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Notes -
To the degree that gender is a useful concept separate from sex, it is exactly a belief. (We could also rate passing, on a scale of 0 (always read male) to 1 (always read female), but that depends on effort, situation and so forth and is probably not worth the cost of measuring.)
Consider a column named "religion" (which is something the government sometimes tracks, e.g. to put on dog tags).
Sure, I could put in
Name: Sarah. Soul: None. Auxiliary Note: identifies as ensouled / Roman-Catholic.But that would be an asshole-atheist move. If I put in
religion: RCCinstead, then almost nobody is going to read that as "she has an eternal soul which she has pledged to the Roman-Catholic version of the Christian god and thus she will either go to RC heaven or RC hell, unlike the next guy who is Sunnite and will either go to that heaven or wherever bad Sunnites go" because nobody expects religion to work like in D&D.Or take the column "name". Nobody will claim that "Sarah" is her eternal True Name objectively etched in her very soul. Perhaps her parents named her "Karen" and she really hated that name and got it legally changed. Should we write:
Name assigned at birth: Karen. Auxiliary Note: trans-named / Sarah-identifyingThis I think is exactly the bone of contention behind the relabelling. To the trans, 'gender identity' is an innate characteristic that is often incorrectly assigned at birth and rediscovered later in life. That is very different from the conception that sees 'gender' as being a propaganda concept that is actually the exact same as sex and 'gender-identifying' as a category mistake at best and a mental illness at worth. That is what I mean by 'reifying' - the manner in which such things are recorded implicitly gestures towards an official attitude on them and is at least in part an attempt to take hold of the 'neutral' ground.
To take a more extreme example for illustration, if Sarah is an otherkin we do not say
Name: Sarah. Species: unicorn.If we note their weird beliefs at all, it would be as a note in the misc section.Finally, let's take your atheist example. Let's imagine a very, very atheist society in which 2% of people at most have a religion and it's regarded as a ridiculous peculiarity and evidence of schizophrenic delusion. Such a society would certainly not have a
Soulcolumn in their datasheets! Nor would they have a religion column because almost nobody has a religion and nobody cares about the people who do. They would, where appropriate, note the person's peculiarities in the misc section.I was amused to see 'Lord' and 'Lady' as potential titles on a questionnaire I was sent recently from Harley Street. You wouldn't get that in America, but you might get 'Mx' or various other formulations. The questions that are asked, and the way the answers are recorded, show society's implicit viewpoint and define common sense, so they are absolutely going to be a battleground in cases like this.
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