Update foreign key values in parent table

[seannie]

I have a member table that has all the standard info (name, address, phone number, etc.) and then I have foreign key ids referencing the related gender, country of the member

When I'm writing an update sql statement, I want to update the gender and country ids in the member table by entering their corresponding value in both the gender table(eg.male/female) and country table(eg.ireland/england/france/etc.)
I'm doing this as I want it to make sense when entering values rather than entering numeric data.

If anyone knows how this is acheived that would be great.

[r937]

When I'm writing an update sql statement, I want to update the gender and country ids in the member table by entering their corresponding value in both the gender table(eg.male/female) and country table(eg.ireland/england/france/etc.)

UPDATE members
   SET genderid =
       ( SELECT id 
           FROM genders
          WHERE gendername = 'male' )
     , countryid =  
       ( SELECT id 
           FROM countries
          WHERE countryname = 'canada' )  
 WHERE id = 937

although why you're doing this on an UPDATE instead of on the original INSERT is weird