Scott Marlowe wrote: > On Fri, 2006-12-08 at 10:44, John Meyer wrote: >> David Fetter wrote: >>> On Fri, Dec 08, 2006 at 03:23:11PM -0000, Raymond O'Donnell wrote: >>>> Just wondering.....how do list member represent gender when storing >>>> details of people in a database? >>> I usually use a table called gender which has one TEXT column, that >>> being its primary key. For one client I had, there were seven rows in >>> this table. >> Seven genders? Even San Fransisco thinks that's over the top. > > Let's see. > > Male > Female > Hermaphrodite > Trans (MTF) > Trans (FTM) > Neuter Just went in for my every-8-week blood donation. They have a new question in the screening form: "gender at birth". So if you decide that you can classify gender (or more properly "sex", as gender primarily relates to grammar) into a data type consisting of male and female, you can create whatever columns are necessary for your app: anatomical_sex_at_birth anatomical_sex_current anatomical_sex_desired_for_self chromosomal_sex preferred_anatomical_sex_of_partner Of course this breaks apart when dealing with that very rare syndrome (name escapes me) where the child appears female at birth but is actually a male whose male sex-organs descend and appear at puberty so I guess we need to add apparent_sex_at_birth. I realize that preferred_anatomical_sex_of_partner leaves a variety of unresolved possibilities but none as severe as those introduced by tetragametic chimerism. And there are others still resulting from the situation of in-progress transgender. But nobody said database design was easy. :) Cheers, Steve
