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Comment by pif | Hacker News Reader

You are right. I don't understand why developers should take into consideration any possible psychological quirk of any potential user.

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The only circumstance I can think of when it is simultaneously true that gender must be recorded and that edge cases (like XXY chromosomes) are not important, is that languages have gendered words — but even in German you can have linguistic constructs to get around that: https://youtu.be/mHYD5cex54A

No, the issue is quite simply: why does your system care what gender the person has? Unless it has a specific need for it, don't even bother

You might ask if it should use Mr./Ms. (or Dr. or some other academic title) etc but even that is a bit anachronistic. Maybe this makes sense if you're sending mail to your customer, but even then.

How to solve 50% of your GDPR troubles: stop asking for data you have absolutely no use for (and no, selling customer data is not a legitimate use)

I can't think of a situation where it's appropriate to ask for a title, other than for government ID. 99.9999% of the time a field for "How can we address you" with a freeform input is perfect. It lets me put in " " or "Dr. 张伟" and be done with it.

In Austria some people are VERY insistent that you use the proper title. Along with that, we need to report certain titles to the government too, because of calculating wages.

And, for us, it is easier to treat all titles the same on the backend side, rather than allow freeform input.

There are cultures in which the honorific is required. There are cultures in which it is not only not required but despised. I have encountered too many web forms in which a gendered honorific is required input, and you must select from a drop-down list.

The people who design those forms are second in line to be put against the wall when the revolution comes. Right behind the people who design free-form input for international telephone numbers but have a hidden undocumented mandatory format that gets rejected and all you see is a red asterisk beside the field when you "Submit" is rejected and all the other fields get blanked out.

> I have encountered too many web forms in which a gendered honorific is required input, and you must select from a drop-down list.

We have 3 gender options, mandated by law, in a dropdown which makes sense for our company. But we don't mandate honoriffics, nor do we use a gendered form where possible. And all input goes through an employee. (We are a worker leasing company, ONLY active in Austria)

> Right behind the people who design free-form input for international telephone numbers but have a hidden undocumented mandatory format that gets rejected and all you see is a red asterisk beside the field when you "Submit" is rejected and all the other fields get blanked out.

You need a revolution to justify it?

What is the obstensible purpose of this law that requires you to collect and store information about peoples' gender? I can't fathom why a legislature would ever think that necessary. It just doesn't seem like useful information in most contexts, almost like asking for astrological signs and blood type. I've seen those on forms before and they seem to serve no real purpose.

The law is that we need to have 3 option, male, female, diverse.

Also: We employ people to work at a different company through us.

With your case where the government requires the title being the notable exception:

> In Austria some people are VERY insistent that you use the proper title.

So let those people put their titles in the freeform input if they care.

"psychological quirk". I see.

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