engender

engender

v. /ɪnˈdʒɛndə/

to cause or give rise to a feeling, situation or condition.

Your transition, in one place, on your own device.

Journal, stats, HRT, surgeries, tryouts, eras, voice practice and a summary to hand your clinician. No account, no server, no price. By trans people, for trans people.

Open source and free forever.

Start journal

  • Free, for good.

    No price, no plan, no ads. The licence is GPLv3, which cannot be revoked, so nobody can charge for this later, and that includes me.

  • Nothing to sell.

    There is no account and no server. Your journal is stored on your device, encrypted, and I never see it. I cannot sell what I do not have.

  • All of it, in one place.

    Journal, stats, HRT, surgeries, tryouts, eras, voice practice and a printable summary for your clinician.

  • By trans people, for trans people.

    No machine to rage against.

What this is

engender is where you keep your transition: how you feel from day to day, what you take, what you are trying, what is coming up and what has already happened. It is a journal first. Around the journal sit the records that otherwise end up spread across a notes app, a spreadsheet, a photo folder and a letter from a clinic.

Nothing in it decides anything about you. You name your own scales and pick what to track, and the app draws what you put in without grading it. It never suggests a dose, never colours a number red and never tells you which way you are meant to be going.

It is free software: there is no price, no plan and nothing to upsell, and the licence keeps it that way.

What it holds

  • Journal

    How today felt. A mood, a note, your own scales, tags, photos, a voice memo, and where in your body dysphoria or euphoria sat. One of those is enough. A day where all you managed was a mood is still a day you logged.

  • Look back

    Whether anything is changing is hard to see day to day and easy to see over months. A heat map of each month, a chart for each scale, how days with a tag compare to days without, a wrapped for any week, month or year, and the good days from a month, six months and a year ago.

  • HRT

    Your medication schedule with the next dose and how much is left, doses logged as you take them, lab results drawn as a chart, and a modelled hormone curve. The app never suggests a dose or shows a reference range.

  • Surgeries

    A journal per procedure: consults, the date itself, recovery, and photos that stay inside the app rather than in your camera roll.

  • Tryouts

    Try a name, a pronoun set, a style or a garment. Give it a start date, log how it feels as you go, and close it when you know.

  • Eras

    Name the chapters of your own timeline, whatever they were for you. They draw as bands along your timeline and milestones, so a reading sits against the chapter you were in when you wrote it.

  • Voice

    Practise, record the same passage each time, and compare with your own earlier takes. Pitch, resonance and speaking rate describe the recording without grading your voice.

  • Clinician summary

    Bring your doses, labs, measurements and changes to an appointment as one printed summary, over a range you choose, with only the sections you choose.

The screens

  1. Home

    The greeting, what is coming up, and the last seven days in whatever colour you picked. The mood row logs an entry for right now in one action, so on a day when you cannot face writing, you can still log something.

  2. An entry

    Mood, your scales, tags, a note, photos. An entry needs only one of them, so a day where all you managed was a mood is still a day you logged.

  3. The month

    Coloured by mood, or by any scale you choose. Days you did not log stay neutral.

  4. One day, twice

    Gender can shift through a day, so a day holds as many entries as it needs and stamps each one with its time. The day's own colour is their average.

  5. Search

    Searches your notes and your tags as you type. Diacritics do not matter in either direction: type lozko and it finds łóżko.

  6. Six months of one scale

    Every scale gets its own chart and its own average over however many days you pick. Days with more than one entry are averaged, and the list behind the chart says which days those were.

  7. Voice

    The same passage recorded today and a month ago, side by side. Pitch, resonance and speaking rate describe each take without grading your voice.

  8. Milestones

    Dated days that matter, in order. The ones ahead count down. The ones behind come back each year.

Also in there: search across your notes and tags, a tally of the times you were misgendered and gendered right, milestones with countdowns ahead and anniversaries behind, letters that open on a date you choose, a roadmap of the legal and medical steps in Poland with room for your own, binder and tucking wear time, hair removal sessions, measurements and sizes, appointment prep, Safe Space with your good days and your own comfort list, a directory of trans organisations and helplines you can read offline, one photo library across all of it, and a place for referrals and court orders. If you already have a year in Daylio, it imports.

Keeping it

  1. Export

    Export packs everything into one Archive, encrypted with a password you choose, before it goes anywhere.

Archives. Export packs your journal into one file, encrypted with a password you choose, before it leaves the app. Import puts it back, either merged into what is here or replacing it.

Automatic backups. On Android, an encrypted Archive saved weekly or monthly to a folder you pick, on the phone or with a cloud provider. The app shows when the last one worked and when one failed.

Coming from Daylio. Import a Daylio CSV. It shows you the counts and how the moods will map before it writes anything, and it only ever merges.

Plain export. CSV or JSON, for a spreadsheet or for keeping your own copy. It is not encrypted, and the app says so and makes you confirm before it writes the file.

Backup reminders. If your last backup is more than 30 days old, the home screen says so and lets you back up there and then. You can dismiss it.

On your phone

On Android. The same journal features as a phone app. Its data does not sync with the browser journal.

Reminders. Medication, injections, appointments. One-off or repeating, as notifications on your phone.

The daily check-in. One prompt a day, at a time you choose, skipped on days you have already written something.

Install it. Add it to your home screen and open it without a browser in the way.

Works offline. Once it is installed it does not need the network to open.

What it protects, and what it doesn't

Your journal stays on your device. There is no engender account, no server, and no copy of your entries anywhere but where you put them. I cannot read your journal, sell it or hand it over, because I never have it.

On your device it is encrypted, and you choose what opens it: a passphrase, a PIN, your fingerprint or face, or the device's own lock. On Android the app does not even ask for internet permission. In a browser, the web host sees the app being loaded and checking for updates, and nothing of what you write.

If you would rather not rely on my server at all, you can host the app yourself: every release publishes it as a bundle you can serve from your own domain, and then the only host that sees it load is yours.

What that protects, and what it does not (an unlocked phone in someone else's hands, for one), is on its own page.

Privacy policy

If you need to be careful

Choose how to unlock the journal in Privacy and data. Disguise, lock on leave and quick exit stay off until you turn them on.

Access. Use a passphrase, a PIN with a device key, supported biometrics or a device-bound key. The Privacy page explains what each protects and how recovery works.

Disguise. The browser tab says Notes instead of engender. On Android, the app takes a neutral name and icon too.

Lock on leave. The journal locks when you switch away. With a mode that asks for a secret, you need it to return.

Quick exit. A two-finger swipe down covers the journal. Disguise shows a Notes screen; otherwise the tab goes blank. If your access mode asks for a secret, returning requires it.

How it looks

Sixteen palettes: trans, nonbinary, genderfluid, bisexual, lesbian, pansexual, rainbow, agender, gay men, genderqueer, intersex, asexual, demiboy, demigirl, trigender and the Polish flag. Each one recolours the whole app, charts and calendar included, and each one works in light and dark.

Colour never judges. No red for a bad day and no green for a good one. The heat map is one colour at different strengths, and an empty day stays empty.

Two languages. English and Polish, switchable in settings, with dates following whichever you pick.

How to get it

engender runs in a browser. It opens straight away, with nothing to install and no account to make.

Start journal

The Android app is the same journal as an app. These are the four places to get it, and each becomes a link as it goes live. Google Play is last for a reason.

  • Aurora Not available yet.

    The same build as Google Play, without your Google account attached to the download.

  • F-Droid Not available yet.

    Builds the app from source itself, so you are not trusting a file that came from me.

  • Obtainium Not available yet.

    Follows this project's releases on GitHub and keeps itself up to date.

  • Google Play Not available yet.

    Works, and tells Google you have a trans app on your phone. Nothing in engender changes that.

Who made this

I'm Alicja Barankiewicz, a data engineer in Warsaw. I also run nazwozbior.pl, which searches every name in the Polish PESEL registry for anyone looking for the one that fits.

You can read it. engender is free software under the GPLv3. The source is public.

The licence means you can run it, change it and pass it on, and it cannot be taken back. If I stop, someone else is free to pick the code up, and your Archives are a documented format rather than something only this app can open.

If something is broken, tell me what happened and what you expected instead. That is usually enough to find it.