pg-gender

A progressive and inclusive model for gender in the database. best.

Description

An implementation of a three dimensional type, gender. This model comes from gender-spectrum.org which breaks down gender into

• Body - "our body, our experience of our own body, how society genders bodies, and how others interact with us based on our body."

• Identity - "our deeply held, internal sense of self as male, female, a blend of both, or neither; who we internally know ourselves to be."

• Expression - "how we present our gender in the world and how society, culture, community, and family perceive, interact with, and try to shape our gender. Gender expression is also related to gender roles and how society uses those roles to try to enforce conformity to current gender norms."

A user interface for this will require something like three sliders (for the three axis dimensionality), or a 3d picker.

Internally, each axis is stored as a float. On one side of the axis, we have "female" which is represented as 1, and on the other side we have "male" which is represented as -1. The full range between [-1,1] can be used to represented the spectrum of each attribute. 0 represents known values.

Synopsis

-- Known to not identify with a gender
SELECT gender.mk_gender(0,0,0);

-- Unknown gender
SELECT undef::gender;

-- Show the 3d gender (text-represetnation)
-- And, the 2d-body, 2d-expression, and 2d-identity (text-representation)
SELECT user_gender,
	gender.body(user_gender),
	gender.expression(user_gender),
	gender.identity(user_gender)
FROM persons;

-- Index it, and find those who identify in a similar fashion with KNN
CREATE INDEX ON persons
	USING gist (gender);

-- You may want null::gender
SELECT gender.polar_male();   -- Male   = mk_gender(-1,-1,-1)
SELECT gender.polar_female(); -- Female = mk_gender( 1, 1, 1)

-- Should return all gender-possibilities
SELECT user_gender
FROM table
WHERE user_gender BETWEEN gender.polar_male() AND gender.polar_female();

Background

Gender is tricky. We can all agree there are more than two genders, and this is a serious attempt to model something more sophesticated in the database than currently available. When standards like IEC 5218 are so flagrantly reactionary, we have an obligation not to follow them.

Caveat

Transphobia and alphabet soup jokes are not welcome.