Gender-Expansive Coding Options are Possible! But Developers Try Little

It is high time for developers to promote gender-expansive coding to include the transgender category

Society is ruled by many binaries but one of the most prevalent, if not utterly exclusionary, is the male-female one. It is so pervading that it goes beyond the physical space to perpetuate itself online. The transgender category persons are in a particularly disadvantaged position because while their male and female counterparts have specific connotations they face a marginal identity as the 'other'. But it is not that the gender-expansive coding options are unavailable in AI models. Developers do not have to exert too much to be a little more inclusionary and adopt such options through sufficient coding. But the problem is they are not very eager to do gender-expansive coding for the transgendered in the global tech market.

Transgender is a term used to describe people whose gender or sense of personal identity does not match the sex they were born with. While the number of 'male' and 'female' is definitely higher, and one can even say that they constitute the overwhelming majority by being either in most cases, this does not give any good reason to be indifferent to trans people and exclude them just because they are not part of the majority. The developers would do well to remember that the number of trans people around the world is considerable. With their growing voice, assertion, and solidarity about their identity, they are now demanding suitable tinkering with the software to make it more inclusionary in terms of gender divisions.

It may be relevant to note that even if Google proclaims that it is "proud to support" the transgender communities one finds that its proud possession, Gmail, is yet to take measures in removing this anomaly, the state of being indifferent to the transgender by literally 'othering' them (the classification being Male/Female/Other) even being situated in the USA in which there is a substantial presence of the people belonging to this category. According to a study by the UCLA (University of California Los Angeles), over 1.6 million adults (ages 18 and older) and youth (ages 13 to 17) identify as transgender in the United States, or 0.6% of those ages 13 and older, among the U.S. adults, 0.5% (about 1.3 million adults) identify as transgender. Among the youth aged between 13 to 17 in the U.S., 1.4% (about 300,000 youth) identify as transgender; of the 1.3 million adults who identify as transgender, 38.5% (515,200) are transgender women, 35.9% (480,000) are transgender men, and 25.6% (341,800) reported they are non-conforming gender. The USA is a 'hot locale' insofar as the movements for transgender rights are concerned in the global tech market through the integration of gender-expansive coding options in AI models by developers.

The coming of the online has made trans people more visible but their struggle for inclusion will be strengthened if proper gender-expansive coding is made. It is certainly not a hugely complicated task for developers to codify an inclusive format and even average developers can do it. There is a suggestion that the transition may be made to "he", "she" and "they" for transgender.

What the developers and we need to understand is that in a world that is in dire need of a more aggressive move toward inclusion, a little change in gender-expansive coding will go a long way to uphold the cause of gender-diverse users in the tech market.