GEPS 027: Gender as an Entry Field

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  • Feature request 5730 Add support for ISO/IEC 5218 - "Codes for the representation of human sexes" (was"Make Gramps more functional for LGBT data")

Introduction

Although it is commonly claimed that there are only two genders, there are actually countless genders. There are transmen and transwomen, there are genderqueers, there are intersex people and there are many many more types. These people are not secretive or rare, instead we are made to be invisible when we are forced to place ourselves into a recognizable category. These people cannot fit themselves into the categories of Female, Male, or Unknown and thus they cannot catalog themselves in Gramps. Even if this incapability is only a mistake in Gramps, it is a mistake which continues to invisibilize and alienate people.

Proposed Solution

I propose that to fix this, we create a new way to recognize gender within the Gramps databases. This can be done through the creation of a new GenderType class, a child of GrampsType that is created in a similar way to EventType or NameOriginType. Then, using this type, gender would be decided from a ComboBoxEntry system, allowing people to select Male, Female or Unknown, but also allowing people to fill in their own genders.

Some aspects of Gramps such as gender stats and gender-guessing (based on given name, which actually is only useful for finding the gender one was assigned at birth) would have to be retooled/rethought. Another barrier might be the conversion of the old data to the new.

How Extensive a Change Would this be ?

I'm in the process of making this change on my own machine, and so far I've edited 8 files (See 5730 for patches)

  • gui/editors/editperson.py,
  • plugins/view/relview.py,
  • gen/lib/person.py,
  • glade/editperson.glade,
  • gen/db/read.py,
  • gui/views/treemodels/peoplemodel.py)

and created one

  • (gen/lib/gendertype.py)

and it works! (mostly...) There are obviously still bugs, but this was just what I've been able to do with a week or so.

I'd be interested in doing a lot of the work on this project, I'm pretty new to python coding, but I feel capable, and as long as my work is reviewed, I'm sure I wouldn't do anything destructive.

Concerns

Here are the areas with prospective problems:

  • genderstats
  • gender guessing
  • translation?

If you have any concerns about this project, feel free to add them to this section:

See also

  • Pull request 1400 for Gramps 5.2.0 : Add new gender option of "Other"
  • bug 5730, with patches, Add support for ISO/IEC 5218 - "Codes for the representation of human sexes" (was"Make Gramps more functional for LGBT data")
  • bug 3718 Same-sex marriages cause members to be shown as "Father" and "Mother"
  • bug 3346 Same gender relationship reports
  • sub-translation
  • Animal pedigree

Also:

Resources

  • ISO/IEC 5218 - Codes for the representation of human sexes is an international standard that defines a representation of human sexes through a language-neutral single-digit code. The four codes specified in ISO/IEC 5218 are: 0 = not known, 1 = male, 2 = female, 9 = not applicable. See ISO-IEC-5218-2022.pdf preview