Django Rest Framework with ChoiceField

An update for this thread, in the latest versions of DRF there is actually a ChoiceField.

So all you need to do if you want to return the display_name is to subclass ChoiceField to_representation method like this:

from django.contrib.auth import get_user_model
from rest_framework import serializers

User = get_user_model()

class ChoiceField(serializers.ChoiceField):

    def to_representation(self, obj):
        if obj == '' and self.allow_blank:
            return obj
        return self._choices[obj]

    def to_internal_value(self, data):
        # To support inserts with the value
        if data == '' and self.allow_blank:
            return ''

        for key, val in self._choices.items():
            if val == data:
                return key
        self.fail('invalid_choice', input=data)


class UserSerializer(serializers.ModelSerializer):
    gender = ChoiceField(choices=User.GENDER_CHOICES)

    class Meta:
        model = User

So there is no need to change the __init__ method or add any additional package.

Django provides the Model.get_FOO_display method to get the "human-readable" value of a field:

class UserSerializer(serializers.ModelSerializer):
    gender = serializers.SerializerMethodField()

    class Meta:
        model = User

    def get_gender(self,obj):
        return obj.get_gender_display()

for the latest DRF (3.6.3) - easiest method is:

gender = serializers.CharField(source='get_gender_display')