Re: [Jmap] [calsify] JSContact: gender property

[Ken Murchison <[e-mail]>]

I also wonder if we might want to add a property for a user's preferred 
pronouns.  vCard doesn't currently have such a property, but it was 
mentioned somewhere (CalConnect?) that this is something that should be 
considered as an addition.  I believe that I have a draft of a draft for 
such a vCard property laying around somewhere.


On 12/23/21 8:37 AM, Robert Stepanek wrote:
> One open question for JSContact was if and how to store 
> gender-specific information for a contact. In the next RFC version, we 
> intend to address this by introduction of the "grammaticalGender" 
> property. We look forward to your feedback.
>
>   * The "grammaticalGender" property defines which grammatical gender
>     to use to address or refer to the contact that is represented by
>     the JSContact object.
>   * For example, several human languages require a grammatical gender
>     for salutations. In German the salutations "Sehr geehrte" and
>     "Sehr geehrter" are used for single-person female and male 
>     addreeses, respectively. The "grammaticalGender" property defines
>     which gender to use in this case. Its value can be overridden per
>     language in the "localizations" property.
>   * The allowed values are (in alphabetical order): "animate",
>     "female", "inanimate", "male", "neuter". Other grammatical genders
>     need to be registered.
>
>
> A related property in VCARD is the GENDER 
> <https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc6350#section-6.2.7> 
> property, which aims to store both the biological sex and the gender 
> identity of a contact. However, GENDER does not adequately address the 
> purpose of the "grammaticalGender" property:
>
>   * human sex and grammatical gender of a contact may differ, so the
>     biological sex component of GENDER is no indicator how to
>     grammatically address this contact.
>   * the gender identity of GENDER is a free-text value, which
>     introduces ambiguity which grammatical gender to use. The examples
>     for GENDER strengthen this assumption.
>
>
> This leaves the question if we need to introduce an additional 
> property to map GENDER to JSContact. We do not think so:
>
>   * It seems that the majority of applications used the biological sex
>     component of GENDER to store the grammatical gender of a contact.
>     This now is provided by the "grammaticalGender" property and
>     mapping from VCARD to JSContact should be straight-forward.
>   * For applications that actually require to store biological sex,
>     the current definition of the GENDER sex component seems
>     inadequate. While it allows for a superset ofISO/IEC 521
>     <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO/IEC_5218>8, it  does not
>     support for "intersex" (Note how the examples for GENDER suggest
>     to store "intersex" as gender identity, which does not allow
>     intersex persons to define a preferred gender identity). In
>     addition, even biological sex seems to be ambiguous
>     <https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(19)32764-3/fulltext>.
>   * We do not know if a free-text gender identity is useful for
>     applications. Gender studies suggest that gender identities may
>     differ by context and that there as many genders likely to exist
>     as human beings. This suggests that more complex value types might
>     be required. Most likely, processing of gender is
>     application-specific and we are no experts to provide a standard
>     that fits all requirements.
>
>
> Cheers,
> Robert
>
> P.S.: Cross-posting this both to JMAP and CALEXT as both working 
> groups have expertise on address book and contact applications.
>
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-- 
Kenneth Murchison
Senior Software Developer
Fastmail US LLC