What is non binary? I haven't heard that before. Can you share some experiences?

You should search for the term + "gender", but the long and short of it is that certain folks don't feel particularly compelled to identify as "male" OR "female" and thus identify as a non-binary (!(M|F)) gender.

Honest question: what does this have to do with software development?

Great question. It's more of a workplace concern, as I'm sure that nonbinary folks experience these issues in other workplaces. However, software development is definitely a male dominated environment and there's a lot of discussion in the industry about how we make that environment more inviting to women.

So there's a shared experience there of being a gender minority within software, but also the difference that some of our concerns are very different than women's concerns.

And software rules our world. My company lets me declare my pronouns on the internal org chart tool (yay!) but required me to select man or woman to receive health benefits (boo!). As an engineer, I can help inform system design and provide feedback on the software that gets written to handle cases like these, which makes our software better.

Men and women have different insurance risks.

I expect it will take a while for insurance companies to build up risk profiles for new pronouns once those stop changing. They will want to know your biological sex and whether you are in or after transition into one of them. Depending on whatever effects social genders might have they will want to know those as well. And as a third separate item they will want to know your preferred pronouns for communication purposes.

They sure do! And trans people have different insurance risks (and presumably nonbinary people do too.) Rates of suicide, for instance, are considerably higher in trans populations.

But, in this case, my insurance company basically said, "Pick either one, and you can change it whenever you want" when I asked how I should pick as a genderfluid person. I asked if I could change it daily, they said, "Sure."

shrug I think you are right, we'll eventually settle out a couple of forms for things like pronouns/gender identity/sex characteristics/etc. But having a member of the minority who is also an engineer can help make sure we build those tools in a way that doesn't leave small integer N% of people feeling left out.

Most professional software development is about working with a local (your team/the people you directly collaborate with) and global (your stack’s ecosystem) community as much as it is about writing code, so it stands to reason that a high visibility social characteristic like gender identity might affect other aspects of the professional experience.

Case in point, demographic information like gender identity is a useful feature to contextualize or find patterns in the data — like how the blog post points out that more than half of respondents wrote their first line of code before age 16, but that this statistic varies by gender and country.

If it really doesn’t matter, it will be borne out in the statistics (i.e. the gender identity feature will give you no additional information).

Sometimes software developers are humans.

> what is non binary

Analog.

I can dig it. Does that mean we get to avoid the gender autotuners and highly produced studio gender? :D

Ok, this is a HIGHLY abbreviated overview that I'm sure other LGBTQ+ folks would say doesn't get it exactly right:

If we decouple the idea of gender (societal expectations for men/women -- e.g. boys like blue, girls like pink. Boys wear shorts, girls wear skirts.) from the idea of sexual/genetic characteristics, then we can start to discuss what it means to be a man vs what it means to be male.

Manliness and femininity are both spectrums -- you can imagine folks who are real tough manly men and folks who are not. We call these two spectrums the gender binary -- people typically fall into the manly spectrum somewhere, or in the feminine spectrum somewhere.

Nonbinary folks feel excluded by those spectrums for one reason or another. Nonbinary is an umbrella term that can include people who are agender (e.g. I don't identify with any gender), genderfluid (e.g. sometimes I feel masculine, sometimes feminine), genderqueer (e.g. I'm going to take the elements from each spectrum I like and make my own thing), etc.

For a more concrete example, people like David Bowie are often held as icons for the nonbinary community (again, not everyone agrees with me here). Eddie Izzard also famously played with gender. Ruby Rose and Tilda Swinton identify as genderfluid. There's a lot of different people under the broad umbrella of nonbinary.

> Can you share some experiences?

I've been told, "Your pronouns don't matter". I've had my bathroom use policed (I often feel uncomfortable in mens/womens restrooms and strongly prefer gender neutral spaces). I've had coworkers ask, "So does that mean you fuck men?" in a way that is clearly a set up to a joke.

Every day I make a conscious choice on my presentation (clothes, hair style, etc.). I typically choose to present in a masculine way because it makes my life easier, even though it's a presentation I am less happy with. There's a surprising amount of cognitive load for me for something that's relatively mindless for most people. Do I dress in a way that makes me happier, but results in a lot more sideways glances (and possibly violence?) or do I dress in a way that keeps me safer but less happy?

I understand that they/them pronoun use is not common, and I'm never upset when I correct people, but some people have told me, point blank, "Your pronouns are wrong and gross" or "I will use they/them, but you should know I'm lying to your face when I do so."

These sorts of experiences are distractions from what I really want to do, which is build awesome engineering teams and solve hard technical problems. But they're unfortunately a reality of (at least) the software world in the US and most likely in the broader workplace.

Couple of questions if I may.

Do you think you have a right to dictate others use of pronouns, or maybe that they're wrong to use a pronoun that matches your sex (as it appears to them, whether that's factual it counter-factual)?

I have a beard, and people always comment on it but I'd rather they not define me by it (honestly, I'm not making this up) - it's hair that grows on me, that's it - should I get to tell them they can't say I'm hairy/bearded (despite that being obviously true)?

I'll engage on this, assuming these questions were asked in good faith.

> should I get to tell them they can't say I'm hairy/bearded (despite that being obviously true)?

You can say, "I'd rather you not refer to me/define me by my beard." Do they have to respect that? Of course not.

Does not respecting that mean that they are now knowingly violating a boundary you've specifically asked them to respect? Yep. Sure does.

Does knowingly/deliberately violating someone's boundaries make you an asshole? Maybe? Probably? At the very least it's likely to make that person like you less.

> Do you think you have a right to dictate others use of pronouns?

I have the right to indicate that my pronouns are they/them, just as you can (presumably) indicate yours are he/him. When people deliberately violate that (e.g., if people started calling you 'the bearded lady' or used she to refer to you) I believe I am well within my right to feel disrespected, just as if they had used any other verbal insult. I see it in a similar light to nicknames. If my name was William, and I tell people to please call me William, and someone continually refers to me as Billy despite being asked not to, then I'm going to feel disrespected.

I get sir/he/him/his/etc all the time. When it's people I'm close to (colleagues, friends, etc.) I'll gently offer a correction and move on. e.g. "Sorry, my pronouns are they/them, please, continue." I don't bother correcting the gas station attendant or the coffee shop barista.

I generally assume most times the wrong pronouns aren't coming from a place of malice -- either someone just forgot or they don't know. I give people a lot of latitude.

I don't really have anything to add here but I just wanted to say I appreciate your tact and attitude.

Especially online, it's very easy to just assume bad faith when responding to something like that, but I think the internet would be a much better place if people were more likely to keep cool and stay civil even in the face of comments which they suspect to be in bad faith.

It seems impossible to ask questions on some subjects here (on HN, I don't really use other mass fora); which makes it very hard to learn the scope of someone's position. 'Assume good faith' has to be the basis of online discussion -- I'm really not sure what's wrong with the questions.

>"in the face of comments which they suspect to be in bad faith" //

I asked two questions and avoided making comments (other than to set the basis for the second question. People often don't appear to read questions as questions.

It's like if someone said "So, do you just not like static typing?" and the responders appear to think the person said "dynamic typing is crap and you're crap if you like it" when in fact they're just interested in someone's rationale for avoiding statically typed languages.

Thanks, that's a very helpful response.

It's curious to me how you say "my pronouns are".

I go to a group where the other adults are mostly always mums or other older women. The leaders almost always refer to the group as "mums", but I just accept it assuming they're not being exclusionary -- I guess that's my choice though. Funnily one of my children has started calling me mummy, which is a little weird to me but not at all disconcerting.

As I reflect on that, I wonder; you say you feel disrespected when called by a pronoun that's contrary to your preference (presumably only if you've already requested the person address you differently), as if it's an insult. Surely it's just an element of language combined with your outer appearance. If you feel being called by the pronoun of one sex or the other (or either) to be disrespecting, that would seem to imply you feel people who are correctly identified by those terms are some how lesser? Perhaps "disrespected" is the wrong term, or my understanding of it is wrong. I guess if you call me "the bearded lady" but it's not malicious, then it's not disrespecting (for me, from my perspective; I'm not trying to tell you how to feel, obviously).

I guess I still don't really get why a strangers pronoun usage matters?

One last aside, if you could do away with gendered pronouns altogether, would that be better/worse? I guess you can't identify as neutrally pronouned if there's no gendering of pronouns?? (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_neutrality_in_genderl...).

>I give people a lot of latitude. //

Blessed are the peacemakers, thanks for sharing.

Thanks for sharing your experience, it sounds like it's much harder than I'd think (as a cis hetero man) to be non-binary. This might be wildly off-topic, but if you wouldn't mind answering, I have a question about workplace bathroom policing. Last week I was leaving the men's bathroom at work and saw someone walking in, who very much looked to me to be a woman. I had a split second to think about if I should say something or not, and didn't say anything. About two seconds later I was walking away and saw this person leaving the bathroom quickly, so I think they were a cis woman and accidentally went into the wrong bathroom.

Was not saying anything the right move here? I imagine non-binary folks get a lot of "are you sure this is the right bathroom for you?", and I'd hate to contribute to that accidentally.

I'd say most cis folks will pretty instantly recognize when they've accidentally entered the wrong restroom and make a hasty (if somewhat embarrassed) retreat. I generally assume most people are headed to the right spot or will very, very quickly figure out when they've made a mistake.

That feeling of, "Oh shit, I don't belong here", btw, is basically what I feel using either gendered restroom. Thankfully, most tech companies try to provide some gender neutral restrooms.