Good to see them do this but I'd have preferred if they'd come up with 3-5 different ways to describe gender that we could use across the web. Have 50 different customisable options is a pain to implement for everyone. Maybe I'm wrong though - can someone with more knowledge on this tell me whether that many options is really necessary?
As a comparison, look at the spectrum of race. How we look at it keeps changing. Could we get by with a binary? Sure, we could have "white" and "non-white". Could we do 3-5? Sure, that's what Brazil's government does. They have white, brown, black, yellow, and indigenous; you can pick one. [1] But people in Brazil don't really like that. It may serve the governmental need to have a simple system. But for the individuals expressing their racial identity, it doesn't really fit their self-perceptions, and they don't like having somebody else's categories imposed upon them.
If you are looking for a simple way to solve this problem, just drop gender from your system. If you really need to use pronouns, just use singular they [2] for everybody.
I think the second-simplest thing would be to not ask about gender, but to ask about what pronoun to use. Facebook's going with he/she/they, which isn't what every activist would want, but it's way better than a simple binary.
If you really need gender, then I'd probably follow the Facebook model; the alternative is to basically repeat Facebook's process of talking to a lot of people and finding some other workable solution.
