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FamilySearch / gedcomx

An open data model and an open serialization format for exchanging genealogical data.
http://www.gedcomx.org
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Change 'gender' to 'sex' to align with contemporary usage #318

Open brylie opened 5 years ago

brylie commented 5 years ago

In the Person data model, the key gender allows Female, Male, and Unknown values. This usage of the word 'gender' is more akin to the concept of 'sex assignment', i.e. the person's sex as determined at birth. Furthermore, the above values leave out the possibility of an 'intersex' categorization.

Proposal

Change the usage of gender to sex to adhere to contemporary usage of those words. Allow 'intersex' to be used as a value for a person's sex.

stoicflame commented 5 years ago

Hi! Thanks for participating, and thanks for the proposal.

This issue has been identified and discussed, and it's practically approved. The use of the term gender was an unfortunate deficiency in version 1.0. I can validate that gender, in the context of GEDCOM X 1.0, means sex. Developers using version 1.0 will need to make sure the appropriate term is displayed in the UI, even though the property of the underlying data model is incorrectly named.

Changing the name of the property would be a backwards-incompatible change, so this proposal will be officially implemented in version 2.0 of the spec. We do not currently have a timeline for the development of version 2.0, but I have assigned this issue to milestone "2.0.0", where it will be gathered with other backwards-incompatible proposals as they surface.

I agree that adding Intersex (along with Male, Female, and Unknown) can be done with backwards compatibility. Will you open another separate issue (maybe a pull request) to track this?

stoicflame commented 5 years ago

See proposal at #320 to clarify the definition of the gender property.