[blog-post] Navigating the internet as a non-binary designer

This one caught me by surprise, the problems of gender nonconforming people are something that never crosses my mind as I don’t know nor interact with any in my daily life. I came across this post on twitter the other day and thought it would be nice to read as I really don’t know much about it and it is always nice to see how people can have completely diferent experiences from yours.

The post centers itself in the topic of online surveys, speciffically in the gender question that surges in the great majority of surveys out there. Three points in particular caught my attention: the idea that the gender field should be eliminated if unnecessary, the idea that the gender field, if used, sould be an open text field and one experience that the author had in which the gender field was only male/female, the author being non binary.

I can get behind the first idea, if the gender field is not pertinent for the scope of the surey it can be omitted, but also I have seen a lot of cases when unexpected insights can be obtained from a seemingly unnecesary gender field, it’s understandable why it’s ubiquity.

The second idea I stand strongly opposed to, as I have analysed quite a few surveys in (my very early) career, I know firsthand of the absolute madness that can be free text fields and how imaginative are people when describing simple things as gender, “some” post-processing can be extremely tedious, not being worth the hassle when most of the answers (depending on the target population) would eventually lie within two categories.

Finally, the anecdote of the author was about a survey they had to take in a company about work culture and the like, the first question being gender, and the only two options being male or female. Up until that point the exclusion of non binary people seems like a non problem from my cis perspective, yet further questions in that survey were if the emplyees felt that the company was a safe place for queer people and if they experienced discrimination base on their gender identity. There I realized how problematic can be that omission, as the anwers that would be most pertint to those questions would come precisely from the group of people invisibilized from it.

[video] Why Italians Don’t Drink a Cappuccino After 11am

The video shows what lactose malabsorption is and some interesting historic and geographic facts about it.

I didn’t know that hard cheese typically had less lactose content and that climate had an important impact in some cuisines using more butter and some using more oil.

[music] [youtube] [bancamp] 悲しい ANDROID - APARTMENT¶ : 行方不明「Goodbye, T O K Y O’ S L I G H T S」お前さん

A very comfy future funk album, a sound that reminds me of the early future funk releases that I listened to.

With it’s heavy use of city pop samples this album is a pretty effective mood lifter, a happy and light-hearted experience.

The first song, 涙と恐怖[Wipe away your tears], to the unknow, hits you like a truck, starting full speed into one of the catchiest samples I’ve heard, if this doesn’t grab your attention nothing will.

The 5th track, リスニング 「９４。２０ＡＭ」in The Night’s Dream Highway (feat. コンシャスTHOUGHTS), nails an 80s anime atmosphere, just the kind of feelings I like when listening to future funk, it compares to nothing else.

The 7th track, Hold my hand bae 私を抱きしめて [I L O V E Y O U F O R E V E R], samples Plastic Love, possibly the most sampled song in vaporwave, but the version by Tatsurō Yamashita instead of the original by Mariya Takeuchi. This is a nice bonus as I find incredible how so much people can sample this song and make a completely unique sound off of it.

Clocking at only 25 minutes it is a relatively short album that is really worth a listening.