Add missing awareness of "Other" gender

Development Beta Testing
1

While looking for something (how the relview.py Relationships view finds the immediate family of the active person so efficiently), noticed that the relationship.py has lines for the 5.1 genders but not the new 5.2 OTHER gender.

Does it (and the 40-or-more subsequent gender specific handlings) need to be expanded?

Related threads:

2

For relationships, we treat Other and Unknown in the same way. In English this is sufficient. Are there any languages where this would cause a problem?

1 Like
3

Shouldn’t “Other” be explicit in lines like:

Also, should a line 45 Remark be inserted mentioning that ‘the “Other” gender expansion for 5.2 is handled as ‘else’ cases (similarly to “Unknown”) for English’? So that will be a prompt for other languages that might handle Unknown and Other differently.

4

Is this a real problem? Can you give an example where the Other and Unknown case would be different?

5

I don’t know if it is a real problem. That is why I am asking.

Perhaps it needs deeper beta testing in real-world situations.

But I (also) don’t know how to find what features leverage things (like that string generation on lines 3132-3140) in order to do targeted testing.

6

There is a big difference: “Other” means “Neither Male nor Female” gender. “Unknown” means “It is not known whether the person’s gender is Male, Female or Other”. Gramps internal logic should reflect those definitions, especially if there is any dispute about what those labels actually mean.

7

I think that Nick is asking if there is an expected difference in what the module calculates as a result of this selection. He knows the Genealogical Data difference between Unknown and Other gender.

There haven’t been too many places where the output of Gramps changes due to 5.2’s new gender option. (Like the new Other gender symbol in the Relationships view modes.)

8

Yes. For example we may have code similar to:

if gender == Person.MALE:
    relationship = _('brother')
elif gender == Person.FEMALE:
    relationship = _('sister')
else:
    relationship = _('sibling')

Are there any languages where we have to distinguish between Person.OTHER and Person.UNKNOWN?

We could add extra conditions and include a translation context:

if gender == Person.MALE:
    relationship = _('brother')
elif gender == Person.FEMALE:
    relationship = _('sister')
elif gender == Person.OTHER:
    relationship = _('sibling', 'Other gender')
elif gender == Person.UNKNOWN:
    relationship = _('sibling', 'Unknown gender')

However, this just adds extra work for the translators and probably isn’t necessary. I haven’t had any feedback from a translator requesting this.

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9

I have one ex colleague who uses the pronouns They/Them on LinkedIn. She joined our team during the lockdown, and I never met her in real life, but at that time, she was a woman with short hair.

She may now identify as queer, or non binary, but I have no idea how such a gender would translate to a relationship, in a report, or other display.

In this context, I am referring to her gender as a role, chosen by her/them person, not to her/their biological sex, which I assume is female.

Biological sex can be intersex, and some other values may also be supported by real science. And there are of course situations where a child’s sex can not be determined, for medical reasons, or where the wrong sex is recorded.

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10

I would disagree that this is sufficient in English, especially in 2024 as the number of publicly “out” people who are transgender and/or intersex continues to increase. In my own family, there is at least one known occurrence of an intersex individual. Their sex/gender is known, but is neither male nor female–falling under the “other” option. I think treating this as distinct from someone of unknown sex is important for tracing lineage, since unknown represents a lack of information/goal for research while “other” represents a known data point.

11

You seem to be discussing a different point.

This discussion is merely about the pronoun handling.

If you want to argue that Other is an insufficient gender option to encompass those transgender and intersex situations (beyond Unknown, Male and Female), there is another thread for that.