my new policy

hey, hi. i experience gender in mostly the usual way, even if i do get called sir sometimes because i'm kind of androgynous and wear hiking boots in the city.

but there are people who do not experience gender on the binary or even in one consistent way and those people are othered every damn time they have to fill out a form that has checkboxes for gender.

there are, by the way, legit reasons to collect gender information, or even just to collect information about how a person wants to be perceived and addressed.

instead of making people choose male or female (for you rightwingers) or male, female, OTHER or "prefer not to say" (for you well-meaning but oh-so-wrong lefties) you could just put a little space there:

gender:

and you leave it blank and let people write in whatever the hell they want. you get the information you want, and a more accurate data sample.

also, on a lot of forms they really, really want to know your preferred prefix. mr., ms., dr., mrs. on some forms they make this a REQUIRED FIELD.

i prefer no prefix. i'm just flask. if you insist on calling me by a title i don't want, you are not being polite.

so i am now going by the eggplant rule.

if the form i am filling out is one on which you want me to do something (sign a petition, answer survey questions, anything non-essential that i could do without in a pinch) and i cannot answer "eggplant" to either gender or prefix, i'm not filling out your form.

my rules.

i make 'em up.