Today, I ran across this post about social networking sites and gender identity, which is pointing to a campaign on MySpace to make the gender option more open and fluid so that people who fall out of the male/female dichotomy can feel welcome and utilise the site without having to 'hack' the metadata fields. This applies to a lot of sites and services, and it's something we ought to think about.
I think this kind of thing is important. It really is a choice between whether the Web is going to be put together by programmers or by users. And it's one of the reasons why I think the Semantic Web is important - because it allows the freedom for communities of people to say "I disagree with all your presuppositions, I'm going to chuck them all away and start afresh". In other words, in using URIs for extensibility, you decouple social policy from technology, because anyone else can grab another URI and start using that.
The example I always use is marriage. If you don't like the way that an ontology defines 'marriage', you can simply create a new one - pulling in the bits you like from others and just patching over the bits you don't like. That way, SouthernBaptist.rdf can define marriage as being between one man and one woman only, while TolerantLiberal.rdf can define it as "just a word that some people use backed up by a contract that the government can change at any time without any forewarning" (my personal definition of marriage). If you don't like either of these, you are only a short way away from encoding your values into the Semantic Web.
Let me point out another great aspect of FOAF - the gender property. It is a string literal. It gives two predefined strings "male" and "female", but allows you to put in other strings also. It does have a cardinality of one (the specification says so, I'm not sure whether that's implemented in any machine-readable code though), meaning that you can only specify one gender property for each Person or Agent. This is a bit limiting, as I could foresee people who may wish to list, say, "male" and "transsexual" or some other kind of category.
I'd like to invite anyone who cares about gender on the Semantic Web to make themselves known. I did a quick check on Swoogle, and there's nothing really too close to what we need, which is a way for people whose categorisation with regards to sex, gender or sexuality is not a straightforward male or female. Who's up for GenderHack - a fun new GetSemantic project where we work out the details? GenderHack would put together a list of general guidelines for programmers, standards-setting individuals and groups, and web application designers on setting policies relating to gender, sex and relationships, as well as privacy and social concerns.
It's up and going - see the wiki page.
