Issue 3274: how do I submit gender-neutral cribs?

New issue submitted

Assigned changed to “anselm” (previously “None”)
Disposition changed to “Needs help” (previously “New”)

Hi Melanie,

At the moment the only gender free cribs option is for E-cribs and in fact they are automatically translated on the fly from the standard E-cribs. Anselm’s software just replaces “1M” and “1W”, etc by “1Lk” and “1Rb”.

This is possible primarily because E-cribs use M and W for the traditional roles and these are easily distinguishable from L and R directions (whereas MiniCrib use M and L for roles which can lead to ambiguities with L for directions). Secondly, E-cribs are written by a small team: originally Eric Ferguson, now mostly Roland Telle and myself. We try and adhere to a common style.

The “SCDDB contributed cribs” can be entered by any user but there is a wide variety of crib styles so automatic conversion would probably give unreliable results.

Defining a new category of contributed gender free cribs would be up to Anselm - so I assigned this issue to him.

Otherwise, if you are happy to follow the E-cribs style the E-cribs team could discuss internally whether and how to incorporate them. If you would like to pursue that option its probably best to discuss privately by sending an email to team@e-cribs.org.

Disposition changed to “Being handled” (previously “Needs help”)

Anyone can submit any “Contributed crib” they wish. There is no censorship on the wording used.

Please realize that “gender-neutral” cribs are disconcerting to dancers who have used the standard Man/Woman or Man/Lady nomenclature all their lives. Cribs are meant to be quick reminders, easy to read. That is frustrated by gender-neutral wording. Most dancers will read the traditional “M” and “W” just as codes that identify dancers, sides and positions in the set, unrelated to the sex of the individual actually dancing.

If you wish to offers event organizers and teachers a free choice between “standard” and “gender-neutral” cribs, I suggest that you ask our e-crib team to write “normal” e-cribs for the dances. Users of SCDDB can then use the option that Anselm has created to transform any e-cribs in gender-neutral wording.

I strongly support the elimination of sex-related discrimination world-wide, and agree that it makes sense to eliminate the words “Man”, “he”, “Woman” and “she” from texts where the individual’s sex should be irrelevant. But when we use "M"and “W” there is no need to change the letters. All we need to change are the mental links in our heads. If we convert those links to “M means Midget and W means Widget” the whole gender-discrimination issue disappears (and I am sure you could find far better options than "midget"and “widget”). In my opinion changing the crib texts is tackling the wrong issue. The problem is not wording but attitudes. I danced for 25 years. What really upsets me - even now - is when I wanted to dance on the W side, I was often told by the class that “we don’t do that here”. In spite of trying, I have never in all those years danced an Allemande or a Baratte as a “W”. And now it’s too late, I can no longer dance.

I sympathise with the demand for gender-neutral cribs but given that, for the time being, the gender-neutral cribs are an option on top of the “traditional” e-cribs I would be reluctant to allow gender-neutral cribs for dances that don’t have “traditional” cribs. Instead, I’m fairly happy with the current method of generating gender-neutral cribs from e-cribs (and I haven’t had any complaints since the feature became available almost a year ago, so it seems to be working).

This of course restricts the availability of gender-neutral cribs to dances that have an e-crib. The e-crib team is quite good at providing cribs even when they’re needed fairly urgently, but even so, the “SCDDB Contributed Cribs” option remains important. Murrough is correct in pointing out that the style of “SCDDB Contributed Cribs” is much less controlled and uniform than that of e-cribs, and for the time being that precludes having an “SCDDB Contributed Cribs (gender-neutral)” crib source which works like the gender-neutral e-cribs version (by doing a blind mechanical replacement of M→Lk and W→Rb).

Of course right now nothing prevents people from entering a gender-neutral crib as the “SCDDB Contributed Crib” for a dance that doesn’t yet have a traditional “SCDDB Contributed Crib”, but this is something that I wouldn’t like, because it forces a gender-neutral crib in a context where people expect traditional cribs. (People who don’t like traditional cribs can prevent themselves from seeing them by deselecting all non-gender-neutral crib sources in their profile, and likewise people who don’t like gender-free cribs can simply refrain from enabling the gender-free e-cribs, but mixing traditional and gender-neutral cribs in the “SCDDB Contributed Crib” crib source would remove that possibility.)

One way out of this dilemma would be to encourage people to write traditional cribs for “SCDDB Contributed Cribs” in a style that enables auto-transmogrification into a gender-free version (mostly by using “W” for ladies/robins rather than “L”). Then we could offer a “SCDDB Contributed Cribs (gender-neutral)” crib source that is fed from just those cribs in “SCDDB Contributed Cribs” that are presumed “gender-safe” (i.e., don’t contain things like “1L”). Presumably the new WYSIWYG crib editor could offer a “gender-neutrality” switch that would preview the gender-neutral version of the crib being edited so interested crib authors could see the effect and verify that the result was reasonable. I realise that people who prefer gender-neutral cribs would have to hold their noses and enter traditional cribs just to end up with gender-neutral cribs in the end, but I hope that even dedicated fans of gender-neutral cribs would be able to view that as their contribution to the greater good for the community (both gender-neutral and traditional).