Why are you asking for my gender, again?

My laptop battery stopped working last weekend, so on Saturday I was trying to figure out how to get it replaced (it is still under warranty). When I went to the computer company’s website (ASUS), I saw that I could register my product online for tech support. When I opened the online registration form, I saw something that made me rather frustrated: one of the required fields of information was “gender.” And, as is usually the case, the only options were “male” and “female.” Normally at this point I would simply leave the website. However, I needed to fix my laptop. I answered based on my legal sex, male, in case for some random reason they needed to see my ID, which has a delightful (sarcasm) little “Sex: M” on it. Unfortunately, the website was no help and I had to call ASUS. On top of that, the company representative told me to go to the store where I bought it, and when I arrived the store told me to contact the company. FML

In case it wasn’t already clear, I am genderqueer. I do not identify as male nor female, but as something else altogether. Legally and medically my sex (biological gender) is assigned “male,” though I also take issue with there being a binary sex model. Furthermore, I find gender much more relevant to my life. By my model of sex and gender, my gender includes how I express myself (clothing, behavior, speech, pronouns, etc.) while my sex includes certain biological traits (presumably XY, flat chest, genitalia, hormones, etc.). The only people who need to worry about my sex are my sexual partner(s), my doctor(s) (sometimes), and me. With regards to my gender, I express myself however I want, as long as no one is hurt in the process. I wear what I want, I walk how I want, I talk how I want, etc.
Getting back to the laptop incident, to a degree I realize that most people in the U.S. follow the gender binary. Many people are unaware that people identify outside of the binary. I will excuse and educate those individuals. However, why on Earth would one make “gender” or “sex” a required question? There is absolutely no reason my laptop company needs to know my gender. That company is by no means alone in requiring that question to be answered. And further, I have never seen a choice for anything other than “male” or “female” except in a few LGBTQ forms.

There is usually little or no reason to require gender or sex, though here are the ones I have observed. Sometimes the “F” or “M” serves as an added layer of identification, such as occasionally with the government (when they aren’t regulating who one can marry, etc.), though that is a sketchy defense at best. Sometimes I think the identification is simply for the company to know how to address someone. The ASUS website refers to me as “Mr. [last-name]” which really annoying (the fact that the representative on the phone assumed I was a woman and called me Ms. [last name] partially makes up for it), and Facebook uses third-person pronouns on their news feed. I could go on a tirade about pronouns, but I am going to simply say that there are non-gendered ways to address someone. Perhaps gender is for demographic information, such as on surveys and the census. If that is the case, it should be optional. Sometimes it may be for marketing, but I find marketing way too gendered as it is. I buy whatever I wish from whatever section I wish--it could be a skirt, it could be a PC Role-Playing Game, it would probably be natural (for toiletries), and it could be so much more that is not limited to a male/female dichotomy. The only other use for one’s sex or gender that I could think of, but that is usually illegal (at least as far as the government defines “sex”) or at least frowned upon.

There is no much more I could have said and so little time. Sorry about the long rant as my introduction in this blog. I’ll try to make the next one happier and shorter.