Person Name: Gender-specific formatting

[Robert Stepanek]

Hi Mike,

Thanks for your message.

On Thu, Dec 9, 2021, at 8:01 PM, Mike McKenna wrote:
> In the proposed PersonName spec, we have left gender out of the name formatting, as the spec is specific to the name only, and not the grammatical context of the surrounding text. The current spec expects the calling application to know, and provide the correctly formatted honorifics or gender-specific connector terms [...]

I assume that this is unlikely to change when the spec becomes a standard? The currently published draft of PRI434 states gender-specific formatting to be an open issue (page 14). I would like to avoid coming up with a solution in our spec that then contradicts what gets defined in PRI434.

>  
> But gender as part of a person object that happens to also contain the personName, and possibly variations of the personName (also-known-as, preferred-name, legal-name, birth-name, etc.) makes perfect sense.
>  
> What I have found on “standards” for gender enumeration are as follows:
>  * ISO 20022 <https://www.iso20022.org/standardsrepository/type/GenderCode> – Financial Industry – only has male, female
>  * ISO 5218 <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO/IEC_5218>: not known, male, female, not applicable
>  * UK Deed Poll <https://deedpolloffice.com/change-name/changing-your-gender>: male, female, neither male nor female. NHS <https://datadictionary.nhs.uk/attributes/person_gender_code.html> appears to be using the ISO 5218 codes
>  * vCard4 <http://microformats.org/wiki/gender-formats>: male, female, other, nor or not applicable, unknown
>  

Thanks, I was not aware of ISO 5128. I like the term "human sexes" which narrows down its purpose better than "gender" or "biological sex", the latter being a likely source of confusion as outlined in this article <https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(19)32764-3/fulltext>.

> One thing to consider is that in the evolution of “diversity and inclusion” as part of user interface and data design, we now have the *preferred pronoun* as part of the expected de facto person descriptor

I also think about adding pronouns to our proposed contacts spec. I see that the Google Contacts API allows for pronouns in the free-text valued addressMeAs <https://developers.google.com/people/api/rest/v1/people#gender> property of a Person object. Do you plan to use a structured or free-text value?

Cheers,
Robert
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