Great question. It's more of a workplace concern, as I'm sure that nonbinary folks experience these issues in other workplaces. However, software development is definitely a male dominated environment and there's a lot of discussion in the industry about how we make that environment more inviting to women.
So there's a shared experience there of being a gender minority within software, but also the difference that some of our concerns are very different than women's concerns.
And software rules our world. My company lets me declare my pronouns on the internal org chart tool (yay!) but required me to select man or woman to receive health benefits (boo!). As an engineer, I can help inform system design and provide feedback on the software that gets written to handle cases like these, which makes our software better.
I expect it will take a while for insurance companies to build up risk profiles for new pronouns once those stop changing. They will want to know your biological sex and whether you are in or after transition into one of them. Depending on whatever effects social genders might have they will want to know those as well. And as a third separate item they will want to know your preferred pronouns for communication purposes.
They sure do! And trans people have different insurance risks (and presumably nonbinary people do too.) Rates of suicide, for instance, are considerably higher in trans populations.
But, in this case, my insurance company basically said, "Pick either one, and you can change it whenever you want" when I asked how I should pick as a genderfluid person. I asked if I could change it daily, they said, "Sure."
shrug I think you are right, we'll eventually settle out a couple of forms for things like pronouns/gender identity/sex characteristics/etc. But having a member of the minority who is also an engineer can help make sure we build those tools in a way that doesn't leave small integer N% of people feeling left out.
Most professional software development is about working with a local (your team/the people you directly collaborate with) and global (your stack’s ecosystem) community as much as it is about writing code, so it stands to reason that a high visibility social characteristic like gender identity might affect other aspects of the professional experience.
Case in point, demographic information like gender identity is a useful feature to contextualize or find patterns in the data — like how the blog post points out that more than half of respondents wrote their first line of code before age 16, but that this statistic varies by gender and country.
If it really doesn’t matter, it will be borne out in the statistics (i.e. the gender identity feature will give you no additional information).
