It's a short and readable paper with some jaw-dropping anecdotes. Like the man who immediately got a pay rise after his transition, despite working in exactly the same job as before; women were on a lower pay scale...

At a basic level you can see why, when computer memory was measured in tens of kilobytes, it made sense to say male==0 and female==1. Why waste precious bits on something which could only ever be binary? Why create an option to change a data field which is immutable? Why design a schema which would allow a woman to be married to another woman?

And yet, even with those constraints, people were able to change their "official" gender within the database. Oh, sure, there were all sorts of cludges (both technical and political) - but it was possible.

The paper sparked four main thoughts for me.

There's No Such Thing As Immutable

For all the talk of Blockchain solving the world's issues (🤣) sometimes it is necessary to "rewrite history". People make mistakes. Assumptions change. Knowledge improves. Lots of facts, it turns out, are matters of perspective.

A really good example of this is time. I don't mean pesky things like timezones and leap seconds. I mean that, due to general relativity, one second on the moon is not equal to one second on Earth. How does your time-ordered database cope with that?

You might very well live in a culture where divorce is impossible, or where sexual consent cannot ever be revoked, or where a person can only be married to one other person at a time. But these are all societal conventions which are liable - and indeed likely - to change.

I'm almost tempted to say that the boolean type shouldn't exist in modern databases!

Diverse Teams Build Better Products

I don't know how many computer programmers in the 1960s were part of the LGBTQ+ community. And I don't know how accepting their colleagues would have been of them.

Perhaps you have read and memorised every single one of the Falsehoods Programmers Believe About... lessons. But surely it is more efficient to build a team who are empowered enough to confidently correct their colleagues' incorrect assumptions about how the world is arranged?

We bake rigid assumptions into our designs not out of malign intent (usually) but because we're ignorant. That's only shameful if we refuse to listen to other people's experiences.

Computers Serve Humans - not the other way around

Most of us have been forced to lie to a computer at one time or another. Perhaps it is a system which insists that you must have a US-style ZIP code. Or that your name must be longer that three characters. Or that you don't have an apostrophe in your email address. Or that your wife is Mrs, not Ms.

I know for sure that you've filled in a paper form where the boxes were too small and you've had to decide how to truncate your data.

Why? Because people have designed a schema which doesn't account for the variety in the world.

Today's constraints aren't tomorrow's

As I said at the start, it's understandable that designers designed around the constraints they faced. But these days, we have an awareness of the likely progress of technology.

It's said that the Apollo Moon landings were only possible because the designers skated to where the puck was going to be. They made reasonable assumptions about what technology was going to be developed in the future.

Yes, we should try and build things which perform well on existing and historic hardware. But we can't ignore the fact that tomorrow's computers will be smaller, faster, cheaper, and more efficient.

Does it make sense to store a human's name as:

CREATE TABLE people (
  name VARCHAR(32) CHARACTER SET latin1
);

Probably not. Disk space is cheap and getting cheaper. Perhaps people of the future will have names consisting of 500 emoji? Or perhaps people with "exotic" Unicode characters will want to use our services.

Oh, I'm sure there will be a performance hit if every column is essentially unlimited. But that's an argument to design better database engines - not to limit human expression.

Read More

You can read "Hacking the Cis-tem" in the IEEE or, if that's not available to you, read the pre-print.

Trans people in Britain today have become a culture war 'issue'. Despite making up less than one per cent of the country's population, they are the subjects of a toxic and increasingly polarized 'debate' which generates reliable controversy for newspapers and talk shows. This media frenzy conceals a simple fact: that we are having the wrong conversation, a conversation in which trans people themselves are reduced to a talking point and denied a meaningful voice.

In this powerful new book, Shon Faye reclaims the idea of the 'transgender issue' to uncover the reality of what it means to be trans in a transphobic society. In doing so, she provides a compelling, wide-ranging analysis of trans lives from youth to old age, exploring work, family, housing, healthcare, the prison system and trans participation in the LGBTQ+ and feminist communities, in contemporary Britain and beyond.

I don't get it. I just don't. Where does all this anti-trans angst come from? I have trans friends. It doesn't cause me any distress. When a friend told me that they were trans, I... Well, look, I can't say I didn't care - I wanted them to be happy and safe - but it didn't bother me. Is it a bit cumbersome remembering a different name and pronouns? Sure. But it's no harder than remembering Miss Smith is now Mrs Jones. Is it a bit discomforting to hear about some of the medical issues they face? Yup. But I'd be just as green-gilled if they were talking about a burst appendix.

Should trans-folk use the same toilets as cis-folk? I genuinely don't care as long as they don't piss all over the floor. The only thing that bothers me is that there just aren't enough toilets. When I'm king, every toilet will be an accessible, unisex stall, with a sanitary bin for those that need it. We shouldn't be restricting who gets to use "our" loo - we should be building more loos!

The existence of trans folk has zero negative impact on my life It's like the argument against equal marriage. If you don't want gay people to get married - don't marry someone who is gay. So why do other people get so wound up by the "Transgender Issue"?

This book presents some of the flimsy arguments that people wield against the trans community - and demolishes them with ease. But, if you're so far down the rabbit hole that you think trans-folk are an existential threat to your way of life, then I'm not sure if this book will change your mind.

Shon Faye presents her case with plenty of data and anecdotes to cut through the blustering rage from the media. It has a strong UK focus - with occasionally dips into USA and EU issues. Again, it's good to remember that the UK has its own unique set of issues - even if we are in the orbit of two outsized cultural influences.

The book covers history, common myths, and contemporary issues. You can feel the righteous indignation behind each paragraph, and it would be easy for the author to lapse into a howl of rage, but she stays remarkably calm.

She handles the delicate subject of how to help trans kids with sensitivity and rationality. Far away from the usual moral panics, the book sets out why it is necessary to support kids in a hostile world and how to do it safely.

There are a few parts which I think make poor arguments. Much like the book "No Bath But Plenty Of Bubbles: An Oral History of the Gay Liberation Front " there's an assumption that LBGTQ+ acceptance means the necessary reconfiguration of society into a socialist paradise. It's an argument I have sympathy with - but I don't think it is particularly convincing. There are plenty of gay investors, lesbian landlords, and trans CEOs - do they all want the abolition of capitalism?

Similarly, should we reform prisons? Absolutely. Does it have much to do with the Transgender Issue? I don't think so. As the book points out, trans-people are a minority and only have the tiniest impact on the prison system - they cannot simultaneously be insignificant and be a compelling reason for abolishing prisons.

In the end, this is an excellent book. It distresses me that some people spend so much of their time, effort, and money to demonise a minority. Undoubtedly there are some difficult questions to be asked about how we alter society to accommodate people who don't feel that they fit. But that doesn't necessitate witch-hunts and pearl-clutching.

Here's the thing. The only slight bit of gender non-conformity I exhibit is long hair. Very rarely, someone makes a snarky comment. Even rarer, someone misgenders me. Also, I'd kinda like to wear a utility-kilt, but don't really want yobs beating me up because I'm "in a skirt". Total liberation for my trans friends also liberates me. There's no downside here.

I thoroughly recommend this book - and will be buying a copy for a few friends.

Thanks to NetGalley for the review copy. The book is available now.

Ewan Forbes was born Elizabeth Forbes to a wealthy landowning family in 1912. It quickly became clear that the gender applied to him at birth was not correct, and from the age of six he began to see specialists in Europe for help. With the financial means of procuring synthetic hormones, Ewan was able to live as a boy, and then as man, and was even able to correct the gender on his birth certificate in order to marry.

In The Hidden Case of Ewan Forbes, Zoë Playdon draws on the fields of law, medicine, psychology and biology to reveal a remarkable hidden history, uncovering for the first time records that were considered so threatening that they had been removed from view for decades.

This book is weird. It starts with an utterly improbable - but completely true - premise; what if there was a secret court case which set back the cause of trans rights for half a century?

And, yet, that's where we are. Complex and secretive bureaucracies fighting against open publication. The open data nerd in me was thrilled and appalled.

The book is a meticulous exploration of the trans* experience during the last century. As well as a detailed journey through Ewan's life, it expertly explains the context of what he - and others - were going through.

It is thoroughly sympathetic to Ewan's plight. Nevertheless, I found there to be something a bit ghoulish about an unauthorised biography of someone who wanted aspects of their life kept private. There's a fair bit of "We don't know how Ewan felt about this, but..." which is a problem with every unauthorised biography. But it never puts words in his mouth - and always contextualises the likelihood of his possible response.

The story, ironically, is one of intense privilege. Ewan and his family were literal nobility. With money and connections, he was able to access a level of healthcare which is unthinkable even to this day. Dining with royalty and being seen by the Queen's surgeon buys access to a level of "respectability" that is out of reach for the majority of people.

Ewan's story dominates the book - but not to the exclusion of others. It pulls in the stories and court cases of contemporary people - mostly from the UK, with some occasional forays into the EU, US, and Australia. It's brilliant to see a book so passionately explore the UK's attitude to trans rights. Too often these books are only viewed through a US lens. This is clearly focussed on the UK - Scotland in particular - and the implications it has for our country.

At its heart is the surprising revelation that there's a constitutional crisis born out of the inherent hetrosexism of primogeniture. The make-believe idea that artificially constructed titles must be passed down the male line. If not, our country and culture will collapse. Without a workable definition of male and female, and the acknowledgement that recording of natal sex isn't immutable, the whole edifice quickly crumbles.

The end of the book left me upset. How can we still be fighting these battles? Why are waiting times so long? What drives the gutter press to such depths of depravity?

It is an excellent biography - not just of a man, but of a country and of a culture.

An important and timely book.

Thanks to NetGalley for the review copy. The book is released later this year and can be pre-ordered from the following sites:

The Transgender Flag is a draft candidate for Emoji 13.0 under the name Blue, Pink, and White Flag. A number of platforms include an image for this emoji, but do not show it on the emoji keyboard. As of June 2019 this is now supported on Twitter platforms that use Twemoji. Emojipedia

The (proposed) Transgender Flag looks like this (image) or like this 🏳️‍⚧️ (emoji). It is a composite character consisting of four elements:

• 🏳️ waving white flag (U+1F3F3)
• Variation selector-16 (U+FE0F)
• ⚧️ male with stroke and male and female sign (U+26A7)
• Variation selector-16 (U+FE0F)

The Variation Selector basically says, "treat the preceding character as a colourful emoji rather than a normal character."

So, how do emoji flags work? There are, broadly speaking, 4 types of emoji flags.

Natural Flags

There are seven flag characters in Unicode:

🏁🎌🏳️🏴⛳🚩⛿

They are independent characters. Use them however you like.

Country Flags

(Almost) every country has an emoji flag in Unicode. Here's the UK's 🇬🇧 Rather than take up loads of space in the spec with each flag, Unicode uses "Regional Identifier Letters." Take the country's two letter ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 code, place them next to each other with no spaces, and a flag will magically appear.

The flag of "United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland" is the symbol 🇬 and 🇧 placed together. Not 🇺 and 🇰 - because that would make life too easy!

Regional Flags

Wales is a country within the UK. It has its own flag 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿. Texas is a state within the USA. It has its own flag 🏴󠁵󠁳󠁴󠁸󠁿.

The way these flags are constructed is different from the country flags.

Wales is 🏴 (Waving Black Flag) then the "Tag Latin Small" letters G, B, W, L, S, then the "Cancel Tag" symbol.

Texas uses Tag Latin Small Letters U, S, T, X, and then the Cancel Tag.

The "Tag Latin" block was originally intended for the invisible mark-up of documents - that's no longer recommended. They are now only used for modifying emoji.

Most systems do not support regional flags other than England, Scotland, and Wales.

Symbolic Flags

Finally, we get on to flags which are in widespread use, but don't belong to geographical or regional identities.

• The Pirate Flag 🏴‍☠️ is 🏴, variation selector-16, and ☠ (Skull and Crossbones)
• The Pride / Rainbow Flag is 🏳️‍🌈 - this uses the white 🏳 flag, variation selector-16, and 🌈 (Rainbow).

So, there are six possible ways to write a flag in Unicode:

1. a unique character,
2. a pair of letters,
3. a black flag and tag characters,
4. a black flag with a variation and an emoji
5. a white flag with a variation and an emoji
6. a white flag with a variation and a character with a variation

Limitations

No historic flags. The flag of the USA has changed several times over the country's history - more recently the flag of Afghanistan has changed. The emoji flag is always the most recent version.

Flags of countries which no longer exist. Countries change, merge, and collapse. There's no flag for the Soviet Union or Yugoslavia for example.

Contentious flags. The emoji flag of Taiwan 🇹🇼 is banned in China. There are regions around the world which have their own flag, but aren't always recognised as distinct countries.

Counting is hard. To a human, a single flag looks like one character 🇬🇧. But to a computer, it could look like several. On a service like Twitter which has a 280 character limitation that can cause confusion for the user. The number of characters a user thinks they've written may be at odds with what the computer says.

The biggest limitation is the time it takes for emoji to filter their way down to every computer. Hopefully you'll soon see 🏳️‍⚧️ as a flag, rather than an odd looking emoji sequence.