To Sir, with Love: How To Get More Women Involved in Open Source (O'ReillyNet) [LWN.net]

To Sir, with Love: How To Get More Women Involved in Open Source (O'ReillyNet)

Posted Sep 29, 2007 21:21 UTC (Sat) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

You're really getting into a nest of snakes here, not least because the
division of the sexes in biology is nowhere near as nice and neat as you
seem to think.

e.g. one of my friends is, outwardly, a very nice lady. By chance she
discovered when she was about seventeen that she's a completely
androgen-insensitive XY (the absolute absence of periods is a good sign
that something is up). I wouldn't call her `really male'; she's
genetically male with a moderately common mutation, mentally female (to
whatever extent that means anything), and biologically... *mostly* female.

Now obviously humans instinctively classify other humans by gender, so
there's not much point saying `everyone, treat me as a woman' if you're
six feet tall and bearded with a deep voice (nobody will be able to, try
as they might): but surgery exists to make you look like whatever gender
you please, and after that, I'd say it *is* insulting to have people say
you're not `really' your chosen gender.

To Sir, with Love: How To Get More Women Involved in Open Source (O'ReillyNet)

Posted Sep 30, 2007 3:02 UTC (Sun) by ofeeley (subscriber, #36105) [Link]

"androgen-insensitive XY"

Also known as "testicular feminization syndrome" if I remember my undergraduate medical genetics courses correctly. It turns out that phenotypically many of the traits currently considered highly desirable in women in our culture are expressed more highly by possessors of this karyotype.

Chances are that many of us that have admired a super-model for their "obviously" "female" characteristics have been appreciating exactly this phenotype!

The contention that "man" is a biologically defined as opposed to socially is not really tenable and the fact that it should matter so much to anyone as opposed to how the human performs as a colleague speaks volumes about the problem.

To Sir, with Love: How To Get More Women Involved in Open Source (O'ReillyNet)

Posted Sep 30, 2007 20:28 UTC (Sun) by k8to (subscriber, #15413) [Link]

It is disrespectful because the nature of scarequotes is such that this implies that Audrey is a liar. About her own sense of self-identity.

But more than that, the device is dismissive, belittling. Even if you wanted to take this sort of a very pointed (and I believe unnecessary) stand, you could do it with some modicum of decorum.

To Sir, with Love: How To Get More Women Involved in Open Source (O'ReillyNet)

Posted Oct 1, 2007 16:59 UTC (Mon) by MattPerry (guest, #46341) [Link]

> It is disrespectful because the nature of scarequotes is such that this
> implies that Audrey is a liar. About her own sense of self-identity.

I think I see what's happening here. In the United States, which is where I live, there is no established social norm for how gender is indentified. Each person is left to their own methods of determination. From your post it sounds like you use a person's self-identity to evaluate the gender. If a person self-identifies as a woman then they are a woman. Am I correct that this is your viewpoint? In that sense I could see how the statement could be offensive for the reason you stated above.

From my point of view gender is defined by ones physiological and biological makeup, not ones sense of self-identity. Tang could self-identify as a woman and even go so far as to have surgery to alter her appearance and it would not change my interpretation of her gender. If I were to meet her I would address her with a feminine pronoun as she has requested in her blog[1] and would treat her as a woman. Yet if the question of her specific gender was raised I would not be able to say honestly that she is female because the criteria that I use to establish gender would say categorically that Tang's gender is male. From my viewpoint, it is a fact, not an opinion, that Audrey Tang is male. Biological science has not yet reached the point at which that fact could be changed.

In my case I didn't find the original poster's statement to be offensive because the statement made an empirical observation. It is demonstrably true given my criteria for what constitutes gender. I interpreted the poster's quotes as a means to emphasize the word 'she' because the written word lacks the auditory and visual cues that face to face communication has. I percieved the emphasis on that word to say, "I'm using this pronoun although I know it's not correct."

1. http://pugs.blogs.com/audrey/2005/12/runtime_typecas.html

To Sir, with Love: How To Get More Women Involved in Open Source (O'ReillyNet)

Posted Oct 1, 2007 18:48 UTC (Mon) by k8to (subscriber, #15413) [Link]

As in other posts, gender means different things. Phenotype, genotype, social role, self identity, identity others perceive. All these things are gender-related. I think it is reasonable to match the identity I perceive others as with their self-perceived identity.

I believe that people who are genetically male but see themselves as somehow intrinsically female have real reasons for doing so, and so I buy into world view! The same is true for those who are genetically female but view themselves as male. It's not really very hard, of course, because these people take various measures to reduce the cognitive leap one has to make.