@ K. Elysa:

Yeah, tell me about it. English is actually not that bad at being gender neutral. You can write in gender neutral way but it comes out impersonal and formal: “It’s that person’s birthday” or “Write on the person’s wall”. When I write documentation for software I usually go with “the user” in lieu of gendered pronouns and it usually does not require that much effort.

My native tongue, Polish on the other hand is a cluster when it comes to this because it’s not just pronouns but also verbs are gendered. For example “he went, she went” would be “on poszedł, ona poszła”. Also, nouns have intrinsic grammatically gender: for example “person” (osoba) can refer to people of both sexes, but it follows grammar rules for female gendered nouns. There are really no explicit rules for which nouns end up what sex other than the way they were entomologicaly derived. For example mouse (ta mysz) is female, rat (ten szczur) is male, table (ten stół) is also male, but chair (to krzesło) is gender neutral for whatever reason. So it is a bit of a mess.

In English we could just all agree upon a gender neutral pronoun (like xe, zhe or whatever) that is to be used both when gender is unknown or specifically not given. It is a little bit grating at first, but it’s only because we’re not used to it. Greg Egan did exactly that in Diaspora and after few chapters it of cringing it started to seem perfectly natural. Hell, Jacek Dukaj did the same in Perfect Imperfection in Polish, though it took many more chapters for me to stop cringing.

I think it’s just a matter of just exposure. Well, that and picking one, preferred pronoun type out of the four or five I’ve seen floating around, for consistency.

In Facebook’s defense (yes, I just said that!) they did add 50+ gender options recently.

Of course, as a feminist, I’m strongly opposed to the male/female binary as the only way of identifying or categorizing people. Linguistically, though, some languages don’t give you much room to venture outside of this male/female binary. (French, I’m looking at you.) Until we figure out a different way to say “It’s ______’s birthday. Write something on [his/her] wall,” without using gendered pronouns, endless dropboxes and buttons might be here to stay.

Dr. Azrael Tod wrote:

actually most profiles could be reduced to some unique identificator (well most use e-mail for that, some some kind of username), password (you yourself did just bring the argument that even this isn’t needed anymore) and some freetext-“description”-field

Exactly. Use email as the “username” type field, because it is guaranteed to be unique. If you need a public profile name, that should be a separate field anyway. If you want full name for the records make that a single box. If you need a salutation (as in “Welcome back Luke”) then ask for it separately. You end up with more fields but each has a specific purpose, and predictable behavior.

Dr. Azrael Tod wrote:

this “first/last name”-problem isn’t even the worst thing you’ll find with such. Most people nowadays kinda know that this will happen and have ways to cope with it (like entering firstname “the” and last-name “doctor”)

Yeah, definitely. People tend to figure out how to deal with these forms. The problem is when different forms have different validation rules. For example, I have a student in class right now whose name has four components, but where they fall on the First/Last spectrum depends on the character limit of any given system and whether or not it allows spaces. So in one system it is two parts in first, two parts in last with spaces in between. In the other system it is one in first, then everything else in the last without spaces, because not allowed. Student emails are typically last name + first initial + number, but that is not even close to what she ended up with. When she writes the name down on paper, it actually has a fifth thing in the middle, but I guess she just gave up trying to plug it into electronic forms. :P

Dr. Azrael Tod wrote:

When it comes to postal addresses it gets much worse.

Yeah, don’t even get me started on the address validation. I have a similar problem at work. I’m working in an office building without suite numbers so I usually use the secondary address field to write “2nd floor, company name” so the mail-critters don’t get confused. Every once in a while online services freak the hell out because that does not fit the appt# /suite# patterns. Also building is listed as office space in some databases and I guess previous landlord did have suite numbers so some services insist I put one down. Sometimes they offer me a pull-down list of non-existent suite numbers to pick from. :P Fun times.

as always with that topic it’s “structured data that we’ll need later” against simplicity
actually most profiles could be reduced to some unique identificator (well most use e-mail for that, some some kind of username), password (you yourself did just bring the argument that even this isn’t needed anymore) and some freetext-“description”-field

this “first/last name”-problem isn’t even the worst thing you’ll find with such. Most people nowadays kinda know that this will happen and have ways to cope with it (like entering firstname “the” and last-name “doctor”)

When it comes to postal addresses it gets much worse. Then you find “validation”-stuff like “your house-number should consist of one to 4 digits and one character” (yeah.. right.. “12B HH” – go fuck yourself!)
Those fields keep popping up and really stop people from using services. I have no way to correctly enter my adress in such and since on my street there is a “12” and a “12B”, both not even being close to my door (and in 12 there even is someone with the same surname)
So if you build your form like that? Then i can’t use whatever your system tries to do.
I tried to enter such things into annotations/notes-fields but that didn’t help much.

people didn’t come that far at learning this stuff in the last 15 years an i’d bet they won’t get that better in the next years.