It looks like this is more complicated than I expected... XenForo (the software we use) has Gender fields by default - but I removed them (via hard coding) from registration years ago, as we had quite a few complains that people didn't like giving out date or birth or gender details (as they didn't want to reveal too much info).
Now that it has been removed, it's proving quite difficult to make it not required on registration and optional to add later - I didn't expect this problem when thinking about it yesterday, but it's hard coded in to the forum software (rather than a "custom field" like "hardiness zone" or "country").
The easiest option would be to use the custom title as suggested by
@MaryMary - it should be possible to edit this on the personal details page:
https://www.gardening-forums.com/account/personal-details
It's not an ideal way of doing it, but I think on balance it would be better than forcing members to enter gender on registration. In XenForo 2.0 (which is very close to release), it looks like they've made gender an optional field, which means I can implement it when we upgrade. Here's the blurb from the XF2.0 information:
Gender and occupation moved to custom fields (upgrades)
New installs will no longer include gender and occupation fields and in upgrades they will be moved to custom fields. You may either remove them entirely or, in the case of gender, customize the available options.
If you've happy to use this workaround in the meantime, I'll be able to implement it properly when we upgrade to the new version
.
