Define Gender in the profile more accurately

[OxfordComa]

Please include "Non Binary/Gender Queer" in your profile gender options.

Gender is not binary (biological sex or identity) and only offering "Female" or "Male" options alienates and invalidates part of your customer base (me included). Using biology to define gender as only male or female also excludes trans people. 

Here is a great resource for better understanding gender: https://www.genderspectrum.org/quick-links/understanding-gender/. Your information is outdated at best but can be yet another way NB/GQ people are marginalized by institutions and companies. We exist! 

I would also like to include that you should perhaps do some company wide training on how to engage with GQ/NB/Trans customers, because telling us that it's just biology is as mentioned, inaccurate and very alienating. It's pride month. Please do better.

Moderator Edit: Updated label

[AlexandraFitbit]

Good idea, thanks for taking the time to share it with us.

[SunsetRunner]

I agree that there should be another option for other people who need it however "queer" isn't necessarily a part of our anatomy because that actually insinuates a sexual partner preference which part of our genetic makeup. I think O for Other would be great. 

ALSO people don't understand that not everyone is actually born Male or Female and not everyone who menstruates identifies with female; it would be very helpful to people who are intersex (or hermaphrodites) so O for other would help them they greatly and even LGBTQ as well. 

Btw Q is for those who identify as queer or questioning their sexual identity; not everyone is clear or open. That’s why people come out of the “closet” later than sooner at times. Sadly not everyone is excepting of all types of people and some people feel they have to keep it to themselves. 

[LibJenne]

I didn't have the chance to sign in to support this idea until it was already approved, so I'm just adding my little yawp.  This is important.  Gender and sex really aren't as binary as people want to believe and there needs to be space for everyone.

[zoso]

I signed up with fitbit just a few days ago and was shocked that the only options for gender were male and female. 

With some countries now issuing gender neutral passports, I think it is high time that an app such as this at least offer an X (or "other") option in the gender selection process. 

There is no compelling reason why fitbit should alienate or mis-gender it's customer base upon sign up.If slow moving bureaucracies can figure it out, surely a 21st century tech company can too. Please act quickly to rectify this.

[EriktheRED]

I understand that this is quite the hot topic as of late.  However, scientifically speaking, they are coming at it from the obvious biological differences between men and women.  Whatever chromosomes you are born with would genetically determine which direction your body would lean in regards to different aspects of performance (circulatory systems, heart rates, muscular makeup, ect).  I'm pretty sure that FitBit isn't trying to alienate anyone, but merely using it to somewhat calibrate the device to the what the person's DNA would normally be inclined towards.  By listing "other" I have a feeling that the device would not be as accurate and therefore customers would complain.

[zoso]

Biology and gender are not the binary may think it is. Beyond that, I’m
sure that many would sacrifice a small difference in accuracy of
measurement (if that is even the case) for accuracy in identification.

[MustardPanda]

There's a reason why there's only "two genders" and it's because there are real biological differences between the two. For the purposes of this device, and other health tracking applications, the need to indicate your actual gender are paramount to the success and accuracy of the program. 

[Cronographer]

While I understand how this particular issue is very important to some people, I believe that in this particular case it may not be as applicable as the original poster may think. The purpose of identifying your gender in this context is purely for bio-metric calibration. In other words, the only reason the fitbit software cares about your gender is so it can more accurately make sense of the data being fed to it from the accelerometer, altimeter, HR sensor, etc etc in the fitbit itself. It is so the device can more accurately record things like calories burned, distance traveled, etc etc. The machine doesn't really care what gender you identify as. In fact, identifying as something other than your biological gender would be detrimental to the accuracy of the biometric data you get from your device, because the machine would be making assumptions about your physical biology that would be inaccurate.

[Digital_Pants]

More options and accuracy should be ensured. So if there are differences in measurements based on whether a person selects "male" or "female" maybe you shouldn't be using language like men/women when what you probably mean is testosterone-dominant/estrogen-dominant bodies since most of those differences probably primarily depend on hormones. So it could be instead of women "people with ovaries or taking estrogen" and "people with testes or taking testosterone", and "other" for people whose bodies don't produce much of either and aren't taking either. 

[mit_rekab]

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", and "other" for people whose bodies don't produce much of either and aren't taking either. "or who would just rather not say.

As I have said would be good to see if there are differences that FitBit data harvesters have found.

[Cassian]

I first requested this feature years ago. It had a reasonable amount of support and I've seen it pop up a couple of times since, but Fitbit never seem to get around to it. I think this is probably because their system is built on a sex binary that doesn't work for all bodies, and it would be too complicated to change it now, so they just sort of ignore it until people give up. There are few enough of us that they can take the loss in revenue. I'd also be very surprised if the scientific studies into calorie burn upon which Fitbit's calculations rely accommodated and investigated people whose hormone ranges didn't fit the typical male/female sex binary.

This is not just a situation where Fitbit's website is badly-designed and not accommodating all body types. In the UK Fitbit's treatment of trans people is a clear case of discrimination under the Equality Act 2010. It equates gender with sex, forcing trans people to out themselves as trans to get correct information from the service, or enter correct information and have the site calculate the wrong bio-calculations in order to be gendered correctly.

There are some fundamental misconceptions in this thread.

One is that chromosomes determine your hormones. For many people with intersex conditions who have chromosomes other than XX or XY, for people with conditions that cause their bodies to process their chromosome-dictated hormones differently, and for those who take hormone treatments prescribed by their doctors, this is not the case. It's estimated that 1.7% of people have an intersex condition, and 0.4% of people are nonbinary. (Fitbit has over 25 million active users, so we can guess that over 100,000 of them are nonbinary, and a lot of them are receiving hormone treatments. We can also guess that 425,000 of Fitbit active users are intersex.)

Another is that everyone's bodies are basically oestrogen-dominant or testosterone-dominant. For nonbinary people that is often not the case - my hormones, for example, are above the highest typical female range but below the lowest typical male range. My body can't be categorised as male or female on hormones alone. And that means my calorie burn will not fit into M/F ranges either.

And then there's the part where social gender is a thing. My passport has the gender I was assigned at birth, and in my country it's very difficult to change that because it's a legal process and while some countries recognise nonbinary genders in law mine does not. My medical records, however, don't say F or M - they say "N" for "not specified". My medical care has been unaffected by that, because doctors are smart. But my friends and family don't pay any attention to those records, and if they used those records as a reference for how to address me socially it would be offensive.

The most sensible system would be to have one question for user-presenting stuff like pronouns, where you say what your gender is, which would include nonbinary options, and one private question that asks something like:

How would you describe your hormones? This is for calculating your calorie burn rate only and will remain private.

- My testosterone levels are in the typical female range

- My testosterone levels are in the typical male range

- My testosterone levels are between the typical male and female ranges

The first would calculate a "female" calorie burn rate, the second a "male" one, and the third would pick something about half-way between the two. Though the latter might not be 100% reliable, I think it's fair to say that it would be more reliable than forcing nonbinary and intersex people into a sex binary that doesn't apply to them, and also the male and female calculations are based on averages that aren't really accurate for everyone anyway - I've run into many people who have to eat more than their Fitbit or MyFitnessPal maintenance goal in order to maintain, for example.

[Digital_Pants]

@Cassian thank you so much for taking the time to lay this out so nicely and @Fitbit better take the free labour you provided them to make their services nondiscriminatory! 

[Cronographer]

@Cassian

"In the UK Fitbit's treatment of trans people is a clear case of discrimination under the Equality Act 2010."

In what way has Fitbit discriminated against people? To me that seems like a fairly serious accusation that I wouldn't want to make without backing it up with evidence. I'm not saying that something like that never happened, just that people will hesitate to take it seriously unless they have actual proof that it happened.

On a similar note, I think it is an unfortunate fact that when presenting new, potentially controversial ideas to people that we must be very methodical in the way we present those ideas. Everything that isn't established fact in the public eye must be verifiable by some outside source. Otherwise, to someone who doesn't already share your views, it might look like you are just making wild, unsubstantiated claims. Again, I am not in any way saying that I think that is what you are doing, just that I could see how it could come across that way.

Climate change had the same problem when it was a new idea. It was full of controversy, and as a result people were very reluctant to accept the facts unless they were absolutely verifiable. In those kinds of situations, the worst thing you can do is provide false or unsubstantiated information, because then people will be even more reluctant to believe it later on.

Again, I want to stress that I am not saying that anything you said is false. To the contrary, you have actually brought to my attention the idea that differing hormone levels could in fact make a biological difference in somebody who is transgender. This is really just my advice to people in general, not really to you in particular. (except for the first paragraph, I would like to see what the deal with that is)

[Cassian]

The Equality Act 2010 defines the gender reassignment aspect of discrimination as:

...when you are treated differently because you are transsexual, in one of the situations covered by the Equality Act.

The treatment could be a one-off action or as a result of a rule or policy. It doesn’t have to be intentional to be unlawful.

When you are transgender and you sign up for Fitbit, you are asked for your gender. Various things about your body such as calorie burn are affected by the gender that you enter. If you enter "female" because you want your profile to tell your friends and members of the public that you are a woman, it assumes that your calorie burn is that of a typical healthy ovary-having cisgender woman. If you are a transgender woman and you're not on hormone treatment, that calorie burn estimation would be wildly inaccurate. Same for a transgender man not on hormone treatment who enters "male".

The site doesn't warn you about that, you have to just know somehow. The gender question doesn't ask for your hormone information. It just expects that everyone who uses the site has a hormone profile that fits into its limited binary cisgender assumptions. People such as me, with hormones that fit neither the male nor the female profile, cannot possibly get anything approaching a correct calorie burn estimation. People such as a transgender woman not taking hormones have to choose between the site gendering them correctly (less gender dysphoria) and the site approximating their calorie burn more accurately (the site is a health-tracking site, so that's fairly important, I think we can agree).

This is considered indirect discrimination. "Indirect discrimination happens when an organisation has a particular policy or way of working that puts transsexual people at a disadvantage." It's a system that was set up to serve a specific purpose, but that incidentally disadvantages people from a particular group (in this case transgender people). This is illegal under the Equality Act 2010. In this case the disadvantage is that cisgender people can be correctly gendered by the system and have accurate bio calculations made about them at the same time, whereas transgender people in many cases cannot.

[mit_rekab]

Male female and other, would stop the bad data being included in the
calculations and much simpler. Baby steps.

[Cassian]

Calling nonbinary people "other" is pretty alienating, but it is better than no option for us at all. 🙂

[SunsetRunner]

I don't mind telling you my binary sex since I think this will probably increase the accuracy of the data my fitbit collects and processes. However some people would not want to tell you thier sex, so please create an 'other' option. Also it would be good if you could ditch the gendered terms used within the app. Telling me 'ranges for women/men your age" doesn't help me I'm not a woman. I am a person, instead just say "ranges for people your age" and then you would not cause distress for your non-binary users and would be inclusive of all you users and not just exclusive for people with a binary cis-gender identity.

[Btyue]

I would like it if the app would focus on hormones instead of ‘sex’. Instead of saying “women/men your age” it could say “estrogen/testosterone-dominant people your age”. It’s one of many easy things you can do to make it more trans-inclusive, but it would make such a big difference for some people, including me. (I get misgendered in my daily life already; I don’t need it in a phone app too, an app that’s supposed to make me feel GOOD, not BAD.)

Adding to that, it’s strange that even though the personal info has a sex category and no gender category, other areas of the app still assume the gender (man or woman) of the user.

If you believe sex and gender are the same absolute thing, please re-educate yourselves. Get a trans inclusion consult team or something. But I think you really need one either way. 

[Btyue]

Of course there some people who have hormone levels not in typical ‘female’ or ‘male’ ranges. I used to be that person myself, until I started taking pills. And I may return to that hormone range if I stop taking those pills.

My suggestion would be to make a third option in the sex category, like Intersex or Other, or maube to just leave it blank. And when it comes to comparison with other people, compare with everyone of the same age, of all sexes. For calculating calorie burn, use numbers in between the testosterone-dominant and estrogen-dominant ranges. This may make the estimations not as accurate, but I think most people of this group would take it over being incorrectly labeled. 

[SunsetRunner]

🙌🏼
--
Thank you,
Ferrari

[SunsetRunner]

The app really needs sorting along with Fitbit's customer services, when I contact them about this I basically got told to shut up and write a post on this website.  If enough other people say the same thing, it may be considered as a valid suggestion, however that attitude is completely non-inclusive we are a minority group who will probably never get enough votes on this forum to actually make it to an improved feature.  

This app genuinely triggers gender dysphoria feelings in me, it just highlights who I'm not and what Fitibit expects me to me so that they can have a simpler app that fits in with their simplistic male/female view of the world.  For a big data company they aren't really handling the veracity and variety of data well, they make very large assumptions about who people are and as a result hurt people like me.

[SunsetRunner]

It's now pride month again, and wait for it....... Fitbit have done absolutely nothing about this, not surprising really, they really don't care. 

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@OxfordComa wrote:

Please include "Non Binary/Gender Queer" in your profile gender options.

Gender is not binary (biological sex or identity) and only offering "Female" or "Male" options alienates and invalidates part of your customer base (me included). Using biology to define gender as only male or female also excludes trans people. 

Here is a great resource for better understanding gender: https://www.genderspectrum.org/quick-links/understanding-gender/. Your information is outdated at best but can be yet another way NB/GQ people are marginalized by institutions and companies. We exist! 

I would also like to include that you should perhaps do some company wide training on how to engage with GQ/NB/Trans customers, because telling us that it's just biology is as mentioned, inaccurate and very alienating. It's pride month. Please do better.

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. 

[mit_rekab]

Fitbit clearly not interested in UK acts

to make all the multiple possibilities easier for them lets just have 

Male= Born XY, identify as a Man/Boy

Female= Born XX, identify as a Woman/Girl

Other= Born XY Identify as a Woman have taken or take hormones.

             Born XY identify as a woman dont take hormones

             Born XX identify as a Man have taken or take hormones

             Born XX, XY, XXX, XyY  but do not want to identify as anything feel their biological sex is not important to FITBITs data gathering and comparison exercise.

This way it helps us all we are not forced into a binary choice, yet Fitbit are not forced to change the software for 7 possible genders.

[Granny-Treacy]

Well I am forced to tick female... I am genderfuild (WoMan)... I know lots people think its a sexuality thing but gender and sexuality are two different things.... Please à custom gender pick

[Granny-Treacy]

I'm genderfuild ... But it just f/m.... Please update this option