Roel wrote:
Well, of the reasons I gave these are most important:
* It prevents confusion in the gender of someone who responded to your topic.
I don't think that's important at all. Who is the person you want to know about? when you don't have their name, you have their photo, when you don't have their photo, you have the way everybody treats them, saying "her" or "he", if they are wrong, and the user doesn't mind, it's ok, if he or she cares, in the strange cases when you have to say "he or she said" and not "username said" (if that cases exist), the mistake will be etremely rare, only with new users.
Roel wrote:
* sometimes it's just nice to know someones gender, it adds more dimension to the user to know this as gender is a fundamental individual aspect which is related to his/her philosophical thinking, look at Simone de Beauvoir and Hannah Arendt.
Your second sentence is redundant. Scott asked why do you want it and yoy answered that yoy want it because it is nice.
Roel wrote:
Despite our brains being wired differently, men and women have the same intelligence, so I don't think that knowing somebody being female would lead to any denigrating remarks here, as philosophers are intelligent people who won't do it.
Seeing an argument with different eyes is the important thing, it doesn't matter if you consider a person more intelligent, or more... something, about anything. Of course, when it comes to experience, only a woman knows how it is to have children, etc, but... as I said, only a tall man knows how it is to be a tall man. For example, age can be a big problem when you deal with someone.
Come to ths forum doesn't make a person intelligent or philosopher. Also, we usually don't have the same definitions for such things.
I think that our brains are not so different, but even if they were... so what? would that change what they say or how you see it? that's the thing to avoid! I've seen lot of stupid ideas about it, let say that you want to learn from "gender knowledge", well, you have your whole life to see people, knowing their sex, and see how they act, here, you have something perfect to test your knowledge, a small group of people when you don't always know the gender, you can test here what you've lerarnt outside. Anyway, as I said, people can lie.
Also, in some countries, differences between sex are very big, and people tend to move on what they are used to. So... if an arabic woman comes here, it can be more difficult to her escape from their culture, feel free to express some things, etc (and I'm saying that as an example, I'm not saying that all people in a country are the same).
Roel wrote:
As I said, it's a CHOICE, if you don't want to be judged by gender, you can choose to not fill it in, but it might be beneficial to prevent confusion and it might help to understand other users better, I once replied in a topic about men, but was misperceived as woman as there are no genders and this could prevent such misunderstandings.
It won't help to understand other users better. Why? You can see the problem in your example, people look authomaticaly if you are a man or a woman, al they look, all they think, after reading you, is "what is the sex".