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Admin
"In a comment" that should have read. Still on my first coffee of the morning.
Admin
Amusingly you've confused sex and gender. Gender is masculine and feminine, not male and female.
Admin
What most companies care about is how people want to be addressed, using male or female pronouns. In that case, a boolean is just fine. The mistake is storing it as 'gender' or 'sex' when that is a) more complicated and b) not relevant. And if you really need to store a gender? Store it as a string and let them fill in whatever they want. Who cares if some clowns enter 'jedi'.
Admin
But why on earth would you use a Boolean? better in all sorts of ways to make it an enumerated smallint. At least that way you can deal with unknown, wouldn't_say, file_not_found, Sir_but_call_me_Claire_at_the_weekend if you've got politicians in your database.
And I'd say the reason most companies store this is not for pronouns, you're better off working from a title field for that, it's for using (and reselling) the data for market analysis and "segmentation" (yuk, yuk, wash my mouth out).
Admin
I'm guessing a nullable complex number is going to be more useful.
Admin
Didn't I just say they are one and the same? The idea of "gender as personal identity" is a modern fad, and I don't think it will last very long. Mostly because it isn't useful.
Admin
The correct solution to the pronoun game is to just not give a fuck, since in most people, its superfluous and instead of having the user/customer input their preferred pronoun instead of their gender. Everyone gets exacly what they want, and it has no bearing at all in the system anyway. And interrested parties can always guess genders from preferred pronouns instead.
Admin
As Remy said, It is COMPLEX.
Admin
They must get a SEX value of 0 too, rather than 6 or 9.
Admin
I believe in making the world safe for our children, but not for our children's children, because I don't think children should be having sex.
Admin
Here's the correct way to implement gender or sex in any system: Don't.