On 2 August 2010 17:29, Marnen Laibow-Koser <[email protected]> wrote: > 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). > > 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.
As the OP said, s/he needs to store either Male or Female - those are sexes. Certainly I agree on all the musings about gender-identity, and the difference between physiological sex. But that's the point - it's the physiological that I assume the OP wants to record. It might be an interesting experiment to store both sex *and* gender-identity of the subject of the DB, but probably outside the OP's requirement. > For genders, there are more than two categories I did say that... '"Masculine", "feminine", "neutral", etc' >> 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). That (the potential surgical change) was my point. But it's interesting that you say "Sex is biological" (whereas I used "physiological"), as can "biology" be changed with surgery - does having my genitals removed change my biological sex as well as my physiologically identifiable sex? If not... does that mean my DB needs three fields?! arrgh! > God gave them. right... time for me to stop there :-) -- 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.
