> Is that really the first criticism that comes to mind when discussing this very specific endeavor?

This is how Show HN works. Someone makes a thing -- a form to collect data. Someone else finds that it's missing options they would find useful, so they offer a suggestion with supporting links to explain why the missing stuff would be useful. Now the form can be improved. High fives all around.

> There are MILLIONS of forms like that all over the internet.

There are millions of everything on the internet. But it's hard to find successful sites with mandatory gender fields and only two options, because that alienates users for no reason, and alienating users for no reason isn't what successful sites do.

Think about it this way: you might choose "female" sometimes to mess with marketers, but "male" is still an option. If you were filling out a form and the only options were "female over 35" and "female under 35," do you think that might tend to discourage male responses?

But you want to lie about your identity on purpose; this person wants to get identified but cannot.

It's a useful criticism.

In the UK current best practice (although it's still changing) would be to have two questions: one asking about gender identity and another asking about gender reassignment.

Someone born as male who identifies as female should need to tick "other", they should be able to tick "female".

> identifies as female

As a point of clarification, this should be "identifies as a woman". Sex (male/female) is a physical characteristic, gender (man/woman) is a social construct.

More info from transman's first link:

> Sex is assigned at birth, refers to one’s biological status as either male or female, and is associated primarily with physical attributes such as chromosomes, hormone prevalence, and external and internal anatomy. Gender refers to the socially constructed roles, behaviors, activities, and attributes that a given society considers appropriate for boys and men or girls and women. These influence the ways that people act, interact, and feel about themselves. While aspects of biological sex are similar across different cultures, aspects of gender may differ.

EDIT: The text you quote does not say that man / woman and male / female have different uses. There's nothing to say that male / female only refer to sex not gender.

If what you said is true (and it isn't) people would only need two questions on forms:

"Are you male or female?"

"Are you a man or a woman?"

This would make no sense and so we can safely ignore it.

Yes, people do still conflate sex and gender terms. But language is increasingly shifting toward using male/female to describe sex and man/woman to describe gender because it results in greater clarity.

Sex and gender are separate concepts, and having separate terms for each is a net positive for the English language IMO.

Well, but they can tick "female". Right?

I do think that "none" would be a useful addition, however. Or "whatever", maybe.

Yes, in this context it's extremely important. It's well accepted there's a pay gap between males and females. However there are also discrimination and pay differences for people who associate with non-cys gender identities. If you're going to expose wage information, it's important that it's done so not only in the name of efficient markets, but also in terms of social equality.

Isn't that kind of a strawman? I mean then what about race? What about the color of your teeth?

Kinda curious whether teeth whitening does make a difference.

It would also be helpful to know the numbers by race. If eye color discrimination ever becomes a problem people are discriminated on, then that should also be included.