I cannot speak for others. The aim is always least harm then most good, action before theory, etc.

>144 Faranae: Thank you!
I find this a very interesting discussion. Because I work at a large university, this issue is coming up more frequently. We have an Office of Diversity, which used to focus mostly on race and promotion of more women, but now it seems that alternative genders are included as well. So far it is a subtle change, but I notice that people from that office are putting preferred pronouns after their signatures in emails. I think it is good that LT is discussing this and I hope a solution will be found that will make most people happy.

>148 Faranae:

Yeah, I don't know how it weighs either. I'm going to favor a single answer first. If the need becomes apparent and there's significant demand, we can make it multiple. But we can't easily go the other direction.

Okay, I've gone ahead and changed the field:



For now, the field:

1. Is free text
2. Has the suggestion text listed above
3. Is unitary, unlike some CK fields which can contain multiple lines.
4. Not translated. I don't currently have a good answer for this. I don't want to split the field up by langauge, but I also can't translate free text. (If I did so, and someone entered a typo or a weird phrase it will go onto the translation list of 30 languages. It a recipe for chaos.) For now, we have to use English.

I have:

1. Not changed any of the current data, which put everything into "male," "female," "other/contested/unknown" and "n/a"
2. Not changed the stats page. I will be changing it when the new design reaches it, but it's not in the first wave of new designs.

My reasoning has been spelled out before. A complicated UI wasn't going to happen, for multiple reasons. Nor do I feel comfortable coming up with an official, or above-the-fold, genders. Experience above shows that informed, intelligent and respectful people will not agree in every respect. I agree with some above (e.g., >144 Faranae:) that there may be edit wars, but that we can't be paralyzed with fear. We have to see what happens and then adjust accordingly.

I'm rolling out here. On Tuesday(?) I'll make an official announcement in Talk.

>151 timspalding: Definitely an improvement. Thanks!

I would be interested in views on male vs. female. While the terms are often reserved for sex, not gender, and "man" and "woman" preferred for gender, I can find quite a few resources, including style guides (APA), that allow for it, especially in situations like ours, where "the age range is broad or ambiguous." It doesn't make sense to have, say, Anne Frank, Zlata Filipović or Thomas Chatterton write as a "girl" or "boy" and then change to "woman" or "man" at one age or another, or never.

>153 timspalding: I prefer keeping male and female because, as you say, man and woman imply age.

>153 timspalding: I think in most cases, authors' works are published entirely in their adulthood. Female and male could be used in the exceptions when the sex is known, binary, and thought to have been the same through the author's publication history.

>155 aspirit:

I'm not sure what you are suggesting here. It sounds as though you'd have some authors listed as "man" or "woman" and others as "male" or "female", and I'm not clear on how you are distinguishing between them. It seems odd to me.

I think using "male" and "female" is clearer as avoiding the complications of age (when, indeed, is "adulthood"? How is that determined? Age at which the author can sign a contract? Marry? Drink? Smoke? Get drafted? And what jurisdiction's laws are we looking at? ).

I'm also for keeping "male" and "female".

There are some children authors and some who began their writing careers when they were children. Male and female specify the sex/gender without adding unnecessary complications about age.

I agree. I prefer male and female too.

New additions now do not seem to connect to the author gender stats page.

>156 lilithcat: We have a free-form field now. We have all the options. The question is how to be both concise and accurate, I think.

Repeating what I said in >91 aspirit:

It's in medicine and some governments that gender and sex are labeled the same, often to devastating consequences. As long as I've been on this site, I've been thinking it's creepy how members are encouraged to guess what external sex organs an author might have based on pronoun use*. I'd be grateful if we stopped doing that.

*This is what's happening when an LT member sees a press release referring to an author as she/her and assumes the author is female. Most of the time, yes, that will be an accurate guess of sex, but we'll have no idea how often it's wrong.

The field is for gender. When a living author identifies as a woman, we should enter "woman" in the gender field. When a deceased author was known to be a woman, we should do the same, entering the gender as "woman". I'm fairly certain Tim agrees the default should no longer be "female" for a woman, but he can correct me if I've misread the comment in >153 timspalding: ""man' and 'woman' (are) preferred".

Tim brought up a question yesterday about what to do for child authors who might have also been considered adults at some point. I'm agreeing with him that even though sex and gender are different, and the author might not have considered the two the same, using female for authors whose age complicates the issue would be better than a blank field.

>160 aspirit:

I think you misread his comment. You've pulled that short quote out of a much longer one.

While the terms are often reserved for sex, not gender, and "man" and "woman" preferred for gender, I can find quite a few resources, including style guides (APA), that allow for it, especially in situations like ours, where "the age range is broad or ambiguous."

>160 aspirit: When you open the field to edit the help line reads

"female," "male," "n/a" or enter as free text

I take that as meaning that female and male are the prefered options.

>160 aspirit: I guess I am not sure I understand. When I say I would prefer to use male and female rather than man or woman, I would use the gender that the person identifies him/herself as, not according to their sexual organs (which is none of my business anyway). That is what we want to do, correct? I just want to be clear so that I don't make a mistake. Thank you.

>163 krazy4katz: Ditto.

In strictly binary cases, I figured people who identify as man/woman would also identify as male/female. For me, female and male are broader, umbrella terms that can cover subcategories like man/woman, boy/girl. If I'm wrong, I'd like to know.

>161 lilithcat: I read that entire message as asking about exceptions.

>162 MarthaJeanne: that's not what the field does on my side. Interesting. What happens when I click on the pencil icon is the text field becomes editable, the same as other fields in CK. The field is entirely free form.

>163 krazy4katz: yes, we want to use the term the author uses. Some people do identity their own sex as female or as male, so that's what would into CK.

>165 aspirit:

That a CK item is an editable text field doesn't mean that there isn't a help line like MarthaJeanne is saying.

Yes, my intent was to use male and female. While male/female is sometimes used to indicate biological sex, as distinct from gender, male/female is also used for gender, as an umbrella term. "Woman" or "man" cannot do this because they also encode age. As the field is entitled "Gender," not "sex," I believe the meaning is clear.

>166 cpg: oh! Thank you. >162 MarthaJeanne: And I'm sorry about not reading closely.

>153 timspalding: is that what you were asking about? (cross-posted)

>167 timspalding: I don't think the meaning is clear. But at this point-- especially as I'm misunderstanding what's being said in this thread in the post day-- I'll accept that the free-form field is an improvement and step out of the conversation.

How author gender is handled here has been uncomfortable enough that I've rarely touched it on author pages. I can continue ignoring it during edits.

While you're looking at the Gender field, can you fix it so you can hit Enter to save after typing a value? That works for some CK fields, but not others.

>167 timspalding:
I basically agree with your remarks.

However, I would like to point out that in other languages, e.g. in German, the distinction between "gender" and "sex" is not so clear and often needs to be clarified.

This must be made clear in the English text to avoid translation problems.

The non-binary values are not being recorded correctly on the stats page:

https://www.librarything.com/profile/lorax/stats/gender for mine, https://www.librarything.com/profile/MEMBERNAME/stats/gender

Sarah Gailey and Luz Calvo are non-binary and have their genders correctly recorded, but on the stats page they're showing as "Not set". I realize that the prior value of "other/contested/unknown" doesn't properly exist anymore, but there should be some sort of acknowledgement that their gender is known, is set, and is not male or female.

>172 lorax: >159 MarthaJeanne:

Tim specifically said in >151 timspalding: (Bolding mine)

I have:

1. Not changed any of the current data, which put everything into "male," "female," "other/contested/unknown" and "n/a"
2. Not changed the stats page. I will be changing it when the new design reaches it, but it's not in the first wave of new designs.

Thanks for trying this - I hope it works well.

gilroy (#174):

Thanks, I clearly missed that part.

However, I would like to point out that in other languages, e.g. in German, the distinction between "gender" and "sex" is not so clear and often needs to be clarified.

This must be made clear in the English text to avoid translation problems.

The translation text can have words in it that guide the translation but don't appear in the English. That is, the text could be "Gender \Note: As distinct from sex\" and that helper text would only be seen by translators. Do you want to suggest wording?

>172 lorax:

Blech. I was thinking they would slot a different way. But "not set" is going to cause different problems. I'll take a look and, if easy, change it now.

>178 timspalding:

Cancel that. I'm working to de-language-ize it.

I'm very happy to see this change implemented and I shall get my little editor fingers working down the list of non-binary authors (though I'm a little late to the party to I'm sure the list is dwindling rapidly!

>179 timspalding:

Okay, the field now has no language per se. (I did similar to date of birth and death, and will look at others.) The trick is that, if someone enters a German word, it will be in there for everyone.

One solution would be to indicate that it has to be in English. A more complex solution would be to use the translation feature to translate back and forth. This couldn't be for everything, or someone could enter the gender "pickle" and EVERY language would suddenly have to translate that. But it could be possible for the more common languages. For now, use English.

>180 Faranae:

You can see recent edits here: https://www.librarything.com/commonknowledge/search.php?f=5&q=

I'm a little worried. People are going in different directions:


I would propose we explicitly ask people NOT to add pronouns.

We might also put "nonbinary" or "non-binary" in the hint, so we can get some clustering around a spelling.

>182 timspalding:

I'm not surprised. Once you allow free text, Katie bar the door.

I would propose we explicitly ask people NOT to add pronouns.

Agreed. That's not what that field is for. Though I expect now people will ask for a "preferred pronouns" field!

Pronouns can always be added in the biography section.

>184 amanda4242: I can see why people want the pronouns listed. That is a good suggestion.

>172 lorax:

I've done the minimal fix--everything that isn't male, female, n/a or blank is now "other." This fixes that they were falling between the cracks and ending up n/a. The real fix is to redo the code but, as I expressed, I'm doing that when we redo the page in a more fundamental wage. It has brain worms and I'm not up to the task of removing just one.

>182 timspalding: I started looking at authors who I knew were nonstandard and entering the usages that each person preferred. I was looking at variation and thinking out loud/online about variations.

I stopped the experiment after a handful of entries. I think that full gender and pronoun details would work best in the short biography. That requires more thought and work than a simple CK field, but that's probably a good thing (capturing nuance can be important).

>188 karenb:

So the argument is that biography details aren't usable as data. Having a gender field allows LibraryThing to summarize and generate charts—to note, for example, that your library is only 20% female authors. That's interesting data, but you can't get there from prose biographical blurbs.

>188 karenb: Also, there is already a short biographical section in Common Knowledge, so anyone who would like to clarify gender or pronouns can do so in that field.

>189 timspalding: Yes, the Gender field is about creating capturaeable data. I'm trying to show that some people use two words, as in "nonbinary/transmasculine" or "gnc/transmasculine" (gnc=gender non-conforming). Isn't that partly why you chose to make this a free text field? Or did I misunderstand you?

>184 amanda4242: >190 krazy4katz: Yes, pronouns details will work well in the "Short biography" CK field. I was trying to agree; sorry that I wasn't clear.

So, I think there's a problem loading gender down with secondary information, or fragmenting things unnecessarily. To take three recent edits you made, do you have evidence the authors prefer to be identified as the genders "nonbinary transmasculine," "genderqueer" and "nonbinary/genderqueer"? Each of these will create a separate gender gender in the system—there is no link between "genderqueer" and "nonbinary/genderqueer" (not to mention "non-binary," which someone else has been entering).

>192 timspalding: Evidence was lots of online research:

Leslie Feinberg's obituary, written by zir spouse: identified as lesbian but presented very masculine and thus identified also as trans (but didn't call it transmasculine)
Merc Fenn Wolfmoor: transmasculine non-binary
Lee Mandelo: Twitter: gnc/transmasc
Nino Cipri: trans/nonbinary

Rather than using slashed/double terms, would it be possible to have an "Add entry" button? That would capture people who use more than one term.

You can see the current ones here: https://www.librarything.com/commonknowledge/clouds.php

Unfortunately, it doesn't update very fast. It's highly cached.

>193 karenb:

"A. Merc Rustad is a queer transmasculine non-binary writer who lives in the Midwest United States. "

I don't think, however, that all of those terms are what they would give if asked to provide merely their gender. But IDK. Others should weigh in.

>196 aspirit: I've peeked at the thread. Weighing in, because a familiar name was brought up--

Just from what I've seen of the author online, I would make an educated guess that Merc Fenn Wolfmoor's (Merc Rustad's) gender is non-binary, gender presentation leans masculine, and overall identity in LGBTQ+ communities is queer (trans ace). For LT, that would mean their gender would be simply "non-binary".

>194 timspalding:
The cloud shows that some people have been entering "Female" and "Male", and they appear separately from "female" and "male", despite what's shown in the example text. Is it possible to force the field contents to lower case? (Or - are there some gender names that would be made incorrect by doing that?)

Posted here https://www.librarything.com/topic/324569