Education about terms in questions.

[drnikki]

This came up in #6 and I didn't want it to get lost. From @emmairwin:

Side-question, one from the summit, was that maintainers (orgs etc) had little to no understanding of even what non-binary is.

How can we use this as a learning tool as well for orgs as they implement. I know that some institutions (thinking higher education in this one) are afraid of what they don't know, and so will shy away from using a standard like this one.

[emceeaich]

Part of the issue here is that binary people aren't aware of being a presumed default, where trans and/or non-binary people have thought about it.

What if one assigned people to a 'gender undeclared' category at registration, don't make gender a required field, if that goes un-changed at some point later prompt them on it, in a manner that encourages reflection, and guides them into a open-ended field for gender.

[sparklingrobots]

As we've been slowly chipping away at an implementation of OD on Drupal, this has come up a few times--folks feel unsure of how to answer the questions and have asked if we could link out to definitions or something like that.

The question then would be who maintains the definitions. Gender Wiki (http://gender.wikia.com/wiki/Gender_Wiki) comes to mind, but I have no idea who maintains those or if our terms are even fully represented there. And I haven't read most of it so not sure if it's accurate.

There's also something nice about this project maintaining the definitions, but...that's a lot of work.

[emceeaich]

There is https://pronoun.is/ which has a repo at https://github.com/witch-house/pronoun.is and their pronoun lists are kept in a static file in the project. But there are no definitions.

I looked over https://nonbinary.miraheze.org/wiki/Nounself_pronouns and wonder if we could break down the problem into groupings of pronouns: zie, they, sie, ze, …, she, him and the nounself pronoun categories. The first group is, to first glance a stable set that may see updates in terms of years, but the second set is more open-ended?

[emmairwin]

I just want to share, that we did not end up making this 'long list' our standard. The primary reason was not education (although I expect we would have run into that more), but rather - even with this long list, we had people using the 'other'. It was still a very important learning experience.

Our current standard is here: https://github.com/mozilla/diversity/blob/master/data-metrics/surveys/en/gender-identity.md

We will probably learn more from how people use the self-identify field. Maybe we think about how we can provide a way to 'show' show people we see them, but to limit the amount of work it is to compile a list.

Always open to learning