I am not a database guy, but am trying to clean up another database. So my question is would normalizing the gender table be going too far?
User table:
userid in
I can think of applications where I'd use different columns for sex and gender, have three values for sex (male/female/decline to state) and six for gender (male/female/transgendered male/transgendered female/asexual/decline to state). Granted, I live in San Francisco, where there's an level of public discussion of transgender issues that much of the rest of the world is behind the curve on.
The point is: without a compelling reason to think otherwise, I'd assume that any simplifying assumption I made about demographics was limited and parochial. The cost of breaking sex out to its own table is small now and expensive later. I wouldn't avoid the small cost on the basis of an assumption.