Our world is full of binary systems: humans use ‘male’ and ‘female’; computers use ones and zeroes. But though we might try sort things into opposites, this usually oversimplifies things. Derwent McElhinney is a Melbourne-based software developer who identifies as a “Dorito-powered code machine on a quest to destroy the gender binary”, and their latest project uses a Google Chrome plugin to challenge our assumptions about gendered language on the internet.
Their creation, titled Jailbreak the Binary swaps all the language in a computer browser to remove gender from the equation. Users can become familiar with nonbinary pronouns and get some insight in the extent to which gender affects our language on a daily basis.
“Any text that appears in the browser goes through this plugin before it is displayed to you, even if it’s subtitles on a movie you’re watching on Netflix,” Derwent explained. “It doesn’t work for images or videos, but anything that’s text-based, it will convert.”
Derwent said because gender has been baked into our language for a really long time, it can be an awkward shift for people to start using non binary language, but once you get the hang of it, it starts making sense. ‘He’ and ‘she’ become ‘they’; ‘mother’ and ‘father’ become ‘parent’; ‘brother’ and ‘sister’ become ‘sibling’.
“We’re used to saying all kinds of words like, ‘delivery-man’, and using ‘man’ and ‘men’ as the word for all of humanity, and using all these gendered words for what is really a non-gendered usage,” they said. “You’re jailbreaking your brain, the way you think about the world, in terms of a binary, because this binary system has been set up and it takes a lot of mental energy to actually break out of it for the first time.”
The plugin builds on Danielle Sucher’s open-source plugin Jailbreak the Patriarchy, which swapped gendered words to draw attention to gender inequality. The software uses Javascript, a coding language that’s supported by all web browsers, to modify content on the page as it loads.
Derwent was originally motivated to create the plugin by their own experiences of being gendered online. Many people are still unfamiliar with non-binary language, and Jailbreak the Binary allows people who might experience gender dysphoria to bypass those experiences.
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“Any incoming message for me gets changed to not be gendered, and that’s actually really awesome,” they said.
Derwent repurposed Sucher’s word list from Jailbreak the Patriarchy, though they admit there’s not always a neat non-binary fit in the same way that male and female words can be swapped.
“Some words didn’t really make any sense at all without gender, for example ‘manly’ and ‘womanly’, ‘paternal/maternal’… there isn’t really a non-gendered equivalent because you’re actually referring to something specifically as being defined by gender,” they said. “It’s definitely not perfect; language is an ongoing process.”
Given that computers are essentially built on a binary – let alone the online algorithms that sort us into categories constantly – I wondered if Derwent found the internet to be a particularly gendered space. They said although there’s a lot of push to fit into one box in real life, more often we go without gender online.
“You can have a completely text-based conversation with someone, on forums or messengers, and if they assume your gender, that’s on them, but it’s more common to not assume people’s genders,” they said. “We’ve almost evolved past the need for it.”
These online interactions have normalised non-binary language even among people who may identify with a particular gender in real life. Derwent said the internet had also allowed non-binary people to connect with each other, and share their ideas more widely.
Next up after Jailbreak the Binary, Derwent plans to create a plugin which adds a non-binary option to web forms: the kind you’d complete while booking tickets and appointments, filling out surveys, or shopping online. Derwent’s been doing this themself for years, even hacking their Facebook account to use non-binary pronouns before the option became available to users.
“You could go into the HTML and change the form, so that it submits that you have no gender… a value of your gender that is basically 0. And I do that with any form I can,” they said. “It doesn’t always work, but most of the time when I book airline tickets, I’ll get Mx. Derwent McElhinney printed on it.”
Derwent encourages others to explore their identity and experiences through software. “It really showed me how easy it is to make a plugin, it’s so simple,” they said. “There’s plenty of tutorials out there… if you think of a cool idea for a plugin to mess with your browser in any way, it’s very easy to do.”
Much of this is due to the open source nature of the internet, to which Derwent says we owe a lot. “We’re standing on the shoulders of giants,” they said. “The internet could’ve gone a completely different route, of being all closed-source and proprietary, but the people who were there from the beginning, founding all the web technology, made it open source, and we have a great deal to thank them for.”
Install the Jailbreak the Binary plugin for Google Chrome here.
