GEPS 027: Gender as an Entry Field

From Gramps
Revision as of 17:20, 8 April 2013 by Bmcage (talk | contribs) (See also)
Jump to: navigation, search
  • Feature request 5730 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 ( 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're 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

Also:

Resources