Adding pronouns property

[shaedrich]

Hi, I don't know if you already considerd that but besides the gender property (which you solved well by defining it as GenderType|Text) there's an increasing use of pronouns on the web so what do you think of adding it as a property?

[thadguidry]

I think this is probably a "good thing" to have for structured data about Person
I'd say that a simple property on that called pronoun or genderPronouns might work?
And it could have an Expected Type of GenderPronounType or Text?

Is that what you were thinking?

[shaedrich]

Good point! People often put "he/him", "she/her", "they/their", etc. in their bios. While this could be a string, allowing for multiple values probably makes sense 🤔 I'm not an expert, but wouldn't this (at least in English, a tuple of length 3: $('he', 'him', 'his')$?

https://pronouny.xyz/ even lists the tuple $('they', 'them', 'their', 'theirs', 'theirself')$ (interestingly, not "themself" and "themselves" 🤔 )

[MatthiasWiesmann]

I second danbri's position we should leverage an existing standard: different languages handle pronouns differently and require a different number of values for different grammatical constructs / cases – for instance you would probably need 7 for Serbian. And you would need a consensus on how to name the keys.

[shaedrich]

I'm open for suggestions. The most important thing right now is that this doesn't go stale over and over again.

[MatthiasWiesmann]

I would suggest making the pronoun an instance of https://schema.org/inDefinedTermSet with one term being one form of the pronoun, with a termCode matching the grammatical case.

"pronoun": {
  "@type": "DefinedTermSet",
  "hasDefinedTerm": {
     "@type": "DefinedTerm",
     "name": "Xe",
     "termCode": "Nominative"
  },
   "hasDefinedTerm": {
     "@type": "DefinedTerm",
     "name": "Xem",
     "termCode": "Accusative"
  },
  "hasDefinedTerm": {
     "@type": "DefinedTerm",
     "name": "Xir",
     "termCode": "Possesive Adjective"
  },
 "hasDefinedTerm": {
     "@type": "DefinedTerm",
     "name": "Xirs",
     "termCode": "Genitive"
  },
 }

[shaedrich]

Interesting. We didn't have that case yet. I'm curious what the others think about that solution 👍🏻

[danbri]

It would be very preferable to cite another standard for this, if there is something suitable out there. Even in English, if I write “they” for pronouns, am I to be understood as telling you something about my gender, or about how I want sentences about me to written and said. Personally I wish everyone used “they” for describing me, to encourage a climate in which people are mentioned without their gender always being declared, much as the adoption of “Ms” achieved for marital status some years ago. However that is goal that may not make sense in other languages, and is likely not what most people have in mind when filling out this field. Some years ago, the old social network Orkut had a “looking for ( men / women / men and women )” field. Orkut had unexpectedly taken off in Iran and it turned out that many users there simply missed the dating/relationships/sex subtext which that profile field had in its original context, resulting in high % listing “both” (it seems reading this as an expression of business networking and friend-making interest, or not reading it at all). This was in a country where homosexuality can result in people being murdered by the state ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_rights_in_Iran). What I mean by this is that it can be problematic to assume that the ‘real’ intent of a field is universally understood, over and above the definition given it in schemas and UI. For pronouns, there is so much that is unsaid… yet understood by those who have learned about it elsewhere.

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[shaedrich]

Even in English, if I write “they” for pronouns, am I to be understood as
telling you something about my gender, or about how I want sentences about
me to written and said.

So, what, in your opinion, would be a more suiting key for this property?

What I mean by this is that it can be problematic to assume that the ‘real’
intent of a field is universally understood, over and above the definition
given it in schemas and UI.

I think, the primary task for structured, semantic metadata properties is to be neutral, clear, and follow POLS. Language, and grammar in particular—with exceptions of course—is structured in such a way, that we can borrow from it and reach an understanding in that particular language since people usually know a fair amount about their language's grammar (assuming, they are fluent in it).

Personally I wish everyone used “they” for
describing me, to encourage a climate in which people are mentioned without
their gender always being declared, much as the adoption of “Ms” achieved
for marital status some years ago.

When people say "Why labels?" (be it a pronoun, gender, orientation, whatever), I agree, that a world without labels would be ideal, yet, we cannot achieve that by just attempting to abandon labels. That would only cement the status quo ("*-normativity" including the generic masculine). I think of labels as a "transitional characteristic" of society's progressivness towards a more open and equal co-existence. Therefore, we need to be aware of said status quo to change the way, we perceive it.

Because, what people—primarily but not exclusively trans, inter and non-binary people—face, is that their gender is just assumed. On the other hand, forcing people to completely ignore gender might sound like something that might make the world a more equal place but actually results again in repression. Self-identity is something very personal and we should let people deal with it. Also, a luxury (not to say "privilege"), trans, inter and non-binary people don't have compared to non-heterosexual people, is that they can't just keep that topic "to their bedrooms" because it will be brought up in daily life one way or the other and be it in microaggressions.

Another thing is, people assume, pronouns are an exclusively non-cis topic but that is everything but inclusive thinking. While people might have the need to clarify their pronouns, they don't necessarily also want to come out as trans, inter and non-binary, which they implicitly would have to if only they would be using pronouns. That's why only if cis people also use pronouns explicitly, forced outing can be avoided.

Some years ago, the old social network Orkut had a “looking for ( men /
women / men and women )” field. Orkut had unexpectedly taken off in Iran
and it turned out that many users there simply missed the
dating/relationships/sex subtext which that profile field had in its
original context

The funny thing is, to make this sexual/romantic orientation thing work, it's usually not absolute but relative to one's own gender if one isn't polysexual/-romantic