why do this?

In contemporary society I believe there is, and should be, a tendency away from insisting on binary gender distinctions. This package makes me wonder what its purpose is. If people want to tell you their gender, let them tell you, and if not, leave it alone. Further, the most progressive thinking is that people identify themselves as whatever gender they deem appropriate, if any. Making assumptions on them based on their name seems regressive. Finally, the male/female binary opposition itself should no longer be regarded as sacrosanct. Some countries officially recognize this by, for example, designing passport application forms that provide the options "male," "female," and "other."

This class is not about a person's gender.

This class is about grammatical gender. For example, even a ship, car .... they all have gender.

In some langages, such as German, French, Spanish, Czech, the grammatical gender is even more pronounced than in English.

But otherwise, I agree with your opinion.

OMG! sorry, I had no idea. I apparently overlooked that in the description. Thank you for enlightening me. I am appropriately embarrassed.

Totally agree, as a native English speaker who is fluent in Spanish and has studied French and German, that this could be very useful indeed. Some languages have rules governing the gender of nouns that you can count on, but others are really tricky.

sorry again, my groveling apology was a little premature! The descriptions says:

"This class can detect a person gender from the name in Latin text.

"It takes a given name of a person that uses Latin characters and attempts to detect the gender of the person by evaluating the characters that the the name uses.

"The class already knows the gender of a person that uses certain well known names but may guess the gender of the person that uses other names."

So, either the description is misleading and needs editing, or my penultimate comment still stands :-)