I cannot agree more.
Only difference: You want to keep the context open, I want to nail it. At least to the degree necessary so you can facilitate remote studies. Meaning, you can send analytic code to someone’s data and the result will be correct within that context. And instead of “context” we call it “THEMIS convention”.
Understood, but unless you are studying transgenders this is really such a small proportion of people that it doesn’t have much influence over the vast majority of use cases: The characterization of populations by gender or the adjustment for confounding by gender.
Look: the convention is not telling people what to do. Only what the context is supposed to be. How the data should behave to be interpretable or analyzable. It is the job of the ETLer to create the best shot at guessing a birthday. And again: Unless we are studying babies the older we get the less precision we need for this.
That is an interesting idea. Please bring it up in the CDM WG, which introduces changes to the CDM based on use cases. THEMIS, on the other hand, is supposed to streamline the conventions of the existing fields and tables.