Gender in genealogy

[John Clark]

I'm working on modeling gender as it actually occurs in the real world, and have written up my thoughts on it here. I would love to hear what you guys think, especially about modeling sex changes and being neither male nor female.

- John C.

[Tony Proctor]

Be sure what you're modelling John. Gender and Sex are not the same thing - see www.parallaxview.co/familyhistorydata/research-notes/worldwide-fh-data#Gender. What you see in the records will nearly always be Sex but some people may be shy of using that term when it is the correct word. I tried to point this out to findmypast because their new site describes the male/female data as Gender rather than Sex. The reference to "Sex" in my suggestion was promptly replaced with asterisks. I tried to query the over-zealous censorship and placed hyphens between the letters to avoid it happening again. They still censored it and so my query is virtually a whole bunch of asterisks  :-(

 

I model birth sex as a tri-state Boolean (basically maning 1=Male, 0=Female, and nothing if unknown). That keeps it locale independent. Any gender or lifestyle choices can be modelled as a custom Property (=" fact" to everyone else). Medical procedures are modelled as Events.

 

    Tony Proctor

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[Doug Blank]

We've been struggling with this issue in Gramps for a long time.

This essay came up during one of the last discussions:

"Disalienation: Why Gender is a Text Field on Diaspora"

http://www.sarahmei.com/blog/2010/11/26/disalienation/

-Doug

On Tue, May 6, 2014 at 5:21 PM, John Clark <socra...@gmail.com> wrote:

I'm working on modeling gender as it actually occurs in the real world, and have written up my thoughts on it here. I would love to hear what you guys think, especially about modeling sex changes and being neither male nor female.

- John C.

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[Brooke Ganz]

Things to think about:

- As nice and simple as it would be for our genealogy programs, Sex is not always boolean in humans.  It just isn't. The number of people who are intersex to some degree is between 0.1%-0.2%, which means over three million people in the US.  If it were not for the invention of karyotype (chromosome) testing in recent years to reveal things like Klinefelter's Syndrome (people who are XXY but phenotypically male, but occasionally with gynecomastia) or Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome (people who are XY but phenotypically female, albeit minus a uterus), many more cases would never get recognized at all; many of these cases never get noticed until the person is of childbearing age and is trying to find out why they or their partner cannot become pregnant.  Obviously, most men with Klinefelter's will choose to keep identifying legally and personally as male, and the same for women with AIS, regardless of their chromosomes.  But some people would choose to identify as Intersex, and they should have the right to that option, especially since it's technically biologically true!  So, my proposal: genealogical programs should be able to model M, F, U (or blank) for Unknown, or I for Intersex.

- And then things get more complicated with transsexuals -- a not insignificant number of whom, by the way, also have or had intersex conditions. The right to legally correct a birth certificate and other government identification varies from place to place, even from state to state.  And it's orthogonal to the choice of the individual to also have had surgery or other medical interventions -- some places require the person to have had surgery in order to update legal documents (i.e. North Dakota) and some places do not (i.e. South Dakota).  So really there are two different Events that need to be modeled here for genealogy programs: Legal Change of Gender/Sex and Medical Change of Gender/Sex.  Although frankly, I can't think of any other kinds of medical Events that are tracked in a genealogy program, other than birth and death, so perhaps just noting the legal formalities would be sufficient, since that creates a paper trail.  It would definitely be a thing I would want to keep track of in the research process, to be able to document that John Doe in census #1 is the same as Jane Doe in census #2, just to reduce confusion.  But on the other hand, I also know that many transsexuals absolutely hate reminders of their previous name and gender status, and really would not want any genealogy program, even one run by a well-meaning relative, to list any documentation of their previous status, especially if that family tree might ever go online in any way.

- A not-too-uncommon scenario: John Doe marries and has biological children with his wife, then legally and medically transitions to female and becomes Jane Doe.  In that scenario, doing a genealogical pedigree of one of their children should show there to be two mothers.  Luckily, this one is a solved problem since every single genealogy program on the planet, offline or online, is able to handle a tree with a same-sex couple in it and could draw the pedigree correctly…oh wait, no, my bad, there's still one online tree program that's a hold-out about that kind of thing.  Well, maybe they'll come around eventually.

Short answer: this is all a little tricky, and has some privacy implications to boot…but it's still not as hard as having to deal with multiple date formats or names in non-Latin characters.  :-)

- Brooke

[Brooke Ganz]

Wow, that was some lousy math right there. That should have said "over three hundred thousand people" in the US, not three million people. Still not a small number, though.

- Brooke

[Tony Proctor]

I was going to write about this later but the current thread has forced my hand: http://parallax-viewpoint.blogspot.com/2014/05/no-sex-please-were-genealogists.html

 

    Tony Proctor

[Brooke Ganz]

Hahaha, love the title.  :-)  And I think you bring up some very good points, particularly about the fact that Australia, Germany, Nepal, and New Zealand do allow birth certificates to legally state "Intersex".  Related to that point, there are countries that allow "third sex" designations in adulthood, if not legally or on birth certificates, and those designations are actually quite old cultural norms, not new ones (i.e. Kathoey's in Thailand, or Fa'afafine's in Samoa).  Surely we'd want our genealogy programs to play nicely with other cultures and legal systems, to be as accurate as possible -- and to gain the widest market share and adoption.

- Brooke

[Tony Proctor]

Thanks for the extra info Brooke. Consider, though, that if some aspect of real-life (e.g. birth sex) has a finite number of "states" (e.g. male, female, intersex, unknown)  then they can be normalised using a controlled vocabulary. There's a difference between the evidential description and the normalised internal value, and STEMMA has a general mechanism for recording both side-by-side. This same approach even applies to dates where a normalised internal value accompanies a transcription of the original written form. I only mention this because I want to emphasise that point in the article about distinguishing evidence and conclusions. Evidence is easier to share than the conclusions.

 

    Tony

----- Original Message -----

From: Brooke Ganz

To: root...@googlegroups.com

Sent: Sunday, May 11, 2014 7:42 PM

Subject: Re: [rootsdev] Gender in genealogy

Hahaha, love the title.  :-)  And I think you bring up some very good points, particularly about the fact that Australia, Germany, Nepal, and New Zealand do allow birth certificates to legally state "Intersex".  Related to that point, there are countries that allow "third sex" designations in adulthood, if not legally or on birth certificates, and those designations are actually quite old cultural norms, not new ones (i.e. Kathoey's in Thailand, or Fa'afafine's in Samoa).  Surely we'd want our genealogy programs to play nicely with other cultures and legal systems, to be as accurate as possible -- and to gain the widest market share and adoption.

- Brooke