It doesn't do any of those things. Behind the scenes facebook has an extremely rich representation of your identity. In fact it is so good that they could proba

It doesn't do any of those things. Behind the scenes facebook has an extremely rich representation of your identity. In fact it is so good that they could probably even predict your favorite color and make that the background of your profile. Would that kind of approach be considered not limiting one's identity and personal representation? At the end of the day facebook wants to collect certain kinds of information to sell to advertisers and the site is set up to do just that. If for some reason advertisers wanted to know tomorrow if you also self-identify with two different genders then you'd be damn sure that tomorrow there would be two gender drop-down lists when you sign up. That is unless they couldn't predict it from the massive trove of data they already have. So really the argument in the article comes down to I don't like facebook's UI because it doesn't let me input the kind of information I want to input all the while forgetting who the real customer of that data is and that there is this thing called HTML/CSS/JavaScript that lets you express yourself as freely as you want for less than $5/month.