this post was submitted on 11 Mar 2026
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The email sounds like a college student participating in a sociology study for class and asking the professor for clarification. This is exactly the kind of thing that I'd expect to ask about gender along with a bunch of other personal information. The goal being to see if any patterns in the responses.
Sociology in general does have the problem that categories are important and helpful to spotting patterns, but people are very difficult to categorize. People just don't fit cleanly into categories