Your gender is your business

[Ativan Prescribed]

One of the things that really bothers me is the need to have gender on forms, when it makes no difference at all, like a survey for instance, it isn't necessary to always reveal your gender when it has nothing to do with whatever.
To me its kinda like race, why does it matter? To be honest it does to this extent, I am part of the human race and even then, to what degree is that even something I have to tell anyone?
Your gender is yours to do with as you see fit, checking off the options given, what if I don't like them and why does it matter?
The more this is just taken out of the flow of information we are trapped in on a daily basis, the better.
99% of the time it has no bearing on what I am doing, what you are doing, what anyone is doing, its a tool used to shove you into a category that is nothing more than an assumption and worse, the assumptions are used against you.
Even the discussion over femininity and masculinity are awful to go through, they are not gender and yet they are constantly gendered and in ways that box you into a corner, usually having to define them from you point of view and if that is different, then having to explain that as well.
The aspects of femininity and masculinity are mostly if not entirely just human and everyone shares them to some degree, just because you have this or that for genitals has nothing to do with it, there is a huge over blown assumption that somehow its tied to your genitals.
Here is a good article I just read, and it isn't by someone who defines their gender as anything at all, but they are like most of us, why are we constantly having to pick a gender on forms?


link to article <----- hover click and its like fricken magic...

[Leena]

So much of this is done because tech companies think targeted ads work, while in reality almost everyone hates ads.

The exception might be clever ads, which a lot of people might watch next Sunday, and those aren't really that targeted.

[nyx]

So true! Surveys often use the gender information to divide their results into female and male sections as if ut were two different species - other genders of course not included or displayed in a weird random third box no one knows what to do with... and the results are telling us exactly nothing. I think they simply confirm existing stereotypes and play their part in reproducing the binary as 'the' standard.
As said in the article, it would help if the people creating those forms would ask themselves if the information is really helpful. I can imagine surveys connected to some questions to gender studies - here it could make sense to ask for gender but of course one would need more options. But in most of the cases, it really doesn't matter and can lead to false assumptions because people often forget that correlation is not the same as causation. And even if there is a causation it might simply mean that people fit themselves into artificial roles society puts on genders.