The range of answers you get when you give a free text entry field is wonderful, and proves why this is the best route.
On matters like forced revealing of gender, my gender is rage.
I'm in the process of trying to convince an genderfork academic I'm friends with to actually put a 20 marks question on an exam "what is your gender?".
To be fair, it actually is hard to parse - I'm re-reading it, and trying to work out how to word it better, but the fact that I'm actually using a freeform gender, and the academic term genderfork, makes it hard to see how.
I'll have another stab later if I have time - My gender is currently busy.
It would also be ideal, given the current sexist state of language, to add a combo box to choose if you want to be refered to as "he", "she", or, in what now seems like a distant utopia, gender-neutrally, obviously given each language possibilities. That would be so much a big step into having gender equality on the net that the fact no big social network has done it yet tells us about how misunderstood a problem discrimination and biases towards sex and gender are.
The user specifies what pronouns to use, and perhaps there would be default values (or you could fill them all in by selecting a "traditional" option). I actually really like this idea. Users would be able to hide their gender if they wanted, and if they wanted to use something like "he or she/him or her/his or her" or "ey/ey/eir", they would be able to just fill it in, and the system would use it in its automatically generated notifications and stuff (Alex posted a comment on eir webzone). This would give us an easy way to gain exposure and experience to the various attempts at creating gender-neutral singular third-person pronouns, and maybe figure out which ones are good (or whether it's worth bothering about).
Also, it might allow for funsies like this.
Possessive: His Majesty's
Subjective: His [random from: Awesomeness, Sleepiness, Whimsy]
I pity the people working on localization if you have that system.
Also, some languages, for example Finnish, doesn't have gender-specific 3rd person pronouns, so giving them that option wouldn't make any sense to them.
