[Bug localedata/14641] Deprecate name_fmt

["bugdal at aerifal dot cx" <sourceware-bugzilla@sourceware.org>]

https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=14641

--- Comment #28 from Rich Felker <bugdal at aerifal dot cx> ---
> One could actually introduce a new keyword for women unmarried+married.
> This is a convention found in many cultures.

This would be a very bad change from my perspective. The entire aim of the
locale system should be avoiding offending users by presenting information in a
way that's culturally inappropriate. While in many cultures there is such a
historical distinction in titles, it's generally not necessary to use such
titles at all, and there will be a segment of members of the given culture who
are offended by it, consider it backwards, misogynist, etc. like Florian
mentioned. The locale system should not be reinforcing or giving preference to
conservative elements of the cultures it's modelling. It should be neutral and
acceptable to as diverse a group of people within the culture as possible.

On a related issue, even storing people's gender or sex in your data is a bad
idea unless it's absolutely essential. What do you do when the person's gender
is ambiguous (particularly a problem in information systems where an employee,
rather than the person being identified, enters their information into the
system), or when the gender on their legal documents does not match the gender
they identify as? Many systems nowadays seem to ask users to choose their title
rather than asking them for gender, which seems like a thinly-veiled way of
asking for gender, but even that has problems. For example you risk non-native
speakers of the language not understanding what title means or what the choices
are, then getting offended later when they're called by a gender-inappropriate
title they (accidentally) selected.

Anyway perhaps this is all tangential, but my point is that the locale system
should be deprecating all of these things rather than reinforcing them.

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