Anyone from Britain will understand the humour in this title[1].
However, overly delicate sensibilities — and maybe some degree of ignorance — could
be masking a related topic that happens to be worth discussing: How do we
record sex and/or gender in our data?
I can forgive anyone that believes sex and gender are
synonymous since the words are not always used precisely in everyday speech.
They should be distinguished as follows:[2]
- Sex is either male or female and so reflects a biological difference. This includes physical, hormonal, and genetic characteristics.
- Gender is either masculine or feminine and so reflects a social or cultural characteristic.
Few people make this distinction nowadays though. It was
sexologist John Money who originally proposed using the term sex to refer to the biological
classification of male/female, and gender
to refer to the differences in behaviour[3].
Before that time, gender was used in
the context of grammatical categories. A deeper discussion of the history may
be found at: Sex
and Gender Distinction.
The majority of the records that we want to cite will,
therefore, be recording sex rather than gender, as typically represented by the
initialisms M/F.
My own belief is that inappropriate delicacy is at least as
much to blame as ignorance of the history for the modern confusion. As an
illustration, when I recently emailed findmypast to point out that their upgraded
search field labelled ‘Gender’ was technically incorrect, my reference to ‘Sex’
was censored and replaced by asterisks. I tried to query this over-zealous
censorship of the S-word and deliberately spaced the letters with hyphens to
avoid it happening again. However, it was still censored and so my query ended
up consisting of mostly asterisks and would be useless to any non-telepath.
OK, so enough of the definitions. What are the practical
implications? Dealing with birth sex should be relatively straightforward
(see below), but we now have many lifestyle choices to consider, as well as
surgical procedures. These are just as much a part of a person’s history, and
shying away from them doesn’t give just consideration to those people. The
personal importance of the issues is illustrated in Sarah Mei’s 2010 blog-post:
Disalienation:
Why Gender is a Text Field on Diaspora.
Given the distinction above, Gender reassignment should include more aspects than surgery alone,
although it is still treated as a synonym of Sex Reassignment Surgery (SRS). People
can travel to undergo these procedures but recognition of their changed status
is still hugely controversial and may be denied in their own countries. Even if
recognised by the corresponding government, it might not include a change to
their passport, retroactive change to their birth certificate, their ability to
marry someone of a complementary sex, or acknowledged if that person finds
themselves in prison, or a hospital, or applies to join the armed forces.
A multilateral convention was drafted to provide acceptance
in other countries but, to date, it has few signatories. See Convention
on the recognition of decisions recording a sex reassignment. In the UK,
the Gender
Recognition Act 2004 is an Act of the Parliament that allows transsexual
people to change their legal gender.
From a family history point of view, the most important
thing to keep in mind is the distinction between recording the evidence of a
person, or our conclusions formed for the person. All evidence will be related
to some dated event, such as the birth event, but the relevant detail could be
an attribute of birth or an explicit change thereafter, including conscious
decisions or procedures. So, for sex, simply having a single property with more
than two possible values may not be the best approach as it cannot represent
the elapsed time preceding a change. It would be inappropriate to retroactively
apply the changed information it as that would amount to genealogical
revisionism. Even when a birth attribute is revised, you should not apply
the associated evidence to previous dates.
Let me demonstrate this by considering the various
possibilities. Any surgery, or related treatment, should be recorded as a
medical event. Even lifestyle choices (which require a conscious decision) and
gender realisations can be dated from an evidential point of view. Birth
information — which basically means the child’s sex — can usually be recorded as a tri-state Boolean. For instance, STEMMA®
uses 1=male, 0=female, and nothing when unknown, in order to avoid locale
dependencies. The special value of ‘?’ is also available in its property values
but is usually reserved for cases of unreadable transcriptions.
Sex is actually a combination of biological factors in
addition to genitalia, including chromosomes, hormones, and neurological wiring
in the brain. Problems get a little deeper if we have evidence that records any
associated irregularities. Indeterminate sex at birth is part of a
classification known as Intersex.
This also includes irregularities
of the sex chromosomes such as: Turner Syndrome and Triple-X Syndrome (for
females), and Klinefelter Syndrome and XYY Syndrome (for males). From an
evidential perspective, you’re unlikely to see this level of detail in a
source, and historical medical practitioners would have made an on-the-spot
determination; rightly or wrongly. Australia, Germany, Nepal, and New Zealand have
taken steps to allow the recording of intersex on identification documents such
as birth certificates.[4] Alex MacFarlane of
Victoria, Australia, is believed to be the first holder of an indeterminate-sex
birth certificate and passport, but they weren’t granted until 2003.
So what about our conclusions for such a person; the data
that we construct based on the information from our sources? Well, for anyone
with a particularly unusual history or status, I would say that a bunch of
multi-valued properties in some database is not enough. Effort would be better
invested using narrative to describe them and their situation.
[1] No Sex Please, We're British
was a
British farce written by Alistair Foot and Anthony Marriott 1971.
[2] Oxford Dictionaries Online
(http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/gender
: accessed 7 May 2014), s.v. “genealogy”, under ‘Usage’
heading.
[3] J. Richard Udry, “The
Nature of Gender”, Demography,
vol.31, no.4 (Nov 1994): p.561, par.1; online scan at http://people.virginia.edu/~ser6f/udry.pdf
: accessed 7 May 2014.
[4] "Intersex", Wikipedia
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersex#Identification_documents
: accessed 10 May 2014), under Identification Documents.
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