MisgenderMender: A Community-Informed Approach to Interventions for Misgendering

Misgendering refers to the act of incorrectly identifying or addressing someone's gender. While misgendering is both a factual inaccuracy and a toxic act of identity erasure, research on fact-checking and toxicity detection does not address it. We are the first to bridge this gap by introducing a dataset, \dataset, to assist in developing interventions for misgendering. The misgendering interventions task can be divided into two sub-tasks: (i) detecting misgendering, followed by (ii) editing misgendering where misgendering is present, in domains where editing is appropriate. We introduce a dataset containing a total of 3806 instances of tweets, YouTube comments, and LLM-generated text about 30 non-cisgender individuals annotated for whether they contain misgendering or not. LLM-generated text is also annotated for edits required to fix misgendering. Using this dataset, we set initial benchmarks by evaluating existing NLP systems and highlight challenges for future models to address. Additionally, we conducted a survey of non-cisgender individuals in the US to understand opinions about automated interventions for text-based misgendering. We find interest for interventions along with concerns for potential harm.