I never noticed the gender choice in LJ. I would've picked "unspecified" for the heck of it.
The only case in which I can see a site caring about your gender are when the site is going to offer medical advice (let's face it -- someone born female isn't going to be worried about her prostate). OTOH, it'd be smarter to have options for transsexuals and folks with both sets of organs (I know at least one person who fits that description) if you're going to go *that* way.
In medical contexts, sex becomes relevant. Elsewhere, they mostly care about gender even if they spell gender "sex" on the form, and there are some valid reasons for caring about gender. The most obvious valid reason for them to care is to please their advertisers, who believe (correctly or incorrectly) that gender is a useful predictor of who will buy what. That's a valid reason for them to want to know, but many folks would agree that it's not a valid reason to insist on knowing. Other sites may just want to be able to tell whether they're inadvertently driving potential readers away by gender, or need to get a rough idea to demonstrate non-discrimination. There are also, of course, a much greater number of stupid reasons to ask. And even when they want to know for a reasonable reason, a "myob" option would be nice, from the users' point of view.
And when they have a good reason for wanting to know, if they only provide two options (either because they've never thought about it, or "because there aren't enough non-binary-gender folks to worry about"), they've got no way of ever finding out whether their assumption about how many of their users are non-binary is wrong.
(no subject)
The only case in which I can see a site caring about your gender are when the site is going to offer medical advice (let's face it -- someone born female isn't going to be worried about her prostate). OTOH, it'd be smarter to have options for transsexuals and folks with both sets of organs (I know at least one person who fits that description) if you're going to go *that* way.
(no subject)
And when they have a good reason for wanting to know, if they only provide two options (either because they've never thought about it, or "because there aren't enough non-binary-gender folks to worry about"), they've got no way of ever finding out whether their assumption about how many of their users are non-binary is wrong.