Clearly, gender should be represented as a user-chosen 32-bit value with separate R, G, B, and A channels, and conveniently represented as an 8-digit hexadecimal number.
In this Portable Network Gender (PNG) system, the R channel is degree of traditional female gender; the B is degree of traditional male gender; the G is a catchall for other gender expressions (or perhaps a lookup table rather than a magnitude); the A indicates the overall transparency/importance of the other values.
On the other hand, this only offers around 4 billion unique combinations, which may not be enough to represent the diversity of the planet's 6-billion-plus individuals (not to mention situational identities). Everyone deserves gender-appropriate and gender-precise targeted advertising! So ultimately, a new Gender Protocol offering 128-bits of resolution may prove necessary (GPv6).
Jokes aside, I like to fit people into two numbers between 0 and 1, non-inclusive. The first, number A represents your gender identification, with 0 being ideally female and 1 ideally male (remember the scale is non inclusive of the bounds). The second number B represents the gender identification that you're attracted to.
So, for example:
Hetero male: A=0.8, B=0.2
Gay male: A 0.7 b 0.9, or a 0.8 b 0.7
It's a convenient way to explain gender to nerds, and remember that there are error bars on each number that vary over a lifetime.
Unfortunately, your specification of the "B" category appears to leave no room for a distinction between, say, a guy who likes uber-masculine men and uber-feminine women, versus a guy who likes humans more toward the center of the scale. (I assume the first guy would like 0.1 and 0.9 people, and you'd record it as the average, 0.5; and the second guy would obviously like 0.5's.)
Clearly we would need a graph with a bunch of data points representing the person's attraction to humans everywhere along the gender scale. For example, at a resolution of 0.1:
And while we're at it, why don't we add scales for attractiveness due to body type, perceived youthfulness, hair color, etc. (Let's hope they can be considered independently. Dear god, the complexity if that weren't the case--I suspect it isn't...) Methinks this is a problem that could suck up as much, or as little, effort as you're willing to put into it.
Some people--probably people who spend a lot of time dating, and who are attractive enough to be able to choose for whatever traits they want--would actually find useful the ability to specify things like that. Others might not care, or might not even know what difference most of these traits make to them (I would probably fall into this last category). Mmm, it might be interesting to see what the hardcore daters would discover about their own preferences (and how they might change over the course of dating). Does anyone know of any interesting studies or results in this area?
I don't know how much has your technique been exposed to the scrutiny of gay people, neither I want to be overly critic... But just be aware that many gay men are far from identifying with being "ideally female", and many gay women are far from identifying themselves as "ideally male".
Making gender one-dimensional is of course richer than using a boolean flag, but I think the problem is even more complicated than that.
EDIT: as gjm11 states, I'm wrong and your scale is indeed two dimensional, as in one might feel a (wo)man and be attracted to a (wo)man.
yid's scale doesn't propose conflating homosexuality with gender inversion, and ver[1] examples put the "gay male" at the same place on the gender scale as the "hetero male". That's the whole point of proposing two numbers.
[1] I normally don't use these funny gender-neutral pronouns, but here it seems called for.
You know, I thought that at firs too. I was going to say that it doesn't make sense to say a bisexual has B=0.5 and that we should have B_male and B_female. However, as I tried to think of a situation where you'd want to split that into two dimensions, I couldn't come up with one. As long as we read B as a relative preference it makes sense to say bisexuals have B = 0.5.
In this Portable Network Gender (PNG) system, the R channel is degree of traditional female gender; the B is degree of traditional male gender; the G is a catchall for other gender expressions (or perhaps a lookup table rather than a magnitude); the A indicates the overall transparency/importance of the other values.
On the other hand, this only offers around 4 billion unique combinations, which may not be enough to represent the diversity of the planet's 6-billion-plus individuals (not to mention situational identities). Everyone deserves gender-appropriate and gender-precise targeted advertising! So ultimately, a new Gender Protocol offering 128-bits of resolution may prove necessary (GPv6).