blog! “Some thoughts on "Hacking the Cis-tem"”
I recently read a wonderful paper by Mar Hicks called "Hacking the Cis-tem" which is about database design in the 1960s and the nascent digital state's approach to transgender individuals. It's a short and readable paper with some jaw-dropping anecdotes. Like the man who immediately got a pay rise after his …
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#ComputerScience #database #gender #trans
This post attracted some deranged comments.
My favourite was "There is literally no evidence that transgenderism even exists beyond people filling out questionnaires and self-diagnosis."
You could substitute the word "transgenderism" for "liking broccoli" and it would have exactly the same meaning!
@Edent well frankly there's literally no evidence that God (s) exists beyond people's deep-seated beliefs. Even when we don't understand things, usually life is easier when we accept that others truly believe and feel things differently from ourselves. Not that rationale thinking helps transphobes. Third rail comment..
@Edent in C, a bool is usually just a wrapper around an integer. A 0 is false, any other value is true. So you can in fact use it to represent all possible genders, you just need to adjust your code slightly to test the integer value of your bool.
Is that deranged enough to qualify?
@Edent Great post, but less sure about the last part. How much of a current performance hit should we take now - and should have been taken by database designers in the 1960s - to anticipate 500 emoji names?
Future proofing is a great idea, so long as we proof against the right future. Investing for future benefit is great, investing for no benefit, rather less so. And by the time it's clear which of those it is, it's already a bit late.
Some semi-related thoughts here https://www.publicstrategist.com/2013/03/the-phoenix-and-the-constitution/
@Pubstrat
True. But as a counterpoint - the sewers of London.
They were already committed to the hard & expensive process of digging them. So overspeccing for future proofing was seen as a sensible minor cost.
@Edent @mattedgar oh wow, thank you for reading and posting about it!
@histoftech
And thank you for writing it 
@Edent Yep. There's also the need for a field to be able to be empty. I knew someone who had moved to the UK and only had one name. When he opened a UK bank account the branch had to invent a last name for him (duplicating his only name) so that the system could cope.