How about a custom fact “Gender Identity,” which is what we’re really talking about. That can be associated with different dates.
I know that I am going to offend some people by saying this, but a male has a Y chromosome, a female doesn’t. How they view themselves doesn’t change their DNA, which is the determinant of gender.
There are those that are going to argue that you are mixing up sex and gender. They will say that your chromosomes determine your sex.
I just checked dictionary.com (though I’m not sure how authoritative it is) and
Sex is defined as the male, female, or intersex division of a species, especially as differentiated with reference to the reproductive functions.
And
Gender is defined as either the male or female division of a species, especially as differentiated by social and cultural roles and behavior.
So, you are right that I missed that fine distinction. But I still think it’s a good idea to have a Gender Identity fact. That will reduce the confusion some people might have when reading the reports, etc.
Nothing will reduce the confusion people have over these issues. I for one am totally confused! It seems you can change your mind on how you identify on gender at will. I don’t really care what anybody wants to be - I don’t have any in my tree that I am aware of and I concentrate more on going backwards to my forebears. I don’t do much on the present generation which is where this is all happening. How people identified in the previous generations we will probably never know.
This is a really interesting discussion. I’m always slightly amused to see the ‘purists’ talk about blood lines, given how many children in their ancestors may have been born on the ‘wrong side of the blanket’!
I think having a change of gender fact would be the most useful. You could set the gender to be what the legal situation is currently so that reports would read correctly (though that wouldn’t help those who prefer different pronouns).
Trans people have difficulty enough in being correctly gendered without the reports bring wrong. The old name could be set in the change gender fact, perhaps?
To say adopted children are not truly part of the family is deeply upsetting to adoptees and adoptive parents. You can use an 'adopted" fact if you want to, but for many parents they are truly part of the family. Foster children are different,as they are part of the family for usually shorter times, though long term foster children might like to be included.
I would like to see Roots Magic (and I’m a user since Family Origins days) have the functionality for people to reflect current family relationships eg gay marriage, gender change etc the pure DNA genealogists dont have to use them but it would good for those of us with,‘messy’ families.
Thank you for this discussion.
This whole thread seems to ignore physical reality. One is born with a biological gender which is the basis of genealogy. One can flip a mental switch and/or have cosmetic surgery but the underlying DNA/RNA remains. A miscellaneous fact type could be used for mental identity, addoption, etc.
From decades of doing database work before retiring, my opinion may be ‘dated’; but, … is there any reason a course of adding more than the two current male/female options, in a drop-down set of choices which would contain more options than just ‘male’ and ‘female’. Other areas would need some work (Source, Citations, maybe legal information), as well as queries, reports, etc. But do-able.
Personally, I don’t believe genealogy is only about DNA and blood lines. Adoptions, shared families, court-assigned custody and/or parenting are but a few of today’s actualities; of which I would think ‘accuracy’ of data trumps all of the other considerations.
This would require further development which would contain the spectrum of possible criteria, facts, et al; but it is do-able.
Are there any social workers or family law professionals in the audience?
Just an opinion.
The primary reason gender/sex is left at male, female or unknown is due to our ability to share with other programs or websites. If we added a separate gender fact it wouldn’t be supported elsewhere. I usually recommend if you need to record a gender change to change the sex to unknown. Then when it can be properly supported you can search on unknown sex and change it.
For data-efficacy, I really thing ‘each gender’ data-point needs to be unique and permanent. It can remain editable (with notation/explanation), but I really think there needs to be something to identify the event(s).
Just a thought.
How is adoption handled currently in: RM, in the GEDCOM standards, in other major Genealogy apps?
From a database construction perspective, is there any parallelism or objective comparisons between re-marriages and or gender assignments, or even adoptions?
Oh but it very much is about precisely that. The rest of your use cases are NOT genealogy, they are family history. The two are very much different things with a bit of overlap. You are attempting to use genealogy software to do family history and as such you are running into limitations due to that.
On adoption, if known add the birth parents for the child then create a 2nd set of parents for the child’s adoptive parents-- mark them as adoptive instead of birth
note that although you say adopted ( or any of the others on the list) the child will be listed in all reports as a child born to both couples (depending on which couple you focus on)–so what you then need to do is add an adoption fact–which then shows up in the reports ( except fan charts or kinship reports)-- basically the use of adopted or the others does NOTHING EXCEPT as a visual reminder for you
edit-- forgot to say that if you do list a child with adoptive parents, it will transfer as such in a gedcom—I have transferred them into RM by gedcom from that company we shall not mention as well as sent a gedcom to Ancestry that showed just fine-- just depends on the other software…
I think you may be onto something. Give us some more info, such as in a mental “walk-through”?
Thank you.Hoping this will be improved upon in the future.
Thank you, well stated, and I had not considered it from that perspective. Just another newbee shortsightedness.
