Gender should be optional/allow other values

[abeyer]

The gender field seems to be required on records wherever it is present, and only has male/female choices. This forces me to enter bad data where I don't know someone's gender or they identify as some other gender.

Ideally it would be nice to allow other values and 'unknown', but at a minimum making that field optional would at least avoid forcing the user to include known bad data.

(Given the subject matter, I really hope this doesn't become a flamewar...please feel free to lock/delete if it is in danger of doing so. And for the record, and perhaps in hope of averting that, I'll say that this is an actual issue that came up for me when trying the app with online contacts where I don't even know their gender for certain, and some friends who specifically identify as some non-binary option, not an "improve the world with social justice issue.")

[ocdtrekkie]

Related to #25 and #36 and now #43

[shockey]

+1. I think we can avoid making this a political discussion - the fact is, I have friends with preferences re: their gender, and I'd like to have a place to document that.

[sergiotapia]

+1 - three options should be enough though.

• Male
• Female
• Unknown (this can be a text field for people to just type in whatever they want)

[djaiss]

I think that we should have 4 values actually

• male
• female
• other/textfield
• nothing (they can skip it entirely)

[sergiotapia]

So if they don't select anything they just have a nil value in the database. Having a separate input for "None" seems redundant.

[djaiss]

@sergiotapia actually no, because these are radio buttons. If you choose one value by mistake, the only way out would be to use "other", and perhaps you don't even want "other" as being a gender?

[sergiotapia]

I think
Male (radio)
Female (radio)
Other (radio) on click shows a text input.

Why should there be another radio button called None?

[SuperDoxin]

@sergiotapia Because you can't unselect radiobuttons, so without one there is no way to select none. In any case it's entirely possible to know people without being aware of their gender, so having a none option would be nice.

[djaiss]

I think we can do the simplest thing and do as follow:

• Rather not say (by default)
• Male
• Female

I'm going to open a PR for this small change.

It's more complex to add an other field and this can be done later in the future.

[github-actions]

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