I think treating this as a gender issue is missing the point. Google doesn't care about non-binary people, nor does it care about binary people. Google cares about advertisers.
If you enter a custom gender on your profile, you're adding lots of complexity that google just has no business incentive to untangle. How would you normalise gender data? how would the UI look like? What about languages other than english?
Honestly, being able to select gender at all is a footgun. Google knows better than you, who your ad should be shown to. It's probably in their best interest to be able to show ads to everyone they think might click them, so if they're giving the option to override this clearly shows that there's probably a demand among advertisers for this.
In conclusion: Google doesn't care about any of us. We're all just data points that can be discarded when they can't be processed.
I think treating this as a gender issue is missing the point. Google doesn't care about non-binary people, nor does it care about binary people. Google cares about advertisers.
If you enter a custom gender on your profile, you're adding lots of complexity that google just has no business incentive to untangle. How would you normalise gender data? how would the UI look like? What about languages other than english?
Honestly, being able to select gender at all is a footgun. Google knows better than you, who your ad should be shown to. It's probably in their best interest to be able to show ads to everyone they think might click them, so if they're giving the option to override this clearly shows that there's probably a demand among advertisers for this.
In conclusion: Google doesn't care about any of us. We're all just data points that can be discarded when they can't be processed.
Google may not care about any of us but it is indeed a gender issue..?