Handling Gay Families and Transgender Individuals

[philfreund 0]

How can you use TMG to document families where children have two parents of the same sex? Both parents are either fathers or mothers but neither is necessarily primary. You can have cases where one is a biological parent but it's just as possible that the child is adopted by both parents.

 

How do you document a transgendered person? Sex is a Flag and can't be date ranged.

[Virginia Blakelock 0]

Phil -

 

You will find many discussions on documenting gender change, gay marriage, civil unions, etc. on the TMG mailing list. Use the search engine here. For example, try the search term: transgender.

 

Virginia

[Michael Hannah 0]

Hi, Phil,

 

You ask several very different questions at once about data entry approaches in TMG:

1. Same sex couples
2. One parent Primary the other not
3. Adopted children of any couple
4. Documenting a transgendered person.
   

Each has often been discussed previously, but usually separately, both on this Forum and on the ListServ. As Virginia mentions you may wish to search both places using appropriate keywords.

 

1. In my latest posting about same sex couples here I comment: "TMG has separated recording the event of creating a "Marriage" relationship which only involves two people of any sex, from recording genetic relationships of a child and two parents of opposite sex. That separation is why a TMG "Marriage" event (whose narrative sentences and Tag Name may be customized to simply imply some kind of partnership) between same sex partners is so simple and possible to record in TMG."

 

2. SInce TMG's stated function is genealogy/genetics, the feature of making a parent/child relationship Primary automatically implies to TMG that this is one of the two genetic parents. But TMG allows as many non-primary parent/child relationships to be identified as desired. However those non-primary relationships will be considered non-genetic.

 

3. Adopted children. The whole topic of adoption is a complicated one to decide on how to record. Just like same-sex partnerships, adoption raises the ever active debate about whether software should focus on "family" relationships or "genetic" relationships. Trying to do both I think would make the software extremely more complicated. WhollyGenes has previously stated that the primary purpose of its "genealogy" software is genes/genetics. However, you might review several discussions about adoption on both the ListServ and in these Forums, especially my suggestions for custom Tag Types in the Sentences Forum here.

 

There are two major approaches to deal with Adoption and thus multiple parents in TMG, especially with respect to TMG ancestry/descendant reports. One is to temporarily change the Primary parent(s) for the adopted child to cause the linkage you desire for the report you are generating, and then change back for some other report. Another way is to enter two separate TMG people entries for the same person/child: one TMG person linked to the biological parents, the other TMG person linked to the adoptive parents. One is also likely to create a custom tag/event that links these two "people" together. That reports a person for either linkage in reports, but does not resolve what to do with the linkages for the children of that adopted child. Thus there are advantages and disadvantages to both methods. You choose based on how you want ancestry/descendant reports to print, and how you want to enter data in TMG.

 

4. How to report a transgendered person depends upon how you want this change to be reflected in reports in TMG. Some simply post the change as a custom Event tag and manually deal with any gender pronoun issues in the narrative sentences of that person's tags. If there is quite a lot entered about the person, some choose an approach similar to what is mentioned concerning Adopted children, especially if those children change their names. Two separate TMG people could be entered for the same transgendered person: one for each gender, with some custom tag/event that links these two "people" together. They record all events which happened prior to the change as tags in one person, and events after the change in the other.

 

Hope this gives you some ideas,