I was recently made aware of a change to Twitter, which exposes a new Gender field. If you’ve never specified your gender before, they guessed what it was (which is a really shitty thing to do, especially towards trans folks!).

Slightly annoyed, I went to go see what Twitter thinks my gender is.

Curses! They know I’m a guy. This won’t do at all.

But what’s this? An “Add your gender” option?

That’s at least, something, I guess? Defaulting to [whatever the algorithm guesses] is sucky, but at least nonbinary folks can still self-identify however they want.

But 30 characters isn’t a lot. What if I want to drop in, say, 68 characters? Do I need to do some crazy Unicode fuckery to pull that off?

Nope, Inspect Element + set maxlength="255" and now Twitter thinks my gender is the EICAR test file. Wonderful!

Which means: If someone downloads my Twitter data without my consent onto a workstation running antivirus software, the file will delete itself and all will be right in the marketing world.

(Okay but seriously, a lot of downstream systemic failures would have to exist for any damage to occur from me deciding to self-identify to marketers this way.)

Lessons to Learn

Twitter enforced a maxlength of 30 in the HTML element of the “Add your gender” text input, but they didn’t enforce this requirement server-side.

Also, don’t try to automatically guess people’s gender at scale. It’s insulting when you get it wrong, and it’s creepy when you get it right.

What’s the Upper Limit for the Field?

I don’t know, but this indicates it has a larger upper bound than a tweet.

If anyone has success dropping an entire thesis on gender identity and culture in the Gender Field, let me know.

Update: The Best Genders

Everyone is having a lot of fun with the Gender field. Here’s some of the best tweets I’ve seen since publishing this stupid bug.

A fox in Furry Technologists suggested building genderfs, which is a lot like redditfs but hoists the entire filesystem into the Gender field.