No, this post is not some rant about non-binary genders. I’m actually referring
to the trials and tribulations that I went through to implement a third gender
option on my social network. The title is an homage to the CSS-Tricks post
titled Features Are Complicated. This isn’t some dramatization,
it’s about that time that I added, removed and eventually re-added a non-binary
gender option from my social networking platform.
The story starts out in April of 2011 when I was originally planning the site
out. “How cool would it be to add a third gender option for people that are
transitioning?” Great idea, I’ll just include “In Between” on the sign up and
user edit forms. OH! I’ll make the user text color green since boys were
already blue and girls were pink.
The option was actually well received, even if at this point I wonder if the
term “in between” may actually be offensive. In the database the option was “O”
for “Other”, also offensive :/ Keep in mind, this was during a time before
Facebook was giving out infinity-options for gender and obviously before my
understanding of these things as a Cisgender.
To make the username green, I was simply including some logic along with the
link to set the CSS class as the gender:
<a href="/' . $username . '" class="' . $gender . '">$username</a>
NO BIG DEAL! This site is small and I had no idea that I would still be around
4 years later. This was fine under the circumstances, but as the site grew and
expanded, I found myself just copying and pasting that logic into all of the
other page templates. This later expanded into having user avatar’s colored the
same way. Don’t be that @joshtronic.
Somewhere along the line I felt like it was better to stop hardcoding the
gender value for the class name and move to using the names of the colors. I
couldn’t tell you why that seemed like a great idea at the time, but that
switch statement almost made it’s rounds into my templates:
switch ($gender) {
case 'M': $class = 'blue' break
case 'F': $class = 'pink' break
case 'O': $class = 'green' break
}
Aside from the fact that I was duplicating code like it was a design pattern,
I was driving the failboat for sure. From the fact that I put “M” first instead
of simply alphabetizing, to the way I lined those cases. Ugh, I really wish I
could figure out what I was thinking. In my defense, the original site was
built while drinking quite a bit of Absinthe 😉
So that gets us to June 2011, shortly after that last great decision, I had
built a chat system. Remember how I said the usernames were gender-colored? The
usernames in chat had the same logic. The observation that I started to make
once chat was up was that users were changing their gender to be “in between”
so their username would show up as green in chat.
It just seemed like people were exploiting the option that I felt was
progressive at the time. I let this go for about a month before I made the
drastic decision to simply drop the third gender. This on July 3rd, 2011
I authored this commit:
The change pissed some people off, but the loud minority were the people that
had their green username stripped from chat, not necessarily any non-binary
users. I didn’t necessarily like taking the option down, but I felt it was the
best choice as I felt it was more offensive for binary folks to be exploiting
gender for a username color.
“Why not just get rid of the username color entirely? You do realize you’re
perpetuating stereotypical gender roles?” Why not? Because I didn’t want to. I
liked having gender-specific colors. I felt that it made the site / platform
unique in a world of blue and white. I still stand by these feels.
Let’s fast forward to 2015. Facebook has added something like 70+ gender
(multi-select) options if you set your gender as “custom”. My site is still
doing it’s thing while living in the dark ages without a mobile app or a
non-binary gender option.
The thing is, I wanted to add a new option, maybe even go all out like Facebook
with a bunch of flexibility. Side note, I think it should just be free-form as
to not offend people by not having some new gender option that just happened.
So why not just do it? Because of all of those shitty decisions and duplicated
code that I had laying around.
Let’s back it back up to 2012 or 2013. I was working on reverse engineering a
daily deal platform after an acquisition at CrowdSavings. I’m browsing
the database and what did I see? A table named “gender”, of course. I laughed
so fucking hard because it just seemed like overkill. A whole table for just
2 rows? Over-engineer much?
I realize now how smart of an idea that was, or at least keeping all of your
gender options and logic in a single file so they can be recalled easier. Just
because something has a finite set of options today, doesn’t mean it won’t
change in the future. It’s a bit early in the story, but that’s the moral of
the story!
Here we are in the present. For the last few years I’ve gotten the semi-regular
support request asking for a non-binary gender option. I added to the FAQ that
it’s not that simple of a change for us and we will address it eventually. I
even went as far as to rename “gender” to “sex” on the site as well as dropping
any pronouns. Not sure how it happened, but there was only one “he/she” in the
entire codebase!
Last January I had decided that adding a non-binary gender option was a
must-have update to the platform based on how regularly we were receiving the
request. I set out to “do it right” this time which effectively meant that I
would need to consolidate any place where the username and user avatar were
included on the templates.
The number of places where username links and avatar links existed seemed about
3x the number of gender options that Facebook has. The process took nearly 3
weeks to complete. Gotta remember, I have an awesome job so this was just night
and weekend effort. ALL OF MY NIGHT AND WEEKEND TIME.
There was something like 200 touch points that needed addressing. Fortunately
some of the leg work was already done when I started to consolidate the media
objects into one central place. The work was mind-numbingly painful. It’s 50 or
so hours of my life that I will never get back. But it was worth it, as we
could finally add a non-binary gender option!
On March 15th, 2015 I finished up the new search page and deployed the code
that included the “Genderqueer” option. “Wait, WUT, you called it that?” Yes,
for a minute at least. After some searching and reading up on Wikipedia, I had
come to the conclusion that if I was going to include a single option, it would
be “genderqueer” because it is defined as the catch-all for non-binary genders.
It wasn’t meant to be offensive, it seemed like the most correct choice, more
so than “gender-fluid”, which redirected to “genderqueer” on Wikipedia. Instead
of green, the new gender color was to be purple. It’s a blend of the pink and
blue colors that we already use.
The initial feedback started to roll in, in 3 distinct varieties:
- Praise for finally adding the option
- Bitching about the shade of purple
- People claiming it was offensive because they do not want to be classified as
“queer”
My wife actually warned me about the negative connotation. I was
stubborn about it initially but figured may as well change it while it’s still
early. The option is now officially “non-binary” but it will remain as “GQ” in
the database for now. Profiles simply omit a gender when you select that
option. Lesson learned.
Since the long awaited re-addition of a non-binary gender option I have been
flooded with feedback. Sadly, most of the feedback is from people bitching
because “it’s already hard enough to tell the boys and girls apart”. Yet
somehow I’m the offensive one, amirite? The kicker is the people barking and
they have their age set to 100+. HOW DARE YOU!
Features really are complicated. Non-binary gender options carry even more
weight as it’s social issue that has a lot more to do with equality then it
does with text color. I still think the decision to include the new option was
the right one. I’ve even future proofed a bit in case we need to go full
Facebook on it.
