I guess I should’ve prefaced my argument with saying that for living transpeople there are legitimate safety concerns related to displaying birth name and sex information and as such that should be held private. For deceased people though, I think historical interest dictates that it should be in the notes. This is even true for nonbinary people, while marking a genealogical record with an X makes it obvious they’re non-binary trans (not that I’m confident anybody does this), there may still be some historical interest in knowing past name, and statistical interest in knowing assigned gender at birth.
“Thoughts? Anecdotes? Facts? Guidance?”
Don’t. Don’t include transgender people’s deadnames and coercively assigned genders. The arguments of safety and privacy should trump any appeal to a phoney historicity here. But there is a deeper issue at stake in personal autonomy and the nature of genaeology as a project itself.
I had to bitterly laugh at the “think about history” argument presented here. History is anything BUT objective and apolitical, as any good historian ought to know. What goes for history goes triple for genaeology. The aim of genaeology is to recapitulate feudalistic, agrarian, deeply retrograde patterns of respectability onto populations who always lived far more diverse family patterns. When it was just aristocrats and gentry bragging about being descended from X demigod or local hero, that was one thing. But when it became an arm of state surveillance and social control, we should be very circumspect about the whole claim of historical necessity here. Given that most Genaeology websites still don’t manage to note same gender couples well, never mind have a clue how to honestly handle transgender and intersexual lives, speaks volumes about the agenda being served in this sort of historiography.
Genealogists should be aware that they now can have immediate and deleterious risks for the people they surveil. In the age of the internet, what was once their obscure family hobby is now prime grist for Big Data, and accessible for those who mean harm to use against people who are often incredibly vulnerable to social ostracism and violence. If you think websites like Ancestry don’t pimp their data, even when marked as private, you are kidding yourself. This information is regularly leaked, hacked, and generally allowed to dribble into lives where it can do huge damage. Read the news.
I know. It happened to me. Ancestry allowed the pics and info nonconsensually uploaded by a distant relation to leak from an international version of their site. It took a long time to figure out how it happened and who was responsible.
The bottom line is an even uglier issue. The insinuation by some here that transgender people are “Orwellian” for correcting their legal documentation and asking respect for their identities deserves deep scrutiny. The reality is the opposite. Deadnaming someone is a denial of truth, an external imposition which operates to obscure history by reifying identities coerced onto people whose bodies and lives (the facts on the ground) are denied and violated by oversimplistic bureaucratic notation. It’s insisting on a mistake despite being given the evidence of an entire life of someone shouting to correct that mistake.
I can grab you by the lapels and call you John, write it down in papers with stamps and stickers. But if you aren’t named John, and especially if you aren’t a man, what that does to you is more than causing offence. It’s erasure of your self, your name, your very life, so I can satisfy my own petulant, officious whim. That is what genealogists do when they deadname transgender people who go to great lengths to correct our documentation.
Try this actual case as hypothetical: Jane was born intersex. The benighted doctors of the day forced her as a baby to undergo surgeries and hormone therapy to conform to a male sex. So that is what they thunked down on the birth certificate. Later she informs them how horribly wrong they were, that she feels herself to be a girl/woman. She then later identifying as a transgender and intersex woman, she has to go back and undo the damage done to her, medically, legally, socially, and spiritually. This stuff happens all the time. But where are the entries to sum up Jane’s life in neat little family trees? Does the genealogist with anything like a conscience actually have to dither about the historical ethics of weighing the factual reality of her life against legal impositions? Or might Occam’s Razor suggest that the plain issue is that genaeology doesn’t in performance serve all of our lives equally? Would anyone with a heart dare deadname Jane?
Of course this isn’t a zero sum issue. Some trans people are fine with talking about their deadnames. Some very much aren’t. Some claim a former gender. Some very much do not. If that lived complexity inconveniences easy graphs and charts, I’m not particularly motivated to care. People come first. Genealogists who care about these people and these issues might start by interrogating whose historical reality they are serving. They might also interrogate the devices and aims of how they conduct genaeology, and make technical changes, and ethical changes, to protect the medical privacy and personal reality especially of living transgender people.
It’s clear, at least, that mainstream genaeology is not serving transgender people and our lived realities. Deadnaming and misgendering in these documents often erase history by insisting on narratives which obscure personal reality. Even in death, that is a gross dereliction of historical responsibility. But I doubt anything will change on this front soon. History, like the law, bows before received authority over subaltern truth most of the time.
Some things are horrifying. Others aren’t - a genealogist once told me that one of the things people love to find in their family history is an ancestor who was burned as a witch. Of course that would be a long time ago and wouldn’t affect anyone living.
I didn’t have to do any genealogical research to find illegitimate births, adoptions, and criminals in my family tree, and my step grandmother’s son changed his name.
ISTM that much of the point of researching one’s family history is to find out things about them and their lives - so-and-so Uncle Stash came to this country one step ahead of the law, Great-great Auntie Ethel had a baby by her brother-in-law, your great-great-great grandfather was related to the bastard son of the Duke of Whimsey, etc.
It seems like it is more complicated nowadays - what relation are you to your father’s second ex-wife’s son by her first marriage?
Regards,
Shodan
Seriously?