Gender Anonymity & Other Ideas

[Xious]

It occurred to me in tonev's thread on female members that the disclosure of gender should probably be turned off by default, and members permitted to elect to display this via preferences. Further, it would be nice to have the option to make other things invisible to non-Admins and non-Moderators, rather than leaving them blank, although this is of less import.

At the least, I don't see the motivation behind the forced-disclosure of a member's gender, and at the least, members should be able to hide this from non-Superuser accounts... Does this seem logical, and would it prove difficult to add? I suppose you can always add 'other' and 'not specified' to the list of choices if making it invisible by user-option would be too difficult. Adding 'other' would also be more PC, if anybody cares...

[UglyJoe]

You're not required to specify gender, age, or anything like that to create an account here.  Further, I don't really see a point in only allowing admins/mods to see your gender.  What is the scenario for that?  I mean, if you want to hide your gender, then you'd want to hide it from everyone, wouldn't you?  I would think the same applies to any other profile attribute as well.