I was once tasked with posting a series of photos of staff and students so that people, especially incoming students, could more easily put faces with names. That was a significant convenience for everyone since unlike a regular workplace a school has a lot of people who are there infrequently and on different schedules. So in the spirit of convenience I made the photos two separate lists: male and female. This allowed people to cut their time in half when searching the photos. In its second year of existence, someone objected to its "gendering". I was actually surprised it took two years before someone had that objection. I explained it as an efficiency thing, and nothing more was said about it (and I didn't change it).Fred in Skirts wrote:When will we stop the nonsense of giving a piece of woven fabric a gender or a sexual designation??
The truth is that the vast majority of people do fall into the sexual categories pretty clearly. Gendering of products sold to them is an obvious marketing advantage, where the sex of the customer is likely to be a significant factor. Gendering is efficient, and efficiency is the main reason we gender. It's not going to go away, ever.
What we really have reason to oppose, I think, is the idea that we each have an obligation to conduct ourselves in ways that maximise that efficiency. If you are old enough you will remember the lament that older people expressed in the 1960s with the introduction of long hair on males (with The Beatles appearing on the Ed Sullivan Show). It was usually expressed something like "it's getting difficult to tell the boys from the girls."
The answer to that objection, I think, is "get used to it".