Re: Male/female

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