Gender and Respect

Xenthos · January 2015

http://www.npr.org/2015/01/09/375928581/locked-in-man

It was an interesting story, that kind of touches on things brought up here... and just further demonstrating how confusing the whole thing can be.

Kethaera · January 2015

Xenthos said:

http://www.npr.org/2015/01/09/375928581/locked-in-man

It was an interesting story, that kind of touches on things brought up here... and just further demonstrating how confusing the whole thing can be.

It is an interesting story, but I don't understand the connection?

Xenthos · January 2015

Kethaera said:

Xenthos said:

http://www.npr.org/2015/01/09/375928581/locked-in-man

It was an interesting story, that kind of touches on things brought up here... and just further demonstrating how confusing the whole thing can be.

It is an interesting story, but I don't understand the connection?

The "lack of respect" is, in many ways, equated to a "lack of understanding" (though obviously not for everyone, as there are some who just don't care to be respectful at all). This is one of those subjects where understanding is an incredibly murky and difficult thing, especially for those of us who are a bit older and grew up in areas where such things were never discussed.

It's one thing to say "You should be respectful," it's another to actually begin understanding why. I think that this little podcast, brief as it is, does touch on some of the difficulties in determining who and what you are, and how you face the world, for a segment of the population that doesn't really have a good way of getting its experience out. In a way that, yet again, I didn't even know existed until I heard it... just as many of the experts in the behavioral psychology field that the individual being interviewed spoke with did not.

Lillie · January 2015

As someone who plays a character who's more or less transgender I understand the occasional confusion here. Certainly other characters around Lillie have been baffled, and it's obviously awkward to bring up, IC or OOC.

That said I hated it back before Lillie got genderbend and people would be all "You're not a girl! Your honours line says 'he!'" or "That emote just had a male pronoun in it!"

Before I got genderbend I had to put in black-and-white in my desc something like "he is likely to be mistaken as female by anyone who doesn't specifically know that he isn't". Sheesh.

Kethaera · January 2015

Xenthos said:

Kethaera said:

Xenthos said:

http://www.npr.org/2015/01/09/375928581/locked-in-man

It was an interesting story, that kind of touches on things brought up here... and just further demonstrating how confusing the whole thing can be.

It is an interesting story, but I don't understand the connection?

The "lack of respect" is, in many ways, equated to a "lack of understanding" (though obviously not for everyone, as there are some who just don't care to be respectful at all). This is one of those subjects where understanding is an incredibly murky and difficult thing, especially for those of us who are a bit older and grew up in areas where such things were never discussed.

It's one thing to say "You should be respectful," it's another to actually begin understanding why. I think that this little podcast, brief as it is, does touch on some of the difficulties in determining who and what you are, and how you face the world, for a segment of the population that doesn't really have a good way of getting its experience out. In a way that, yet again, I didn't even know existed until I heard it... just as many of the experts in the behavioral psychology field that the individual being interviewed spoke with did not.

Ah, alright. I agree that respect is a good thing, but also that understanding goes both ways. We don't necessarily know why a particular person gives the appearance of disrespect(like the example of the mother's comment in that story) unless we understand their position as well. Sometimes it is just deliberately provocative, but in other cases it's that knowledge and experience don't lead to the same conclusions. Context matters.

Anyway... there have been times when I've used the pronouns associated with the player(if I knew them) rather than their character's, especially if I didn't interact with them much IC- I.E., their real-life person had more of an impression on me, and also often from being confused about what the IC pronoun was supposed to be. Never been something that seemed worth arguing about, though.

Moi · January 2015

On an not-Lusternia related note, I have huge problems with this in my Eclipse Phase campaign, since we have a female player playing with a female token who is currently gender-ambiguous but prefers to be referred to as male except when they're sleeved into the ostrich morph, in which case they're female. It's perplexing, but there's always that happy feeling when you get the pronoun right this time.

Daraius · January 2015

Xenthos said:

http://www.npr.org/2015/01/09/375928581/locked-in-man

It was an interesting story, that kind of touches on things brought up here... and just further demonstrating how confusing the whole thing can be.

Ooh, that same podcast has a story even more specifically relevant to this thread!

Categories - Invisibilia, via Radiolab

Marcella · January 2015

I've always wanted to play eclipse phase...

Xenthos · January 2015

Daraius said:

Xenthos said:

http://www.npr.org/2015/01/09/375928581/locked-in-man

It was an interesting story, that kind of touches on things brought up here... and just further demonstrating how confusing the whole thing can be.

Ooh, that same podcast has a story even more specifically relevant to this thread!

Categories - Invisibilia, via Radiolab

Oh... yeah. That's the one I meant to link. Thanks for pointing that out!

Kiskan · January 2015

Unfortunately we can't do this in the real world (it would be handy for people we don't know, or don't know well) but could they let people customise a pronoun? That way I can always just honours people as usual and I know what pronoun they want me to use. It could be anything you like, so long as it's less than... some reasonable number of letters. Maybe let people change it once per RL year if they like (so that people don't abuse it knowing they can change it again tomorrow, and so that most of the time, people actually would hopefully know the right pronoun to use if they'd interacted with you somewhat recently). The most wonderful thing about it would be, if you forget... you can just look again.

Mysrai · January 2015

Kiskan said:

Unfortunately we can't do this in the real world (it would be handy for people we don't know, or don't know well) but could they let people customise a pronoun? That way I can always just honours people as usual and I know what pronoun they want me to use. It could be anything you like, so long as it's less than... some reasonable number of letters. Maybe let people change it once per RL year if they like (so that people don't abuse it knowing they can change it again tomorrow, and so that most of the time, people actually would hopefully know the right pronoun to use if they'd interacted with you somewhat recently). The most wonderful thing about it would be, if you forget... you can just look again.

I asked about this when I was making Mys, actually. That and adding a third gender are apparently pretty tricky from a code perspective.

Ciaran · January 2015

And it'd be a huge pain in the ass for everyone to redo their triggers.

Aerotan · January 2015

Triggers already need to account for the possibility of both currently in-use sets of pronouns. Honestly, if I was coding a system I'd have an empty capture there so that I didn't have to manually account for both pronouns anyway. Because I'm notorious for making code-breaking typos that take WEEKS to sort.

Mysrai · January 2015

Aerotan said:

Triggers already need to account for the possibility of both currently in-use sets of pronouns. Honestly, if I was coding a system I'd have an empty capture there so that I didn't have to manually account for both pronouns anyway. Because I'm notorious for making code-breaking typos that take WEEKS to sort.

Yeah, I'm not sure who hardcoded in the gender set in the code itself, but I'm not surprised by it. Smacks of old, bad code from way back when.

IIRC, Rapture is at least a decade old. The older MUD code gets, the more outright weird shit is in there - I'm reminded of the driver I saw with compile settings for UNICOS and direct calls to memory addresses. Gender is the least surprising thing to crawl out of the horrid heap that is MUD legacy code.

Euthymia · January 2015

Estarra said:

Male players inhabit female characters, and female players inhabit male characters. My attitude has always been to refer to a character by the pronoun of their character's gender. If you are privileged to know the player behind such a character, it is not only a gross OOC transgression to refer to the player's gender but also downright rude. It is no great secret that I am male IRL and play Estarra as female, but I take great insult when Estarra is not referred to as female. That's who she is! That's who I am in this reality of Lusternia!

Agree. Same here. And it doesn't happen only here in Lusternia of course. Something similar happened to me also in wrestling e-feds.

Rialorm · January 2015

Gender was for a long time assumed to be binary. A lot of systems thus store this in a binary format, or use a true / false format for it (and the true is usually male, heh). It's actually considered a best practice to store something that would only ever have two states in such a field. And that creates further assumptions in the rest of the code. Depending on the age and skill of the ones who wrote the code, that can have some serious consequences. I'm overly simplifying this but I hope that this explains a bit to non-coders how such things work and why they might be hard to fix.

It's not yet an option on official documents here, but I was however glad that one software I got to work on (healthcare industry administration) had options for both, neither and unknown. It did pertain to biological gender but it was a refreshing difference. It was also not bound to the title the person carried, such as sir or madam.

Chade · January 2015

Mysrai said:

Aerotan said:

Triggers already need to account for the possibility of both currently in-use sets of pronouns. Honestly, if I was coding a system I'd have an empty capture there so that I didn't have to manually account for both pronouns anyway. Because I'm notorious for making code-breaking typos that take WEEKS to sort.

Yeah, I'm not sure who hardcoded in the gender set in the code itself, but I'm not surprised by it. Smacks of old, bad code from way back when.

IIRC, Rapture is at least a decade old. The older MUD code gets, the more outright weird shit is in there - I'm reminded of the driver I saw with compile settings for UNICOS and direct calls to memory addresses. Gender is the least surprising thing to crawl out of the horrid heap that is MUD legacy code.

Rapture dev started back in 1999 I think, they released it sometime around 2001. It was Vortex before that and Hourglass back in the really early days. Guessing it's a holdover from Hourglass/Vortex that was ported into Rapture by the person who wrote Rapture. I remember it being released to a lot of fanfare. It definitely improved lag but then I was using GMud on a 56k connection back in those days so don't think I really noticed much...

With that useless bit of info I'll go back to sleep >.>

Aerotan · January 2015

Kiiind of wish we could ground-up Lusternia's code, but I don't want to think of the time involved in such a task, or the headache involved with having to equate the credits spent on skills/artifacts that only exist because of legacy issues.

I seem to remember ToP having been worked on from the ground up, but I only had very brief interaction with that and I also think it got trashed?

Shaddus · January 2015

With that useless bit of info I'll go back to sleep >.>

Denied.

Mysrai · January 2015

Aerotan said:

Kiiind of wish we could ground-up Lusternia's code, but I don't want to think of the time involved in such a task, or the headache involved with having to equate the credits spent on skills/artifacts that only exist because of legacy issues.

I seem to remember ToP having been worked on from the ground up, but I only had very brief interaction with that and I also think it got trashed?

It got trashed, yeah.

Ground-up redoing of code can take years, and requires a lot of dedicated code effort. It also requires a good knowledge of compilers, data structures, save structures, which formats are best, etc, etc. It can be done, but one effort I've seen has quite literally taken eleven years with a skilled senior software developer... who originally made his chops bugfixing on the same code.

The other problem is that most MUD code came about as a result of bored college students, who aren't well known for documenting their work. I don't know much about the history of Hourglass/Vortex (though, I will be obsessively Googling today), but I would assume it was similarly developed.

Ieptix · January 2015

ToP was being developed on Rapture, rather than a brand new engine; what was being developed from the ground up was the game logic, so a lot of the more technical issues that'd require more sophisticated skills (e.g. compiler theory, save states, etc) to tackle were already in place, though certainly it was still far from a trivial project. They also had to maintain compatibility with the IRE-wide code/library, which would have made writing some stuff from scratch significantly more difficult.

Anyhow, that digression aside, this is veering a bit off-topic.

Tylash · February 2015

This is such a big issue in my life. As a part of the queer community I have a lot of friends that identify outside of the gender binary and are misunderstood by society at large.

I am so glad to be part of a game where people's gender and sexuality are respected and that not only do the admin, but the players I interact with, are open-minded and non-judgmental.

If only more of the world was like my Lusternia friends!.

Edit: I know @Estarra's post is more along the lines of some people having been less than respectful but from my personal experience, the people I interact with IC and OOC are absolutely amazing about this sort of thing and other aspects of diversity.

Aeral · February 2015

I'll just weigh in on my thoughts on the issue.

I'm someone who went from being female to identifying as male and beginning transition to male. I then decided that for various complex reasons including social stigma that I would detransition. (IE I went back to identifying as female and using my female name.) I met a number of transgender people along the way, and a lot of nonbinary.

They/them is perfectly acceptable for singular third person nouns. To call Mysrai "it" based on Their gender alone is disgraceful, disgusting, and really makes other people within the game feel like they cannot play out their own roleplays without persecution. I understand perfectly well roleplay, but to continue it to the real world is crossing the line a bit.

Mysrai.

Gender and Respect

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