Genuine question. Why does a program need to know the user’s gender? (I’m asking in general, not in this particular case). Just use gender neutral pronouns to refer to the user, or, better yet, don’t talk to me at all!

Aside from niche things like targeted ads and gendered health tracking and stuff.

[–] verstra 6 points 3 days ago

Gender PHP extension is a port of the gender.c program ... The main purpose is to find out the gender of firstnames.

As of why, you don't need a why in open source. Some people treat gender as a function of their firstname, apparently, and need that information somewhere - maybe for localization, maybe for personalization, maybe for form-filling auto-suggestion purposes.

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