vanillaforums/Garden — pull request #1174 by ckolderup (2011-10-23 07:33:05+00:00)
Title: Add third gender option, 'Unspecified', and make it the default

Forcing users to identify as either Male or Female is a bad idea— some people prefer not to reveal their gender while others choose to identify as something other than those two options. The new default selection, "Unspecified", allows people to remain uncommitted to one of those two options.

I couldn't run a Vanilla install in good conscience while forcing my friends to choose between "Male" and "Female", especially when "Male" is chosen by default.

One thing left to consider is the pronoun issue— I went with "they"/"their", which isn't necessarily preferable, but seems the simplest solution for now and is the choice I've seen in a lot of other systems that decide pronouns are a necessity.