Anyone who says "people have names" is a wrong assumption can be safely dismissed as a crank.
A newborn baby needs to be entered into a hospital information system, obviously they are assigned a name at birth, right?
There are further examples of why you shouldn't require people to have names, for instance a police information system should take into account the possibility that the person entered into it is unable or unwilling to give a name (note: entering "John Doe" is a *very* poor workaround). I work with Personal Identifiable Information from all over the world and not only do I agree with th
I am not sure what hospitals near you do, but the ones around here usually put "Baby Boy ", or something similar, for newborns.
It's one thing to note that there are edge cases, like the kind of people who aren't going to use a computer system, or when they are newborn. But the overwhelming majority of people have names -- most of them include spaces, even -- and prefer to be addressed by name rather than by some arbitrarily assigned number. "I am not a number, I am a person!"
I am not sure what hospitals near you do, but the ones around here usually put "Baby Boy ", or something similar, for newborns.
So, they have 4 or 5 classifications - anatomical male, anatomical female, anatomically indeterminate (which would normally be about 1% of births), parental non-specified (a significant number of parents want the child themselves to find out what their gender is - say, another percent or so) and "other" (which would probably need to be free-form).
Your assumptions about what is "right" are almost certainly not universally accepted, even if you're utterly convinced of their universality.
This has never been more obligatory (Score:2, Funny)
Re: (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Anyone who says "people have names" is a wrong assumption can be safely dismissed as a crank.
Re: (Score:2)
Anyone who says "people have names" is a wrong assumption can be safely dismissed as a crank.
A newborn baby needs to be entered into a hospital information system, obviously they are assigned a name at birth, right? There are further examples of why you shouldn't require people to have names, for instance a police information system should take into account the possibility that the person entered into it is unable or unwilling to give a name (note: entering "John Doe" is a *very* poor workaround). I work with Personal Identifiable Information from all over the world and not only do I agree with th
Re: (Score:2)
I am not sure what hospitals near you do, but the ones around here usually put "Baby Boy ", or something similar, for newborns.
It's one thing to note that there are edge cases, like the kind of people who aren't going to use a computer system, or when they are newborn. But the overwhelming majority of people have names -- most of them include spaces, even -- and prefer to be addressed by name rather than by some arbitrarily assigned number. "I am not a number, I am a person!"
Re:This has never been more obligatory (Score:2)
So, they have 4 or 5 classifications - anatomical male, anatomical female, anatomically indeterminate (which would normally be about 1% of births), parental non-specified (a significant number of parents want the child themselves to find out what their gender is - say, another percent or so) and "other" (which would probably need to be free-form).
Your assumptions about what is "right" are almost certainly not universally accepted, even if you're utterly convinced of their universality.