How can I deal with diverse gender identities in user profiles?

I'm trying to work out the wording for (preferably) a gender dropdown in a user profile of a site I'm working on. I want to be inclusive of people who don't gender orient to either male or female ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_identity ) but I don't want to use a textbox for this field because I'd still like to have some clear demographic data about the majority of my users who would like fall under the simple male/female heading.

If I use a text box I'd have to parse out a lot of "male", "MALE", "Man", "guy", etc. to get the clean data.

My thought was to just have a simple dropdown for "Gender: " with the options of "male", "female", and "other".

Is "other" an appropriate handling of this group? Is gender the right label for this field?