Bug 23609

*** Bug 27540 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Stumbled across this bug today. Currently the inputs for the radio button
for patron gender have fixed labels in the template.
If the patron gender would be tied to an authorized value, it would in
that case be good to take the lib value for the label.
In this case you would also need to allow for having more or less
radio buttons to be used as inputs than the currently allowed 4.
If I have more time soon I'll take a look at trying a patch.

We would need A Lot of choices--I'm all for authorized values (since they eliminate typos), but these are the pronouns in use by just people that I know and interact with in USian English--there are many others, of course!

she/her
he/him
they/them
she/they
he/they
xe/hir
e/em
she,he/they (use either she or he for singular)
it/they
fluid (no fixed pronouns--default to they)
they  (this is the common default when pronouns are unknown)

Just a note that gender and pronouns are 2 separate fields in Koha now. I believe there is a separate bug for making the pronouns field use a drop down instead of being free text.

A downside of authorised values is that they are not translatable. As this features quite prominently in the OPAC I wonder if using a multi-select system preference with most often used options could also do the trick?

Ah--thank you, Katrin!  Our Koha doesn't have these two separate fields, and I just looked at the ByWater Demo staff interface, and it, too, has just the free text field, "Pronouns."

We would then need authorized values for gender like these, and these are just the ones I can think of in use among people I know:
Woman
Man
Non-binary
Intersex
Two Spirit

I'll go comment on bug 36340!  (I.e., "male" and "female" are biological terms, not gender terms--it's pretty offensive to call a woman "female" around here, for example, since it's biologically reductive.)  (This is definitely problematic for translations, I'd think, since it's so variable even in regional USian English!)

Thanks Heather for the US perspective! I was thinking along the German perspective, where it's somewhat legally required for government institutions (including libraries) to have the three options "male", "female" and "diverse". I guess the "diverse" is supposed to encapsulate any and all genders outside of just male/female.
I myself would prefer the US perspective, but it's not a matter of debate for most German libraries AFAIK.
If we were going to use a multiselect system preference with the "most commonly used" genders, it would be interesting to hear what other gender options would be needed for other countries as well.

(In reply to Philip Orr from comment #6)
> Thanks Heather for the US perspective! I was thinking along the German
> perspective, where it's somewhat legally required for government
> institutions (including libraries) to have the three options "male",
> "female" and "diverse". I guess the "diverse" is supposed to encapsulate any
> and all genders outside of just male/female.
> I myself would prefer the US perspective, but it's not a matter of debate
> for most German libraries AFAIK.
> If we were going to use a multiselect system preference with the "most
> commonly used" genders, it would be interesting to hear what other gender
> options would be needed for other countries as well.

+1

Thanks Heather for the perspective, it's really interesting!