warpus
In pork I trust
Why should they oppress people by trying to force them to conform to some outdated preconceived notions? If it's absolutely necessary, can't they provide a field where people can write their gender, whatever it is?
Asking people what their sex or gender is is oppression? Is that supposed to be a joke? It's a common thing that's asked on webforms, which is why I'm asking. If society is not all on the same page as to how to ask and answer such questions, then we need to figure out how to get on that same page.
Why do you need to ask?
From my POV, because the user has made that a requirement for the project and a field that needs to be populated in the database, usually for reporting purposes, but I suspect depending on the situation for other reasons as well. Say you're an architect, and your client says that there need to be 5 rooms on the first floor. You don't ask why, you design a first floor with 5 rooms with the specified parameters.
It seems to me that if gender is so undefined, you can't really ask it on a webform. Giving the user a text field to fill out means you won't be able to report against the field, which is why this sort of question is always a dropdown, with predefined values.
But like I said, the Canadian government seems to often ask for your sex, but the responses on their dropdowns indicate that they are actually asking for your gender. Which is also confusing. If they mean to ask for gender, why not ask for that?