Michael Pavling wrote: > On 29 July 2010 17:25, bingo bob <[email protected]> wrote: >> What's the best way of to deal with gender. >> >> i.e. a Person is either Male or Female (generally and fot my purposes >> I'll stick with that rule). > > I don't know if it's annoying anyone else, but I've been following > this thread with interest, but every time I read "gender" it grates. > The word you're after is "sex". > "Male" and "female" are sexes. "Masculine", "feminine", "neutral", > etc, are genders... > > I appreciate that it seems to have become a convention to use the word > "gender" as a "polite" reference to the discrimination between innies > and outies...
Not exactly. Sex is biological, gender is psychosocial. There are people of male sex and feminine gender, and vice versa. > but for the vast, overwhelming majority there are only > two choices; either being male or female, and that's your sex (whether > it changes over the duration of your life is a different debate :-) No. Your sex doesn't change over the duration of your life if you're a human (at least, not without surgery, but that's a different debate). Your gender may. I know genderqueer people who don't consistently identify with one gender or another, despite whatever genitalia God gave them. > > Now, I'd store that in a text field in the record as either the full > word, or as "m" or "f", and load the DB and the model up with > constraints and validations, and not worry about having a Sex model, > with associated "sexes" table. Move along to other areas of your > application. Agreed if we're talking about sexes. For genders, there are more than two categories, and the list might change as other gender categories are recognized (yes, the issue is more complex than you'd think), so I'd probably use a model or at least an enumeration for that. Best, -- Marnen Laibow-Koser http://www.marnen.org [email protected] -- Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Ruby on Rails: Talk" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/rubyonrails-talk?hl=en.
