Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror Forums

Thanks for pointing out those authors that need to be removed from the women author's list.  If you don't mind the undertaking we would greatly appreciate it if you could look through the list and see what other authors should be taken out.  We'll use your list to un-flag them as women and take them off the list as an immediate fix.

Going forward we'll have to add a non-binary category to our gender flag so that can be selected, if known, at the time they go into our database.  There is always the possibility that we'll still not know their preference and get it wrong but at least we can make it less likely.

There are a bunch of other bits of code that will have to be adjusted along with that so it will take a bit of time to sort through those things before we update the site.  Like what about members who have selected those non-binary authors for their Women of Genre Fiction Reading Challenge already?  Also we have male and female placeholder images that we'll have to replace with a generic non-gendered silhouette.

I will post updates here as we get to them.

Thanks very much for the response. Yes, I'm happy to work through the list, though it will take me some time to get through. I will keep the updates here so there's an open record of what's being flagged for change and others can weigh in if there's anything I've overlooked or got wrong (as there inevitably will be).

My inbox is also open if anyone wants to raise something with me privately.

A couple more I noted after my original post:

- Foz Meadows (genderqueer)
- Poppy Z Brite (male)
- Emily Foster (I'm not sure on this one. The photo is definitely of the wrong author, and <a xhref="https://www.tor.com/2016/12/14/tor-com-publishings-fiction-from-2016/">this</a> confirms the author in the database now goes by a different name. However, I can't find any information on the author beyond what's on tor.com, which doesn't state how they currently identify. Their novella is still published under "Emily Foster" so I'm not sure you could change the author name without creating confusion and making that work more difficult to search for - but on balance of evidence I'd also recommend removing from "women authors".)

So first steps taken. Removed the following from the Women Authors list:

• 5192 JY Yang
• 5637 Rivers Solomon
• 4254 Rose Lemberg
• 4880 An Owomoyela
• 5414 S. Qiouyi Lu
• 4490 Foz Meadows
• 912 Poppy Z. Bite

For Emily Foster I changed the picture to the default female silhouette (we still haven't changed the code to anything else) but left her as female until we can get some clarity on her situation.  What we'll do is make Emily a pen name record and add a Lee record and link them together but we'll need their details for the new record first if you want to chase that down.  I could not find anything. Thoughts?

To get them off the list I changed their gender flag from F to N for non-binary directly in the database.  We'll code for N on the author edit page so that we can go back and adjust any other authors we find/add.