I came across this tweet from Kurtis Rainbolt Greene:

If you've ever interacted with a form on any website, you've seen registration forms that ask for things like first and last name as well as your gender. The form asks for first and last name separately so the app can address you by your first name and gender so it can use the "correct" pronouns.

"Correct"

I put "correct" in quotation marks because as much as companies and programmers would like to believe we're doing the right thing by addressing people by their first names or using masculine pronouns just because someone said they were male, what we're actually doing is pigeonholing users into our narrow view of the world.

Hello, #{first_name}!

Patrick McKenzie wrote a blog post a while back entitled The Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names that I'm not going to attempt to duplicate here. It's pretty much the best article ever about how everything you think you know about names is wrong.

The TL;DR is that names in various parts of the world don't fit our Firstname Lastname convention. In fact, there may be more names in the world don't fit our convention than do.

Additionally, in many cultures, a business addressing a customer by their first name is considered too informal and can insult them or at least make them uncomfortable. Either way, you've lost that person as a customer.

EDIT: Kurtis also recommended that I link to the W3C article titled Personal names around the world. It's a fantastic article that provides background for a lot of the falsehoods listed in Patrick McKenzie's article linked above. It's fairly long, but so worth it.

Download gender binaries or compile from source

When you use the words "male" and "female", you're not referring to gender at all. If you are, you're using the wrong words. Rather, male/female refers to a person at the biological level, which is a weird fucking thing to ask about in your registration form for your new social app. Katrina Owen and I discussed this in a Ruby Rogues Parley thread once and it's really stuck with me since then.

The gist of it is: We're not animals. We're civilized (more or less) people that have layers of abstractions on top of our biology. We're not "male" or "female", we're "men" and "women".

And this brings me to my next point: even if you went with man/woman rather than male/female, you're still not covering all the bases. There are a lot of people in this world who don't fit the man/woman archetypes (regardless of whether that matches their biology). My long-time friend and current roommate is one shining example of this. This friend (who will remain nameless until I get their permission to use their name) struggles pretty constantly with their gender identity. They are neither masculine nor feminine (until a cat walks in the room, then they become Agnes from Despicable Me), but have to pick one very often. And a lot of times, people in the same situation feel excluded because the world wasn't designed to work for them the way it has been for everyone else.

Basically, we're making people feel like shit just so we can figure out whether to use "him" or "her" when referring to them. That is literally the only reason. Even if you don't care how your customer feels, this hurts your bottom line by encouraging them to find a competitor that does cater to them.

Okay, so my shit's broke. Please to tell me how to fix?

We ask people for first and last name so we can infer how to address them. We ask for their gender so we can infer which pronouns to use for them.

Both of these are wrong. The thing they have in common (well, besides being wrong) is that both are used to infer something about them. Rather than trying to guess details based on metadata, ask for the information you want directly.

That is, don't chop up their name to guess at how to address them. Ask them how you should address them.

Don't use third-person pronouns based on a multiple-choice gender response. Ask them what pronouns to use when referring to them. And don't limit pronouns to him/her. Don't even limit it to him/her/them. If you want to be truly inclusive and respectful, get a freeform response for every single pronoun they want used:

• Subject pronoun (he/she/they)
• Object pronoun (him/her/them)
• Possessive pronoun (his/her/their)
• Possessive gerunds (his/hers/theirs)

The examples in parentheses are just that: examples. Let your customer enter a freeform response in case the pronouns they want aren't there (trust me, cisgender people, there are pronouns transgender people use that you haven't heard of).

I've mentioned this to a few people before and almost universally, their knee-jerk reaction was "But using male/female is so much easier!" This is simply not true. It's slightly (seriously, only slightly) easier for building the form, sure, but then you have to use a function or helper all over your app to select the "correct" pronouns every time you need one.

#{user.name} updated #{possessive_pronoun_for(user)} profile.

But wait, here's the one with user-specified pronouns:

#{user.name} updated #{user.possessive_pronoun} profile.

Since user.possessive_pronoun is a simple reader method and doesn't check anything else, there's no logic that needs to be tested (you are doing TDD, right?). You're just getting data from the model.

Besides, if you put in that little bit of extra effort to offer proper pronoun support, you're very likely to have a lot of very happy customers who will feel included rather than looking at your registration form and saying "Oh, another fucking 'male/female' select box." They'll tell their friends that your service is inclusive and it will forever be known as "the service that doesn't hate marginalized people".