4 ms·

If you feel resentful toward your coworkers or are planning on quitting your job soon: You could have Male, Female, and Transgendered tables, each of which poi

If you feel resentful toward your coworkers or are planning on quitting your job soon: You could have Male, Female, and Transgendered tables, each of which point back to the Patient table. Only the Female table (and perhaps the Transgendered table) would have an isPregnant column.

ak39 14y ago
Lol! But, will this work? How do we ENFORCE mutually exclusive Male, Female & Transgendered records for ONE Patient record?
rmc 14y ago
'Transgender'? You know that's not just one big lump of people? There are trans women and trans men. Also it would inaccurate (and possibliy) illegal to refer to a trans man as anything other than male in some cases (ditto for trans women).
- jerf 14y ago
  There is a non-zero subset of people out there who will look at any given fixed list of genders and insist they are not any of them, or be offended at being classed as "other" or any artfully disguised equivalent term. Data modelers have to draw the line at some point. Besides, since we are in medical context, your chosen gender is less important than your physical sex (including all the known intermediates and nons), which is what is actually useful to the medical system. Your chosen gender might as well be a write-in slot for all it matters ("Jedi").
  - rmc 14y ago
    Yes you will often get objections no matter what you say. However in the UK, under the Gender Recognition Act it's a criminal offence to reveal that someone is trans ( http://www.equalityhumanrights.com/advice-and-guidance/your-rights/transgender/transgender-what-the-law-says/ http://www.equalityhumanrights.com/advice-and-guidance/your-... ). Designing a database system, and leaving a criminal liability open like that, is very unprofessional. Not to mention that Data Protection Law in the EU requires you to store accurate personal data, and allows the person to have this data corrected (i.e. you have to change it if they tell you & can prove it). So you may think "We'll just lump you in the 'Transgendered' Category", however if the person says "I'm male, here's my birth cert showing male", you are legally required to change it.
- danielmiller 14y ago
  Agreed! "Male" isn't one homogenous lump of people; neither is "female". And, as you mentioned, neither is "transgender(ed)"[1]. [1]: http://www.paulinepark.com/2011/03/glaad-is-wrong-on-transgender-vs-transgendered/ http://www.paulinepark.com/2011/03/glaad-is-wrong-on-transge...
  - rmc 14y ago
    It is true that "not all men are the same" (and "not all women are the same"), but splitting into "trans male" and "trans female" is probably more accurate than lumping all "trans people" into one category. After all, it would be silly to have only 2 chategories "trans" and "cis" (trans:cis :: gay:straight).
  - danielmiller 14y ago
    [I can't respond to your comment directly. This is a bit off-topic, but I think it's interesting!! Here goes.] > It is true that "not all men are the same" (and "not all women are the same"), but splitting into "trans male" and "trans female" is probably more accurate than lumping all "trans people" into one category. > After all, it would be silly to have only 2 chategories "trans" and "cis" (trans:cis :: gay:straight). My original post was in jest—in fact, it was inspired by some holy-crap-I-can't-believe-it's-real database schema I've had to work with. Someone made an effort to hyper-normalize things and saddled us with a disaster: Every query required seven or eight slow joins, and there was duplicate data sprinkled everywhere (in my example, the same patient could inadvertently have records in both the Male and Female tables). The "architect" quit a few weeks after it went to production. Anyway, I consider (biological) "sex" to be a sliding scale: one end being female, the other end being male, and the middle being intersex. I consider (social) "gender" to be where one self-identifies on that scale. Others might disagree, but I think this is a useful distinction. Upon reflection, it's obvious that my schema isn't even remotely helpful! My inclusion of the "Transgendered" table implied that the three tables were genders, not sexes. Gender, being a self-identified trait, has nothing to do with whether one can get pregnant. So if we wanted to hyper-normalize our schema and indicate that only certain patients can get pregnant, we should clearly have a "Uterus" table. In fact, it would probably be wise to have tables for every body part, and inner-join on all of them whenever we need to grab a patient's information. Or we could use check constraints... but our schema diagrams would be much less impressive.

ak39 14y ago

Lol! But, will this work? How do we ENFORCE mutually exclusive Male, Female & Transgendered records for ONE Patient record?

rmc 14y ago

'Transgender'? You know that's not just one big lump of people? There are trans women and trans men. Also it would inaccurate (and possibliy) illegal to refer to a trans man as anything other than male in some cases (ditto for trans women).

jerf 14y ago
There is a non-zero subset of people out there who will look at any given fixed list of genders and insist they are not any of them, or be offended at being classed as "other" or any artfully disguised equivalent term. Data modelers have to draw the line at some point. Besides, since we are in medical context, your chosen gender is less important than your physical sex (including all the known intermediates and nons), which is what is actually useful to the medical system. Your chosen gender might as well be a write-in slot for all it matters ("Jedi").
- rmc 14y ago
  Yes you will often get objections no matter what you say. However in the UK, under the Gender Recognition Act it's a criminal offence to reveal that someone is trans ( http://www.equalityhumanrights.com/advice-and-guidance/your-rights/transgender/transgender-what-the-law-says/ http://www.equalityhumanrights.com/advice-and-guidance/your-... ). Designing a database system, and leaving a criminal liability open like that, is very unprofessional. Not to mention that Data Protection Law in the EU requires you to store accurate personal data, and allows the person to have this data corrected (i.e. you have to change it if they tell you & can prove it). So you may think "We'll just lump you in the 'Transgendered' Category", however if the person says "I'm male, here's my birth cert showing male", you are legally required to change it.
danielmiller 14y ago
Agreed! "Male" isn't one homogenous lump of people; neither is "female". And, as you mentioned, neither is "transgender(ed)"[1]. [1]: http://www.paulinepark.com/2011/03/glaad-is-wrong-on-transgender-vs-transgendered/ http://www.paulinepark.com/2011/03/glaad-is-wrong-on-transge...
- rmc 14y ago
  It is true that "not all men are the same" (and "not all women are the same"), but splitting into "trans male" and "trans female" is probably more accurate than lumping all "trans people" into one category. After all, it would be silly to have only 2 chategories "trans" and "cis" (trans:cis :: gay:straight).
- danielmiller 14y ago
  [I can't respond to your comment directly. This is a bit off-topic, but I think it's interesting!! Here goes.] > It is true that "not all men are the same" (and "not all women are the same"), but splitting into "trans male" and "trans female" is probably more accurate than lumping all "trans people" into one category. > After all, it would be silly to have only 2 chategories "trans" and "cis" (trans:cis :: gay:straight). My original post was in jest—in fact, it was inspired by some holy-crap-I-can't-believe-it's-real database schema I've had to work with. Someone made an effort to hyper-normalize things and saddled us with a disaster: Every query required seven or eight slow joins, and there was duplicate data sprinkled everywhere (in my example, the same patient could inadvertently have records in both the Male and Female tables). The "architect" quit a few weeks after it went to production. Anyway, I consider (biological) "sex" to be a sliding scale: one end being female, the other end being male, and the middle being intersex. I consider (social) "gender" to be where one self-identifies on that scale. Others might disagree, but I think this is a useful distinction. Upon reflection, it's obvious that my schema isn't even remotely helpful! My inclusion of the "Transgendered" table implied that the three tables were genders, not sexes. Gender, being a self-identified trait, has nothing to do with whether one can get pregnant. So if we wanted to hyper-normalize our schema and indicate that only certain patients can get pregnant, we should clearly have a "Uterus" table. In fact, it would probably be wise to have tables for every body part, and inner-join on all of them whenever we need to grab a patient's information. Or we could use check constraints... but our schema diagrams would be much less impressive.