Family Historian User Group

Ok. So this just confirms that FH doesn't provide the flexibility that I (and others) need for this situation. I've manually annotated the details and can manually edit reports is the future.

You can hand-craft the sentence for each reassignment event to read as required, case by case.

If you want to record gender separately from sex, you can create a custom attribute.

If you wanted to get really creative, I suspect you could make a variant English language pack where Sex is translated as Gender, and track gender rather than sex... (An export might lose the distinction though -- I haven't played with language packs).

What other flexibility are you missing?

Moirty wrote: ↑

03 Oct 2022 17:13

...
HOWEVER, when I use the fact definition as shown, the text ends up saying "His gender was reassigned" referring to the birth sex. The individual's preferred text would be "Her gender was reassigned." Is there a way to force FH to do this? ...

Helen's template sentence starts with
{individual's} gender was reassigned ...

The "{individual's}" code is inserted when you choose "Name of Individual (or His/Her)" using the Insert Code button. Or you can hand-code it, of course. (You may know that already). It would be simple to replace the code "{individual's}" by the text "Their" (no quotes, obviously). If you do that to the sentence in the reassignment fact definition, it will produce the neutral every time the fact appears in a narrative.

If you want to get the actual name, it's slightly more complex - the {} codes are all liable to flip from the actual name to Him/Her for readability reasons - I'm sure there's a way to fix it to the Primary name but the alternative is to go to the actual fact in question and alter the sentence on the Fact tab - that alters that single sentence for that single fact.

Presumably if the system is generating "His" on that one sentence, and this is unacceptable, then all the other sentences for that individual are liable to generate "His". In which case, you will need to edit all the sentences for that individual on their fact tab in a similar fashion. To the best of my knowledge, it's not possible to predict whether the Name or "His" appears in a narrative - it changes for readability so may not be constant depending on text elsewhere.

I have not dealt with these at all yet, but wonder if not would work.

Thanks for this reply, Adrian. Much appreciate the detail.

My husband's boss used to say "If you don't cite yourself, who will?" and in that spirit, I recommend my answer to Including name change for transgender person in genealogy at Genealogy and Family History Stack Exchange.

https://genealogy.stackexchange.com/a/15849/1006

Rather than get into matters which are woefully off-topic for Family Historian, I'll simply say that GEDCOM (not to mention the English language itself) are woefully inadequate to describe the complexity of the topic.

The TL;dr is simple: if you want to be respectful, ask trans people what the preferred language is, and follow their usage. This may mean using different language for different individuals and learning new language over time.