fix: normalized gender comparisons and defaulted to genderless rather than male in salutation and pronoun methods

[jpagh]

This PR normalizes gender comparisons, particularly so that capitalized genders are still handled correctly. If the gender attribute is actually an object with a __str__() method, then this will actually cause that to work as well by casting the attribute to a string first.

It also changes salutation and the pronoun methods to all default/fall-through to genderless options rather than male options as they were before. I don't actually care that much about this part, I really only want the casefold/lower on the gender attribute comparison, but it seemed weird that if you called .salutation() on an Individual that had a specific gender == 'other' that it would still return Mr., and I did look it up, "Mx." is the genderless salutation.

[Copilot]

Pull request overview

Note

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Updates gender handling in pronoun and salutation helpers by normalizing gender comparisons and introducing gender-neutral defaults.

Changes:

• Normalize gender checks via casefold() across pronoun helpers.
• Change fallback pronoun behavior to default to gender-neutral forms instead of defaulting to male.
• Add “Mx.” as the default salutation for non-male/female genders.

Reviewed changes

Copilot reviewed 2 out of 2 changed files in this pull request and generated 7 comments.

File	Description
docassemble_base/docassemble/base/util.py	Normalizes gender comparisons and adjusts fallback pronoun selection.
docassemble_base/docassemble/base/functions.py	Normalizes gender comparisons and adds “Mx.” for non-binary/other genders in salutations.

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[jpagh]

There are some judgment calls to be made here about how exactly to handle this. At the very least it would be nice if the gender comparisons were improved (I used casefold, but lower would probably be just fine, too).

For the specific project that caused me to dig into this, we're using helper functions instead because we also need some language handling. These aren't perfect, but should work for what we need for now without requiring the upstream changes.

_SALUTATION_LOOKUP = {
    "en": {
        "male": "Mr.",
        "female": "Ms.",
        "nonbinary": "Mx.",
    },
    "es": {
        "male": "Sr.",
        "female": "Sra.",
        "nonbinary": "Mx.",
    },
}


def greet(person: Individual) -> str:
    preferred = person.attr("preferred_greeting")
    if preferred:
        greeting = preferred
    elif getattr(person, "language", "") == "es":
        greeting = (
            "Estimada"
            if getattr(person, "gender", "").casefold() == "female"
            else "Estimado"
        )
    else:
        greeting = "Dear"
    return f"""{greeting} {salute(person)}"""


def salute(person: Individual) -> str:
    greeting = str(person.name)
    salutation = person.attr("preferred_salutation") or _SALUTATION_LOOKUP.get(
        getattr(person, "language", "en"), {}
    ).get(getattr(person, "gender", "").casefold(), None)
    if salutation:
        greeting = f"""{salutation} {person.name.last}"""
    return greeting