I am currently developing an online form for a social networking website, used to retrieve users' personal data. Name, Surname...these are all fine, what troubled me was when I had to decide how to get the user's gender.
Some of you will probably come up with the female/male binary option either as radio buttons or drop-down menus.
This solution would have been appropriate when gender from a legal point of view was determined by the birth certificate: to avoid getting too mixed up with so much diversity in definitions, we could always safely claim to refer to the law.
However after 2004, at least in the UK, this is not the case anymore. The Gender Recognition Act which was approved three years ago, allows 'acquired genders' to be legally recognized.
Internet is usually at the front in social change, but a quick skim through web pages , seem to indicate the contrary in this case: many forms still only offer the female/male options, few include a form of cross-over, none to the best of my knowledge, give you free choice.
A possible solution
As I wanted to acknowledge the problem, I tried to find some kind of regulation that we could use in order to develop appropriate input fields in gender, but nothing official seems to be around. Therefore I opted for the freest solution: use a text field.
References
The Gender Recognition act can be found online at:
http://www.opsi.gov.uk/ACTS/acts2004/40007--a.htm#1
Social Sciences and Internet at crossroads
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