• tim (unregistered)

    Offtopic:

    That's BS, gender or sex is something you are born as. You can't change that with operations or by being called "her" when you're really a man. But I digress.... muwhahahaha

  • ResumeNext (unregistered)

    At my last job I worked on a big data warehouse project, and they had a table for gender. They had the following genders choices. Male, Female, Male formally Female, Female formally Male, Hermaphrodite and Unknown!

    Pretty much covers all bases.

  • Jake Vinson (unregistered)

    With my site's table structure, I spend hours daily fixing entries under the Sex field that contain "YES PLEASE!!!"

  • Tom Seddon (unregistered)

    Five pounds says this is a table that is indexed by the person's sex and provides you with the appropriate pronoun for use when composing (say) form letters, rather than any evidence of confusion...

  • Tom Seddon (unregistered)

    Bwuuuh... that's what I get for being tired, the blurb says that.

    I am still confused about how this counts as a WTF moment though. Unless the 3 is max length of string, in which the humour comes from this being English-centric and inadequate for localisation purposes.

  • Alex Papadimoulis (unregistered)

    Well, if it's used to generate reports (form letters), it should be in the report generation logic as opposed to being physically stored with the entity.

    There are instances where derived data is stored for performance issues, but I can't immagine a case where using something like (IsMale?'He':'She') would slow you down so much that you need to store that data.

  • Jon Galloway (unregistered)

    A friend at work inherited an application (purchased from another company) with an int field for sex.

    The field contains 0,1,2, and null. Good thing this field isn't a tiny int - I'm sure we're going to be way over 256 genders in the next decade or so...

  • yk (unregistered)

    m Male
    f Female
    u Unknown (!!)

  • Centaur (unregistered)

    If the database handles not only individuals but also collective entities, they may wish to be referred to as they/them/their.

    Hardcoding strings is generally not a good practice if there is any probability of localization, so having a dictionary of genders with all forms of pronouns may be a GoodThing.

  • anonymuse (unregistered)

    When people enter "Yes Please" into the sex field, we respond with an error message next to the field saying "ha, ha".

    We just got tired of it I guess :-)

  • Tim Smith (unregistered)

    Woohoo, hard code your software with a bunch of "IsMale ? 'He' : 'She'" stuff. That is a good idea.

    NOT

    May the gods of localization pour Pepsi in your keyboards. :)

  • Sean Lynch (unregistered)

    I bet the application has the value to place into those fields hard coded though.

  • tim (unregistered)

    Ohh brilliant Centaur, you've finally identified me. Although not new, I am in fact multiple people trapped in one body. I am 8 different people born as one and from now on you must address me as "they" and allow me to marry myself and file taxes on 8 people or you're violating my civil liberties.

  • secretGeek (unregistered)

    Someone pointed out in the comments of my blog that there are no less than TEN legitimate genders...

    I kid you not...
    (see http://www.secretgeek.net/y2_g.asp is you don't believe me...)

    But whether you use different pronouns for "transgendered post-op ambiguous to male" and "transgendered pre-op male to female", for example, I am not sure...

    To be safe, just use "he/his/him" 50% of the time and "she/shis/shim" the other half.

    love the DailyWTF!

  • rs (unregistered)

    I agree this doesn't seem like WTF stuff - three pronoun fields for possessive, subjective, and objective forms of pronouns. The names are informal, but probably more self-evident that way. Definitely English-only, but you can't expect a few lines of code to handle phrasing in all known human languages.

  • Casper (unregistered)

    Back a while ago, I worked on a US Government project (I'm a DBA). The gender list (I still remember this) was --

    - Male
    - Female
    - Male becoming Female
    - Male formerly Female
    - Female becoming Male
    - Female formerly Male
    - Indeterminate
    - Hermaphrodite
    - Sexless

    I'm not at all sure as to why the full list, but what do I know.

  • GrouchyAdmin (unregistered)

    I think the words you're looking for are: 'hir', and 'shi', if not 'hem'.

  • Shawn (unregistered)

    That doesn't look like a WTF to me. I took it as a mean of strings to use for building letters and the string lengths are 3 characters. SHE, HE, HER, HIS, HER, HIM all 3 letters or less. But this is a IDE shot so I have no clue really what that snapshot is of. But i'm doubting its a string array.

  • (cs) in reply to secretGeek
    secretGeek:
    Someone pointed out in the comments of my blog that there are no less than *TEN* legitimate genders...
    Maybe he meant there are *10* legitimate genders... and he was using binary numbers :)
  • Volodya (unregistered)

    I really don't understand why it's necessary for people to be queerphobic. Ok, we want to laugh at some poorly written code, but this is actually a good idea, which is poorly executed. The problem here is that the coder has limited the fields to 3 characters long, and perhaps the choices within the tables, but the idea is very reasonable.

  • anon (unregistered)

    the real WTF is the restriction to 3 letters. I have a few friends in the LGBT community, they consider an appropriate way to great someone for the first time is "Hi I'm anon and I prefer to take the male pronouns." I don't have a problem with it. There is also the use of the "no assuming of gender pronouns" (which confusingly are the same as the group pronouns.) "They, Their, Them" And the Explicitly genderless pronouns: "Zi,Zir, Zem" (or something like that)

    I've come the the conclusion that both sex and gender (consider 1 to be physical and the other to be matter of personal identity) to not only be not binary, but to not be easily represented as a finite number of sets (with unions intersections etc).

    I mean we have people who identify as: 30% Male, 20% female, 40% genderless and 10% haemaphodite. And are genetically XXY, and are percieved as female.

    And in the interests of future expandability we need to be prepared for when they have their own commonly used, and accepted pronouns.

  • Jacek (unregistered) in reply to anonymuse
    anonymuse:
    When people enter "Yes Please" into the sex field, we respond with an error message next to the field saying "ha, ha".

    We just got tired of it I guess :-)

    That's why you name your field (at least in frontend) "gender"

  • DaasBavel (unregistered)

    Interesting to see how attitudes have changed between the first post in 2004 and the latest comments...

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