GMEOW Gender Module

• IRI: https://blackcatinformatics.ca/gmeow/slices/gender
• Tier: core
• Group: core

What This Slice Covers

This slice owns 33 terms and contributes 59 mapping or projection rows. Use it when its terms match the native fact you want to preserve; use the linkage tables to see how those facts leave GMEOW for consumer vocabularies.

Dependencies

• gmeow:slices/entities
• gmeow:slices/kernel
• gmeow:slices/names
• gmeow:slices/observations
• gmeow:slices/sexuality

Consumers

• Identity facets on persons (P16: core by commitment); the 7-axis orthogonality matrix.

Local Map

Examples

Self Asserted Facets

• Source: slices/core/gender/examples/self-asserted-facets.ttl
• GMEOW terms: gmeow:GenderExpression, gmeow:GenderIdentity, gmeow:IdentityFacet, gmeow:Organization, gmeow:Person, gmeow:displayable, gmeow:expressionAndrogynous, gmeow:expressionValue, gmeow:facetSubject, gmeow:facetVantage

# SPDX-FileCopyrightText: 2026 Blackcat Informatics® Inc. <paudley@blackcatinformatics.ca>
# SPDX-License-Identifier: CC-BY-4.0
#
# Worked example: gender as reified, self-asserted, co-equal facets ( P9/P10).
# Each axis is a reified gmeow:IdentityFacet (the NameUsage relator idiom), never a
# flat enum column. Four tenets are visible here:
#   • SELF-ASSERTION is the top authority — a self-asserted facet (selfAsserted
#     true) outranks an external registry record (selfAsserted false), which is
#     SUPPRESSED, never deleted (gmeow:displayable false, P10): kept for provenance,
#     never leaked or displayed.
#   • CO-EQUALITY — gender identity and gender expression are separate facets with
#     no primary/preferred slot; expression is never inferred from identity.
#   • SEX ≠ GENDER — gmeow:sexAssignedAtBirth is a RECORDED administrative datum,
#     not an IdentityFacet, and implies nothing about identity or expression.
#   • OPEN VOCABULARY — values are individuals (gmeow:genderNonBinary, …), never
#     Person subclasses and never a forced enum.
@prefix gmeow: <https://blackcatinformatics.ca/gmeow/> .
@prefix ex:    <https://blackcatinformatics.ca/gmeow/examples/gender/> .

ex:robin a gmeow:Person ;
    gmeow:name "Robin"@en ;
    gmeow:hasGenderIdentity   ex:selfId , ex:registryId ;
    gmeow:hasGenderExpression ex:expr ;
    gmeow:sexAssignedAtBirth  gmeow:saabFemale .   # recorded datum — NOT identity

# A facet is an Observation: it records its gmeow:facetSubject (whose facet) and
# gmeow:facetVantage (who asserts it). When self-asserted, the vantage IS the
# subject — that self-reference is exactly what makes it the top authority.
ex:registry a gmeow:Organization ; gmeow:name "National Records Registry"@en .

# --- The self-asserted identity: subject is its own vantage; displayed.
ex:selfId a gmeow:GenderIdentity ;
    gmeow:facetSubject  ex:robin ;
    gmeow:facetVantage  ex:robin ;
    gmeow:genderValue   gmeow:genderNonBinary ;
    gmeow:selfAsserted  true ;
    gmeow:displayable   true .

# --- An external registry's conflicting record: its vantage is the REGISTRY,
#     not Robin — kept for provenance but SUPPRESSED (P10) and never self-
#     asserted, because self-assertion outranks an imported datum.
ex:registryId a gmeow:GenderIdentity ;
    gmeow:facetSubject ex:robin ;
    gmeow:facetVantage ex:registry ;
    gmeow:genderValue  gmeow:genderWoman ;
    gmeow:selfAsserted false ;
    gmeow:displayable  false .

# --- Gender expression: a separate axis, never inferred from identity.
ex:expr a gmeow:GenderExpression ;
    gmeow:facetSubject    ex:robin ;
    gmeow:facetVantage    ex:robin ;
    gmeow:expressionValue gmeow:expressionAndrogynous ;
    gmeow:selfAsserted    true .

Terms

Classes

Properties

Individuals

Linkages

• Rows: 59
• Projection profiles: foaf, gedcom, schema-org
• External vocabularies: fhir, foaf, gedcom, gsso, homosaurus, schema, sosa, wd, wdt

Guide

Gender — self-asserted identity facets, never inferred, never erased

Slice: https://blackcatinformatics.ca/gmeow/slices/gender · tier: core The shared IdentityFacet base, and the gender-identity / gender-expression / sex-assigned-at-birth axes of the seven-axis orthogonality matrix.

Most schemas have a gender column: an enum, single-valued, often silently inferred from a title or a pronoun. GMEOW refuses every part of that. A gender is a reified, self-asserted claim — an IdentityFacet, the same relator idiom as names' NameUsage — never a bare property; the value space is an open vocabulary of individuals, never an enum and never a Person subclass (Principle 9: inclusive without overtyping); a person bears many co-equal facets with deliberately no primary/preferred term, because a primary-gender slot encodes the same hierarchy a primary-name slot does (Principle 9, anti-colonial in both directions — the seeds neither force Western categories nor appropriate culturally-specific ones: Two-Spirit carries a scope note restricting it to self-referential Indigenous North American use). Self-assertion is the top authority (Principle 9): a facet the person asserted outranks any registry or import, and is never silently overwritten.

A superseded label is suppressed, never erased (Principle 10): gmeow:displayable false — the deadname analog — keeps the history while preventing the leak. And none of this is optional: identity slices sit in core by commitment (Principle 16) — GMEOW refuses to make respectful identity an extension someone might not load.

The seven-axis orthogonality matrix

Seven identity axes span three modules — GenderIdentity, GenderExpression, and SexAssignedAtBirth here; SexualOrientation and RomanticOrientation in the sexuality slice; PronounSet and Honorific in names — and they are pairwise disjoint with no inferential bridge in any direction. Address ≠ identity: pronouns say how a person is addressed, never what they are. Sex ≠ gender: sex-at-birth is a recorded administrative datum, not an identity. Nothing infers expression from identity, orientation from gender, or anything from anything. The disjointness is a reasoner theorem (owl:AllDisjointClasses over both the facet classes and their value spaces, OWL 2 EL-visible — relator-mediation doctrine); the bridge-absence half, which OWL cannot say, stays a closed-world lint (tests/test_identity_orthogonality.py).

The facet base

gmeow:IdentityFacet

The shared root: a reified, self-asserted claim about an aspect of a person's identity — a gufo:Relator and a gmeow:Observation in the universal claim stack (observation-spine bridge), mediating the person (facetSubject) and an open identity value, with the asserting agent as facetVantage. Carries the optional validFrom/validUntil clocks and the gmeow:displayable control. The sexuality slice's two orientation facets subclass this same base.

gmeow:selfAsserted

The authority marker: true when the person asserted the facet themselves (the top authority), false for a third-party record. Non-functional — a multi-source merge carries both, coexisting rather than contradicting (Principle 9's standpoint stance). Also usable as a statement-level RDF 1.2 annotation on a quoted claim.

The three axes in this slice

gmeow:GenderIdentity · gmeow:hasGenderIdentity · gmeow:genderValue

What a person is. hasGenderIdentity is non-functional — bigender is two co-equal facets, genderfluid and transition are facets over time — and MUST NOT be inferred from pronouns, honorifics, expression, or sex-at-birth. genderValue is functional per facet (one value each; multiplicity is more facets) and is the single path to the value: there is deliberately no flat gmeow:gender shortcut to grow stale.

gmeow:GenderExpression · gmeow:hasGenderExpression · gmeow:expressionValue

How a person presents — a separate axis: a masculine-presenting woman and a feminine-presenting man are directly expressible with no tension, because expression is never derived from identity (or vice versa). Same shape: non-functional bearer property, functional-per-facet value path to an open GenderExpressionStyle.

gmeow:sexAssignedAtBirth

A recorded administrative datum — not an IdentityFacet, not self-asserted, never equated with or implied by gender identity/expression. Non-functional so a correction and a prior record coexist (multi-source honesty). Historical/genealogical records keep external gedcom:sex; this is GMEOW's native, value-vocabulary-backed term.

gmeow:intersexVariation

An optional free-text note for inclusivity where gmeow:saabIntersex alone is insufficient. Deliberately a plain note: GMEOW does not model clinical sex characteristics or a DSD taxonomy — that depth would be overtyping in exactly the sense Principle 9 forbids.

The value vocabularies

gmeow:Gender · gmeow:GenderExpressionStyle · gmeow:SexAssignedAtBirth

Open value vocabularies of individuals under gufo:QualityValue — never Person subclasses, never a closed enum. The seeds (woman, man, non-binary, agender, genderfluid, genderqueer, bigender, demigirl, demiboy, Two-Spirit, questioning; feminine through neutral; the four coarse sex-at-birth values) are anchors, not a fence: an identity not seeded is a fresh individual carrying rdfs:label — the names module's custom-PronounSet idiom — never a flat literal. The three value spaces are themselves pairwise disjoint, so a raw value can never cross axes.

ex:robin a gmeow:Person ;
    gmeow:hasGenderIdentity ex:facetNb , ex:facetPrior .

ex:facetNb a gmeow:GenderIdentity ;            # current, self-asserted
    gmeow:genderValue gmeow:genderNonBinary ;
    gmeow:selfAsserted true .

ex:facetPrior a gmeow:GenderIdentity ;         # superseded — suppressed, kept
    gmeow:genderValue gmeow:genderMan ;
    gmeow:displayable false .                  # Principle 10: never deleted

Boundaries, solver, and alignment

Closed-world cardinality ("exactly one value per facet", "exactly one subject") is deliberately not OWL — it is SHACL's job (phase 3, SHACL closure gate), keeping the reasoned core EL-friendly (Principle 12's boundary discipline: the ontology states the relata, the gates check the counts). Alignment is lossy by design: GSSO, Homosaurus, Wikidata, schema.org, FOAF and HL7/FHIR mappings live in mappings/gmeow-gender.sssom.tsv, and flat targets like schema:gender receive a documented downcast — the reified, self-asserted, co-equal machinery is canonical and survives only here (Principle 4). The full rationale is in identity-mapping.md.

Dependencies

Depends on kernel, entities, names (the displayable control and the relator idiom), observations (the claim stack), and sexuality (the matrix axioms span both). Consumed by every person-bearing dataset: identity facets on persons are core by commitment (Principle 16).