Last modified: 2014-01-04 09:29:50 UTC
Moving from a gender neutral system to a gender binary system is a step backwards. If you're going to require someone enter a gender, you must support *all* genders. At least, include the following options: 1) male 2) female 3) transgender 4) agender 5) bigender Please read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_identity
This is for grammatical genders, which depends on the language, and is for choosing appropriate grammatical forms: pronouns (as in English), adjective and noun agreement (as in Romance and Germanic languages), verb agreement (as in Semitic languages), etc. For English this gives a trinary system, currently labeled as 'male' (usually goes with "he"/"him"/"his"), 'female' (usually goes with "she/her/her"), and 'undisclosed' (probably tends to "they/them/their" though I haven't checked lately). These won't come up all that often for English, relatively. In other languages, there may be different choices, and the actual results of choosing a gender will be more far-reaching (eg appropriate grammatical forms for the 'User:' namespace). I suspect better labeling would be appropriate, but I'm not sure what additional options would actually accomplish in English specifically.
(In reply to comment #1) > I suspect better labeling would be appropriate, but I'm not sure what > additional options would actually accomplish in English specifically. Marking low priority. Since this is for grammar, we would have to start using [[Gender neutral pronouns]] for English, at least. I like them, but their usage isn't standard. Implementing this would result in a lot of confusion.
Marking invalid. We can't change languages. This is not about the gender identity, it is about grammar in different languages. And it's not required either.
