freebasing
Notes on Freebase, the free database of everything
Gender is not binary
Author: Skud2 Oct
If you go to edit a Person in Freebase, there’s a field for “gender”. The current choices are “male” or “female”, and it’s a fundamental Freebase system type, which means that you can’t add new ones. Nor can you choose more than one.
Regardless of whether you buy into it or not (and you won’t be surprised to hear that I do), there are many people, groups, and indeed entire cultures that have more complex models of gender than a simple binary model.
- From a purely biological viewpoint, some people (or organisms) are actually hermaphroditic or intersex, having some male and some female biological traits
- In modern Western societies, many people undergo sex reassignment therapy (aka “sex change”), meaning that they might be male for one period of their life and female for another period.
- During the transition some of these people are both/neither, and identify as transgender or other related terms.
- Some people like to stay in the “transgendered” place, and live as neither (or both of) male or female long-term or permanently.
- In some cultures, a gender which is neither (or both) male nor female is widely acknowledged and used, eg. the Native American two-spirit concept.
- There is a general understanding in academia of the difference between sex (biological: what chromosomal make-up and/or sex organs do you have?) and gender (what role do you perform in society?)
- The example of women who dress and live as men (of whom there are some very famous examples, some not discovered til their death) gives us a situation where sex = female but gender = male.
I’m not actually an expert on this, just a reasonably well-informed layperson, but obviously it’s way more complicated than the simple male/female binary currently expressed on Freebase.
My feeling is that as a first step, “Gender”, the system type, should have an “Other” option (if not a more complete list). The next step, I suspect, is to create a “Transgender Person” type, which allows for gender identity to change over time.
I’m playing with some of this in a personal domain if you’d like to come comment or take a look.
Tags:freebase gender genderqueer intersex metaweb queer transgender
8 Responses for "Gender is not binary"
Based on your observations I’d suggest a slightly reverse solution to yours.
Sex in the genetic sense applies to humans-as-a-type-of-animal in the same way that it applies to rats, birds, fish and monkeys. Genetically, you can make a definitive statement about the sex of an individual, however fuzzy the picture at the cultural level. And the range of genetic options is only so big; it shouldn’t be hard to model comprehensively.
The more complex picture for humans (and possibly even some other higher animals) plays out on another, distinct level, and it seems to me that the two should be kept separate.
So it seems to me that Gender should be renamed Sex and gain an option “Hermaphroditic” (and possibly one or two more, if there is need for greater differentiation), to cover the genetic side, but no “Other” option. Instead, a new type called “Gender” should be added to model the socio-psychological self-conception of people; one of its options – and the default – would be “Identifies with his/her sex”.
In the common case you’d then specify a Sex and the Gender would automatically derive from that. In more complex situations you could distinguish precisely between the genetical and the cultural sides of the matter.
Aristotle: There was a related discussion thred: Should some of the properties of Person be moved to Organism?
Someone facetiously commented, “I immediately began wondering which celebrities would get marked as hermaphroditic or asexually reproducing”, which of course is one of the risks of over-generalising.
I think there’s a tension in Freebase, taking a very broad view, between models that tend towards abstraction and those that tend towards how people think day-to-day. We encountered this when Jeff P was modelling Government, and had an abstraction which was kind of theoretically valid across many government forms, but left some of us (esp. those from countries whose governments use the Westminster system) scratching our heads and saying, “but nobody in Australia/Canada/UK *talks* like that!”
In the case of sex/gender of human beings, there’s probably 99% of cases where people just want to be able to say male/female, and confusing them with a list that includes “intersex” and “asexually reproducing” would just boggle them. Male/Female/Other is a reasonably well-precedented pattern for use in forms etc (though I’d want to get some trans people’s views on that to make sure it’s what they’d want) while not being overwhelmingly technical.
Oh, btw, Aristotle: do you want an invite? I don’t see you on FB under any of the names I’d expect.
Cool, I’m glad that these sorts of issues are being raised.
Should Lesbian be a distinct Sexual orientation when there’s already Homosexuality?
Peter: Another case of technical accuracy vs how humans tend to think
Freebase will always have this sort of wackiness, and I think it’s good to keep “sexual orientation” open so that people could put, eg., “Furry” if they wanted. Who am I to say what’s a valid sexual orientation or not?
(Note also that my stuff around orientation is much vaguer at the moment than the gender stuff, and much more likely to undergo huge change.)
Skud: that’s why I proposed having a Gender option that just defers to Sex. That way, people could just pick a value for that and not deal with anything more, most of the time.
As for obliging the way people think and thus not, by default, showing them a Hermaphroditic option for things of type Human, I think that’s something that should be inferred from the data set (by seeing that one of the values is used in, say, only 0.01% of the records), not baked into the model.
I’m not on FB, btw. It’s mildly tempting, but I don’t know where I’d find the time. I ended up here just because you twittered about the post. :)
[...] dianabobar wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerpt… groups, and indeed entire cultures that have more complex models of gender than a simple binary model. From a purely biological viewpoint, some people (or organisms) are actually hermaphroditic or intersex, having some male and some … [...]
[...] the comments on my post about gender I linked to a thread on the data modelling mailing list: Should some of the Person attributes be [...]
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