Do We Need a Campaign to Change "Gender" to "Sex" on Forms?

[nickymanchester]

I often see the term "Gender" used on forms and then a choice of man/woman or male/female. Although, it must be said, a few do also have the options of "Other" or "Prefer Not to Say".

I have read here of some MNers who are crossing out gender and replacing the word with sex (especially where there is just a binary M/F choice) and I'd never thought about doing that until I read about it here.

Anyway, what really prompted me to ask this question came from reading another thread about the video from the Scottish school:-

Student kicked out of classroom as believes there are only male and female

and one poster linked to reddit where the boy in that video explained what had kicked the whole thing off. Speaking about the teacher and what had happened earlier he said:-

He was showing us how to sign up for a certain website and on the sign up the options were Male and female and he made a big deal about how bad that was

So that whole video and that boy being sent out of the lesson was all kicked off by a website with a sign up screen that presumably asked for "gender" rather than "sex".

Any thoughts on this?

The kid is right. Good on him.

Yes we need to roll back this ridiculous change because of prudishness.

Yes!

Yes we do!. I was discussing this in a work context recently and was shocked / not shocked at the lack of interest / awareness of the issue.
My suggestion was
Sex: __
Gender: _
One thing I dont agree with is giving a checklist of all 1001 possible answers - just so someone can be horribly offended.

I cross out ‘gender’ and write ‘sex’ where appropriate (and sometimes a short slogan)

Did this survey on YouGov today and they slyly side-stepped the issue (also the survey was about ‘LGB+’ experiences in the workplace, not alphabet soup).

Yes. I have flagged this to an organisation I am involved with. Not least because the data will be corrupted. By all means add gender, but as well as, not instead of sex.