How is moving from a gender-neutral system to a binary gender system a feature? This is a bug!
Dear developers, you do realize that there are more gender identities than male and female, correct? By limiting this selection to only 'male' and 'female', you're taking a step backward. You were better off leaving it neutral. Please read this to understand: w:en:Gender_identity
"Leaving it neutral" is erroneous; previous to 1.18 many women got addressed as men in non-English languages. MediaWiki's developers are aware of the difficulties in addressing people respectfully and accurately with regards to gender; for example, see the discussion on https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=30442 and https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=27744, which you're welcome to join. Sumana Harihareswara, Wikimedia Foundation Volunteer Development Coordinator 03:37, 23 December 2011 (UTC)
These changes are mostly about support for grammatical genders, as far as I understand, and most languages that have grammatical gender differences that I know of use mainly two genders. Gender identity is of course more complex, and has always been, but as these changes make it possible to make grammatical correct translations in more places, I would at least not consider it a step backward. (Though maybe the settings field in the preferences page could be worded differently. I'm sure any suggestions on how to phrase it differently will be taken into account if you file a bug on it). rotsee 00:00, 1 January 2012 (UTC)