I applaud the researcher's conviction to use the remaining part of the year to do the things they think are valuable.<p>However, They tell use they did something <i>"disgusting"</i> when labeling patient data by reinforcing some social constructs. That is just what *must* be done when looking at many aspects of physical medical health research.<p>It is inappropriate to take self selection of something like gender identity into account for medical research not specifically dealing with transitioning and the follow on effects/side effects. Let's flip it around judge if it would be appropriate to approve a drug that was tested exclusively on white men in the 40s. The conclusion being that if it works for them it should be safe and effective for everyone. It would be irresponsible to do clinical trials for most drugs tossing gender out the window because it made people uncomfortable.<p>This is of course absurd and people would rightly call it out as such. Don't believe me? Take a look at the garbage patch of early AI image research trained on data sets of white men and how that worked for imagines outside of the test group.<p>I know the researcher wants to respect identity, but with luck their research can help to save lives even if they had to hold their nose while doing it.
"In the process of labeling and training on medical data, I reinforced social constructs like gender and race to a disgusting extent."<p>There are two sexes. Regarding race, there are diseases whose incidence varies with self-reported race, so the concept of race should not be expunged.