This is my third post on Web forms. All Web designers and Web developers have to work with forms. I am not so much offering tips and techniques (though I have done). Rather, I am trying to get designers and developers to abandon provincial customs and wake up to the modern globe.
So I have attacked the dreadful custom of asking for ‘First names’ and ‘Last names.’ And I have put in a protest against the illogical American system of numeric dating. In this post, I tread on even thinner ice: is it ‘sex’ or ‘gender’?
In modern English and American Web forms, this not only reflects a misunderstanding of the original radical purpose behind the use of ‘gender’, it also stifles that very purpose. From being a mind-changer, it has become a system-enforcer.
In many (maybe most?) of the languages of the world, gender is a critical feature. Articles, possessive pronouns, adjectives, and so on, all have to agree with the gender of the noun. If you are speaking Spanish, you have to know that a tie (una corbata) is feminine, and a dress (un vestido) is masculine.
This gender is quite arbitrary, as my examples suggest. So radical thinkers in the early days of structuralism extended this to masculinity and femininity generally. There were no given masculine qualities or feminine qualities. It was all arbitrary.
A liberation, which led to much ‘gender-bending.’ A liberation for all of us, men as well as women. And then one day some English speakers got hold of this idea, and not understanding its origins in the grammar of other languages, decided that using ‘gender’ instead of ‘sex’ would show everyone that sexes are also arbitrary.
You might applaud the thinking behind it. However, its net effect has been to freeze what had been fluid. You can now ask people for their gender on a Web form. So it’s fixed.
You have to be an English speaker, and not very good with languages, to think that there can be a ‘male gender’ or a ‘female gender.’ So a great radical liberation has been lost. We are all back in our (check) boxes.
