Nothing in this discussion should be taken in any way as an endorsement or repudiation of the current social and political debates around gender. This post simply describes how FastDraft and RediDraft handled gender variables and pronoun resolution when drafting a document. With the 2024 release, content curators can continue to use the original gender and pronoun functionality or they can use the radically different RediDraft gender handling and pronoun resolution available in the 2024 release. While it wasn’t a stated design goal, this new approach described below gives the content curators virtually unlimited flexibility in how they handle gender and pronouns in English. It should be noted most RediDraft users manage their content and draft in English. While there is nothing preventing other languages being used the assumptions used in the design and development process were English-centric. However, this new approach has been shown to better facilitate gender and pronoun resolution in other languages.

FastDraft handled gender variables and pronoun resolution in a very straight forward way. Originally, when a gender variable drove a pronoun choice the variable in the component took the form of VARNAME:PRONOUN-TRIPLET. For example, Testator_Name:he/she/it would resolve to “he” if the testator name was marked as male when entering variable data. Later pronoun-quads were introduced to handle plural cases … ergo Child(ren):he/she/it/they would resolve to “he” for a male, “she” for a female and “they” if more than one child was entered and plural was chosen as the gender.

With it’s 2010 release, RediDraft retained this approach.

With the 2024 release the content curator can continue to use the previous functionality and RediDraft will reliably continue to resolve pronoun triplets and quadruplets based the male/female/neuter/plural paradigm.

The primary problem with the current approach is you can end up with a very large number of quads just to support plural variables. This can become quite cumbersome. While the addition of a plural form was needed with the introduction of variable groups the added complexity was unintended.

The 2024 release also supports a better way of handling gender variables. The concept of singular vs plural has been separated. Before you could have a variable like Testator_Child(ren) defined as a gender variable. When drafting the user could enter a single name and pick male, female or neuter and have the singular forms resolve. But they could also enter multiple names and pick plural as the “gender” to have it resolve to the plural form. This is no longer the case if the content curator chooses to use the new gender and pronoun functionality.

The alternative to the case above would be for the content curator to define a variable group such as Testator_Descendants and optionally identify a variable like Testator_Name for example as the “ancestor” and an aggregate variable to capture the descendants. This allows more flexibility because with this group the curator can define what information is gathered for each descendant. They could gather the name, date of birth, relationship, gender and any other information needed to draft a document. The content curator also defines the singular and plural forms of any and all genders they wish to support. They can also define how variable pronouns are represented in the components to make curation easier. Then if a single descendant is entered the singular forms of the defined pronouns are always used. If multiple descendants are entered then when the group Testator_Descendants is referenced to be replaced with a pronoun the plural form is used but if a specific descendant is referenced to be replaced with a pronoun then the singular form for that descendant is used. Consequently, since any variable can be an aggregate capturing the gender as one of the aggregate attributes replaces the concept of a gender variable.

<NEED VISUAL ON GENDER AND PRONOUN SUBSTITUTION>