There are some long lists of false beliefs that programmers hold. isn't because programmers are especially likely to be more wrong than anyone else, it's just that programming offers a better opportunity than most people get to find out how incomplete their model of the world is.
I'm posting about this here, not just because this information has a decent chance of being both entertaining and useful, but because LWers try to figure things out from relatively simple principles-- who knows what simplifying assumptions might be tripping us up?
The classic (and I think the first) was about names. There have been a few more lists created since then.
Time. And time zones. Crowd-sourced time errors.
Addresses. Possibly more about addresses. I haven't compared the lists.
Gender. This is so short I assume it's seriously incomplete.
Networks. Weirdly, there is no list of falsehoods programmers believe about html (or at least a fast search didn't turn anything up). Don't trust the words in the url.
Distributed computing Build systems.
Poem about character conversion.
I got started on the subject because of this about testing your code, which was posted by Andrew Ducker.
"I understand that you find it upsetting, but our policy here is that trans people get to use the changing rooms corresponding to the gender they identify with. If Ms X was staring at your breasts, that was well out of order regardless of gender and I will be happy to speak to her about it and make it clear that that behaviour is unacceptable. If you are troubled by Ms X's genitals, then I can only suggest that you try to ignore them."
Maybe some of them leave and never come back, or set the lawyers on me. No one ever said that doing the right thing is guaranteed to be maximally profitable or keep you out of legal trouble.
Alternatively: "Oh, I think Ms X must have misunderstood our policy, which is actually that she should be using the women's toilets but that to avoid the kind of discomfort you're suffering -- for which I am very sorry -- our members are asked to use the changing rooms corresponding to their anatomy regardless of gender identity. I'll talk with Ms X and see that that's understood."
(The question I answered was about women's bathrooms -- where the partial nakedness is generally confined to individual cubicles -- rather than gym changing rooms where more difficult issues arise. I do, as it happens, prefer the first answer above to the second, but I think either is defensible.)
And of course the same argument goes the other way. The same pre-op trans woman turns up at the gym and you show her to the men's locker room and showers. Soon after that a lot of men come along and complain that there's a woman in their locker room staring at their dicks. (They may use a word more specific and ruder than "woman".) Now what?
The fundamental difficulty here is that gym changing facilities are designed on the assumption that people can be neatly partitioned into two groups, either of which is happy being naked around others in that group. This falls down in the presence of trans people, and doesn't cope too well with the existence of gay people. So any policy you adopt may have problems when someone of non-majority gender or sexuality turns up. The options are: close all the gyms; make them single-sex; provide changing facilities that let people isolate themselves while naked; exclude anyone whose appearance might disturb others; accept that some people are going to be disturbed from time to time. None of these is problem-free. Too bad.
Which answer, do you think, a sufficiently representative poll of women would pick?
Would you also prefer the first answer in a predominantly Muslim neighbourhood? ;-)
I don't know. Speaking of solutions, two come to mind. One is to have a few individual showers/changing rooms. They are usually called "family rooms" and are lockable as the intent is that they are used by a single family, often with small kids. The o... (read more)