[DanBC]

It's a useful criticism.

In the UK current best practice (although it's still changing) would be to have two questions: one asking about gender identity and another asking about gender reassignment.

Someone born as male who identifies as female should need to tick "other", they should be able to tick "female".

[lowboy]

> identifies as female

As a point of clarification, this should be "identifies as a woman". Sex (male/female) is a physical characteristic, gender (man/woman) is a social construct.

More info from transman's first link:

> Sex is assigned at birth, refers to one’s biological status as either male or female, and is associated primarily with physical attributes such as chromosomes, hormone prevalence, and external and internal anatomy. Gender refers to the socially constructed roles, behaviors, activities, and attributes that a given society considers appropriate for boys and men or girls and women. These influence the ways that people act, interact, and feel about themselves. While aspects of biological sex are similar across different cultures, aspects of gender may differ.

[DanBC]

EDIT: The text you quote does not say that man / woman and male / female have different uses. There's nothing to say that male / female only refer to sex not gender.

If what you said is true (and it isn't) people would only need two questions on forms:

"Are you male or female?"

"Are you a man or a woman?"

This would make no sense and so we can safely ignore it.

[lowboy]

Yes, people do still conflate sex and gender terms. But language is increasingly shifting toward using male/female to describe sex and man/woman to describe gender because it results in greater clarity.

Sex and gender are separate concepts, and having separate terms for each is a net positive for the English language IMO.

[mirimir]

Well, but they can tick "female". Right?

I do think that "none" would be a useful addition, however. Or "whatever", maybe.