On Visible Gender Diversity Itself

The plan for visible gender diversity is to prefix one’s realname with genders. For example:

• “Genders: ♾️, 🟪⬜🟩; Soni L.” - For Soni, these represent autgender and genderqueer respectively.

The use of emoji makes it stand out, which is an explicit part of “visible gender diversity”, but there’s nothing special about the syntax/formatting. Additionally, not having a real mechanism for it means it can’t easily be blocked/filtered/pretended it’s not there, which is important for visibility and as such also for diversity.

On that note, IRC client developers are encouraged to omit the wording “realname” when displaying others’ realnames. For example, this is an acceptable way to display it in a /whois:

• Soni (Genders: ♾️, 🟪⬜🟩; Soni L.)

But this is an unacceptable way to display it:

• Soni (realname: Genders: ♾️, 🟪⬜🟩; Soni L.)

Rationale

• On Genders instead of Pronouns, by Soni:

  There are many reasons to go with genders instead of pronouns. The project is about diversity of gender, so it makes sense that it would care about gender. Also, this isn’t upholding the gender binary - in fact, it even acknowledges having multiple genders. But one of the things that stands out is that a huge amount of genderqueer and nonbinary ppl actually use she/her and he/him pronouns, and making it about pronouns would erase their genders. Indeed, we (Soni) use she/her and they/them, so if it were about pronouns, we’d look like any cis or trans woman.

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to Irenes (@ireneista) for many conversations about this topic, particularly for how it relates to taxonomy and queerness.