I'm just glad Google+ has an "other" option to begin with. Facebook lets you hide gender (which would be nice to have in google+), but they only offer male/female.
Really, I'm more disgruntled that Google+ lets you put down your relationship status and types of relationships you're looking for, but no way to specify which genders if any you are interested in talking to. I've been mulling over removing that part from my google profile because I can't mark that I'm only interested in women for relationships and dating. I have some female friends that would prefer to talk only to other females as well, it doesn't even have to go as far as preferences for dating.
Human sexuality and gender is so complicated that I'm willing to give a pass to any company that at least tries to make an effort to be more inclusive. They sure fall short here and there, but maybe with better education and awareness and bug reports, that will change.
I used to work for a gay dating site where instead of presenting a table of data about each person, we generated a natural language text that described the person's age, location and sexuality. At the beginning you had a radio-button to select your own gender (male/female/other/none) and checkboxes to select which genders you were interested in.
With those limited options, it was fairly easy to construct this profile text, even though we were using VBSCript. (Yes, it was that long ago) Sometime later we wanted to expand and cover all the trans* options which resulted in that piece of code expanding into a horrible mess of weird cases, and those users not being happy with the result anyway. We got a lot of complaints of the type "I am an X looking for Y, but I don't want to be called Z".
I'd rather program date and time functions than that, ever again. :-)
Well, Google+ and many social networks feel designed to be opt-in so interaction between people that aren't directly connected somehow is limited and suboptimal. For example, some people I don't know have added me to a circle of theirs on google+ and have shared some bizarre pictures and things I don't care for, and I have to purposefully seek these out if I cared to look at them. That solves a lot of problems right there.
Some networks don't always work like that. It's the general idea of the thing more than it was google+'s implementation I was referring to by the end of that paragraph. I personally just want it in google+ out of habit, because I have it set that way in Facebook and all my dating site profiles and such. Inevitably I have a guy hitting on me and I don't want them to have a misunderstanding or to waste their time. It also helps to search for other people to talk to, and that benefits more than just me or my friends.
Really, I'm more disgruntled that Google+ lets you put down your relationship status and types of relationships you're looking for, but no way to specify which genders if any you are interested in talking to. I've been mulling over removing that part from my google profile because I can't mark that I'm only interested in women for relationships and dating. I have some female friends that would prefer to talk only to other females as well, it doesn't even have to go as far as preferences for dating.
Human sexuality and gender is so complicated that I'm willing to give a pass to any company that at least tries to make an effort to be more inclusive. They sure fall short here and there, but maybe with better education and awareness and bug reports, that will change.