My friend and I were discussing issues about gender identification (in the context of gender verification in the Olympic Games, which is actually more complicated than simply checking a person's cells for a Y chromosome, but that discussion is more detailed than necessary here). I was linked to this [url="http://blog.xkcd.com/2010/05/06/sex-and-gender/"]xkcd blog post[/url] on the issue of collecting gender information. While the WCA only uses gender information for statistical purposes, currently our stance is to require this information during registration. This hasn't presented a problem so far, but it might be more courteous/appropriate if we included a "Decline to state" option for people who want to protect their privacy or simply can't/don't want to identify themselves as either male or female.

I'll just say that personally I see absolutely no reason to take information regarding gender. The main reason for this is we have no reason to believe there will ever be a need to differentiate between males and females (and "others", so to speak) at any stage in the future of speedcubing. I can understand why it's needed for many sports, for example running, because males and females are significantly different physically, giving males a major advantage. But I doubt such a significant difference exists for hand/finger speed/dexterity and vision processing etc. (all of the components required in speedcubing). So if we never need to separate males and females into separate categories, we have no need for that information at all; it's just superfluous. That's my opinion anyway. Cheers, Dene.

i totally agree with both of you. i think we can keep it for information, but definitely no need to require it at registration...