Perhaps this is unreasonable as well, but maybe ongoing developments in society have caused you to focus a little too much of your attention on gender.

Gender dysphoria is a recognized medical condition, for which there are suggested plans of treatment--up to and including hormone therapy and reassignment. Just go with the treatment, and be done with it, and accept that people who have done so were trying to make themselves better. I don't know why society is making it such a hot-button political issue.

(Actually I do know why... politicians need to find wedge issues to split and enthuse people, to get votes.)

I’m not motivated by politicians (I hardly ever listen to them or endorse them).

I’m motivated by the suffering I see in our society experienced by gender nonconforming individuals who feel uncomfortable in a world that believes in the gender binary.

It’s interesting that you mention treatment. I’m not sure if you know any gender nonconforming people, but “just go with the treatment and be done with it” doesn’t really reflect accurately the experience I’ve seen other people have. Hormones and surgery can treat the symptoms of dysphoria but the cause seems to be society and the expectation that all people fit in to a binary. (Please ask if you’d like me to elaborate on that.) So here I am proscribing a treatment for society: stop gendering things unnecessarily and stop supporting a hard gender binary.

There are less gender nonconforming individuals than amputees. Let's tackle the big ticket items first.

51% of the population are women, who suffer from these gender roles. That's a super big-ticket group right there.

As a woman, I can tell I don’t suffer at all from gender roles.

I am completely fine with gendered personal assistants, which was the original topic being discussed.

And I don’t buy all this political crap regarding gender.

Stop using all women to support your political agenda. Stop speaking for the 51%. Not all of us support you, don’t speak for all of us.

Believe it or not, the other 49% also suffer from these "gender roles".

That's an entirely different issue from what we're discussing

Actually it's because gender is a hot-button topic, and not just political. Some of us think that everyone pays too much attention to gender, and those who think they don't are generally male and don't have to think about it because everyone follows the "rules" so it all looks normal and no big deal. But it's ever-present, and I think it's quite reasonable to try to ungender things, particularly things that have no biological sex and are unnecessarily gendered in the first place. Gender is insidious and oppressive for almost everyone and I appreciate that the OP balks at it.

You can choose between "he", "she" and "it", at least in regular English, sans the XXI-century additions. "It" usually refers to things, so if you want to humanize your bot/robot - as many people tend to - you're stuck with picking a gender.

At least in English you don't have nouns automatically selecting gender for you, like in other languages.

> You can choose between "he", "she" and "it", at least in regular English, sans the XXI-century additions.

Or "they". People seem to think that singluar they is some kind of modern invention, but most people also use it all the time without thinking when talking about people that they don't know the gender.

Not to mention it's used by Shakespeare and the King James Bible.

Is it just me, or is humanizing these things so much itself kind of creepy? I prefer not to call Siri "she" for that reason alone.

I go all-in on the weirdness and make my Siri call me "master" just for shits and giggles

I too noticed the gender-ness of the description but I don't know if it matters. I bristled at it with the thought of "Why does it have to be a 'he'?" and then thought well if it was another "she" would I be thinking "Oh so only women can be 'assistants'?!". I get that non-gendered is probably the best but I wouldn't read too much into it. The author wrote this, it appears, for themselves and they can call it whatever they want as far as I'm concerned.

For my Google Assistant, I've made it a point to select a male voice, and I always refer to it as the Google Assistant or just Assistant. The choice in voice gender was so that my wife could keep the default female voice, and we would know it's responding under her account when she talks to a Home in our house vs defaulting to my account like it does for me or guests.

Having said that, I've never heard a genderless voice (although there have been times when I'm on the phone and cannot make out the other person's sex from just their voice). I think this idea that everyone should stop considering gender as binary simply due to the apparently increase in gender dysphoria is a bit ridiculous. Creating the voice for a digital Assistant is a perfect example of this, since the big companies involved have probably done a lot of research to try to determine the best way to make one that doesn't lend itself to a particular gender but always seem to default to a female voice / character (excluding this "Leon").

> I think this idea that everyone should stop considering gender as binary simply due to the apparently increase in gender dysphoria is a bit ridiculous.

But gender isn't inherently binary, even if many but not all cultures have tended to ascribe gender from a binary pallette.

> Creating the voice for a digital Assistant is a perfect example of this, since the big companies involved have probably done a lot of research to try to determine the best way to make one that doesn't lend itself to a particular gender but always seem to default to a female voice / character (excluding this "Leon").

They probably haven't aimed for genderlessness, and in fact has e probably avoided it, because real people have genders (whether or not aligned in the stereotypical way with external sex traits) and conforming to social expectations improves receptions (and, at least in America, there is significant research that, across genders of listeners, people on average respond more positively to feminine voices, which is why the default usually is for a feminine voice.)

> But gender isn't inherently binary, even if many but not all cultures have tended to ascribe gender from a binary pallette.

You say that, but based on what? It's not a construct that makes any sense, except with regard to mental disorders (gender dysphoria). The mental disorder context is particularly relevant when you look at the wildly abnormal rates of suicide attempts among gender dysphoria sufferers.

> I get that most folks aren’t tuned in to this and I will sound unreasonable

> someone will tell me I am wrong

I know "+1" style comments are generally dissuaded on HN, but just chiming in to say that not everyone thinks this sounds unreasonable. It's a topic well worth opening discussions on.

> And for the record, all my robots are non-gendered (“Scout, Skittles, Rover”).

All of my robots are named "Larry"[0]

[0] https://bugs.gentoo.org/27727

> I’m utterly tired of robot-like things being given gender.

I would actually prefer it if humans weren't given a gender either. Obviously we should recognise that people have different physical characteristics, but the abstraction of genders with different societal roles doesn't seem like a very useful one in this day and age.

I agree wholeheartedly! I make my robots non gendered as a kind of point that assigning gender to things that can’t or haven’t affirmed that is unhelpful. That includes baby humans. :)

I mean I think it's pretty unhelpful even for adult humans. If someone tells me that they are "man" or a "woman", then that tells me... pretty much nothimg about them. So why bother?

You can actually pretty much do what you want, regardless of your gender. It is a myth that your "sex" or "gender" forces you into certain roles. Your physical attributes may influence your roles, to some extent (giving birth, lifting heavy stuff,...).

There are definitely segments of society that have different expectations for people they categorise as "men" and "women" though. I certainly come across "you're a man, can you help me open this jar" (even though I'm physically weaker than a lot of the women I live with), and plenty of people thinking that because I'm a man that I won't be caring/empathetic.

The trend of the large assistants (Google Home, Alexa, Cortana) to all be female-voiced by default is pretty awful. Recently I tried to change the settings on an Alexa to try to get it to answer in a male voice, but I don't think it's possible.

I think the explanation is more practical and less nefarious than you are implying: female voices are often easier to hear and understand, especially with background noise.

Maybe it's different for other people, but that's certainly the case for me, in movies, lectures, radio, and synthesised voices.

Amusingly Amazon could have simply dropped the trailing "a" and had a gender neutral name.

Siri made some effort to be non-gendered, but I think most users still think of Siri as female.