You are the only person who should have control over your identity. Period. No exceptions. No other person, company, or government should be able to constrain or dictate who you are, are allowed to be, how you’re classified or categorized, or what your name is or how it’s styled.
Across regions and cultures, names vary quite significantly. Family names can come first or last. Someone can have more than one given name. Some names have only one character. Some have prefixes or suffixes. Someone’s real name is not the same as their legal name. What seems like merely accent marks on other, more familiar letters to one person are—in fact—completely different letters to others. It should go without saying, someone’s name might consist entirely of characters someone else doesn’t recognize.
Yet every day, people wrangle with infrastructure that fails to acknowledge who they are by questioning or denying their identity. Their gender isn’t listed on an intake form, or a false choice of gender is presented. Maybe there’s no valid entry for a supposed required field. Some characters in their name are prohibited. Maybe their name is on a list of words not allowed at all.
There may be nothing more frustrating than a website that determines your own name is invalid. There are no excuses for not acknowledging who people say they are. They are the only authority on the matter.

If this doesn’t matter to you, first acknowledge that you are privileged in that your identity is considered normal. Your name, your gender, and all other attributes about yourself are what the world around you easily recognizes. Next, make sure any systems you control or can influence can accommodate everyone else.
If you or your company has any desire to accommodate people different from you, if you build forms or assemble database entries of people, just get this one thing right. It is the most basic, fundamental human right we have: to be recognized exactly as we are.
You can’t argue with people about their identities. Instead, restructure your systems (or your own brain if necessary) to work for everyone. If your company or entity can’t handle this, then I don’t have faith in any accessibility feature you support. This is the most important accessibility feature.

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