I’d like to see a solution for genres first, then worry about genders
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Both are very different topics. And this discussion seems to result in some workable solution, I don’t see this for genres. Please feel free to discuss genres separately, but not inside this thread.
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So I was gone for a week now and it seems there are not a lot of objections to my plan above, so I created STYLE-1013 to set the first step in motion.
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I have put lots of more thoughts into this lately and came up with a counter-proposal to my own plan (step 3) from above and here it is:
Paula’s revised plan for genders on MB
Make genders entities that have their own link and MBID and show the following info:
- list of artists labeled with that gender
- maybe users too (they probably should have to tick a box agreeing to appear in such a list)
- aliases in different languages
- relationships to other genders (has part/is part of, is similar concept to)
- links (e.g. Wikidata)
- …
If possible much of that info should automatically populated from Wikidata.
Everybody should of course be able to link genders to artists (even more than one per artist), but maybe there should be privileged editors that are the only ones who can create new genders. I’d obviously volunteer to be such a “gender editor”.
Genders I’d suggest for now are the following. I found example artists for all of these in our DB - see my collection.
- female
- male
- non-applicable - for artist that are not persons or characters so the concept of genders can not apply.
- none - for people who don’t believe in the concept of genders or refuse it so the concept of genders does not apply.
- non binary (not further defined) - all persons currently labeled as “other” would go here until they are moved to a more specific gender
- non binary - this would be the super-category for all the genders below
- genderqueer - this would be related to non binary as “similar concept to”.
- agender
- genderfluid
- third gender
- gender nonconforming
- androgyne
- transgender - with the two sub-entities below
- transfeminine
- transmasculine
IMO the trans* genders should not be used for trans people who identify as male or female (as probably most do), but only for those who are cited to identify as trans.
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I just looked this up out of interest Faʻafafine - Wikipedia and it seems this is a cultural thing thing rather than a biological thing
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The distinction between “non-applicable” and “none” seems subtle enough that I could see it getting lost in practice. Is “agender” a viable alternative to “none”?
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To be honest that is something I’d like to ask such a person before I make a judgment about it.
PS: E.g. if you do a websearch for “Eliot Sumner agender” you’ll find some articles like “Sting’s daughter comes out as agender”, but they all refer to the same interview with the quote “I don’t believe in gender labels”. Agender on the other hand is a gender label.
Another option would be to scratch the “none” and just leave the gender field blank for Eliot.
I have some problems with this proposal and the existing Gender field as it currently is. If we consider the case of Miley Cyrus she was born biologically female, and whilst I totally respect that she identifies as gender-fluid (from wikipedia) that doesnt mean she is no longer female , it certainly doesnt mean she wasn’t born female. Currently her gender field is set to to blank so that means we have lost the ability to store her birth/biological gender. That has impact on creating a query such as Females singers from Nashville as she would not appear. And since MusicBrainz primarily deals with facts it is not good to lose these facts
So whilst I can see the value of capturing this additional gender information it should be stored in a different field not the existing Gender field, if you want to use the word Gender for this information then perhaps the existing Gender field could be renamed Biological Sex or something.
The other thing about these new genders is that it seems likely that a person may change how they self-identify so just having single field will mean you can only their gender at a point in time. What would be better is if a person could have multiple genders stored with start and end dates like we do with areas.
You say information should be auto-populated from Wikipedia, MusicBrainz doesn’t usually autopopulate anything so I think that is unlikley.
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I don’t think it makes sense to store the biological sex in our DB as I don’t think it’s anyone’s business. Your gender identity is the only thing that matters. If you are a transwoman and identify as female, then your gender should be set to female and no other information is necessary.
In the case of Miley Cyrus I’d set her gender to gender-fluid, female and probably male too, as that is what gender-fluid means: You (sometimes) identify with both (or even more than two) genders.
So in her case the query for female singers from Nashville would still work.
That’s what I’m proposing.
Wikidata does it like that and its misused probably in 90% of the times. It’s true some people may change their gender identity over time, but usually you just realize over time what you identify as.
As long as a person is not cited to say “I identified as … until … and now identify as …” (which I have never heard of) start and end times for gender identity make no sense.
I certainly don’t want our DB to loose facts, but if a person doesn’t identify with a certain gender than it’s not factual to link them to it in any way.
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On that basis you should not have genders in the database at all, but personally I find it very useful to find female/male musicians. And gender is a key part of music folklore, i.e girl bands, boy bands. MusicBrainz already has a mechanism where a person can ask for information about themselves to removed so if someone is not happy with how their gender is stored then they can make a request and it can be altered.
You are coming it from a very transgender rights point of view, but it is an undisputable fact that Miley Cyrus was born female, and for the purpose of categorising music I am interested in that not how she identifies herself. Personally I dont see the value of some of the gender categories you have listed, they seen so similar as to be meaningless to most people. SInce I think your main driver is not to pigeonhole people rather than to try and capture their Gender identity and since this is a very controversial area with many opposing views maybe best to leave things as they are since MusicBrainz is a Music database not a Gender identity database
I don’t see your point. Why not store genders if they are informative data? If you want to find female singers then you should be able to do so, but you should be aware that the results will be singers who identify as female, not singers that when they were born the doctor considered to appear female.
If you want to find singers with female voices then you’d probably get the best results searching for singers who are not male.
Yes, but musicbrainz doesn’t have a mechanism where you can ask to have the correct gender shown if it’s not male, female or “other”. And all the other data is also entered (mostly correctly) by editors and not only after request by the artist, so why should genders be different?
Nope, it’s not. If she says she identifies or identified as female then she is/was, if she doesn’t she isn’t. If you want to store facts about her biology you’ll have store her entire genetic code, regular blood test results and stuff like that. If you want to store facts about someones gender you take them by their word instead.
But they mean a world of difference for the people who matter: They, themselves.
I could also say I don’t care whether you are male or female, all cis- non-queer people are the same to me. But that doesn’t give me the right to say your male or female identity is not a fact.
Sorry to be rude, but you are right, there are different views: One deals with the reality that things are not as people thought they were in the dark ages and the other is an uneducated view of people who think they can dictate onto others what they should identify as.
MB doesn’t store a single file of music, so by that logic we should just delete all the data and pronounce MB dead.
MB stores data related to music and artists’ genders are a part of that. The way we store tracks, recordings and works evolved over time too to better reflect reality, so the same should be possible with other data too.
PS: Isn’t our highest rule “artist intent”? I think if an artist publicly states that they identify with gender n, then that is what we should store in the DB.
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But why cant I search for singers that were born female, you are dictating to me that I have view this subject in the same way as you do.
‘Other’ just means something other than the choices, I can see why you might want to add a few more but Other isn’t itself wrong. I’m not quite clear what your proposal is but I suppose if you want to allow someone to select multiple genders I would be okay with that, what I’m not happy about scrubbing their biological sex from the record.
To my mind that is complete nonsense, its not that she is saying she was a man she is simply seems to be saying she doesn’t think about here sex or care about the sex of her partners, but regardless of what she currently thinks she was still born female. It seems perfectly fair to say Miley Cyrus was born a woman and currently considers herself as genderfluid, but your views seems to be we just have to say Miley Cyrus is genderfluid.
Lets take an analogy based on race, I’m caucasian white. If i did an ancestry dna test Im sure I woudn’t be categorised 100% white, but does that mean I should therefore not describe myself as white. Furthermore would it be okay for me to say that I am black, and therefore expect everyone to say I am black ?
I’m not saying they are not a fact, just that they are very nuanced, i.e from your page linking to wikidata we have:
non-binary:range of gender identities that are not exclusively masculine or feminine
third gender- set of gender identities that are not exclusively masculine or feminine
I can’t understand the difference., From a database pov if you have both values I expect people searchng for non-binary would probably expect some of the people categorised as third-gender to be returned and vice versa.
Actually i would be interested in you explaining the difference to me.
You are being very rude and wrong. I’m not dictating anything about how you identify I’m just saying Im not particularly interested in how artists currently gender identity and I am more interested in gender born with and don’t want to lose that information. That is a perfectly valid view to hold and it is wrong to accuse me of being uneducated just because I don’t agree with you.
You can. People who identify as female were born female, but people who were born with XX genes and at some point realized they identify as something else were not born female.
As the artist does you mean. → artist intent.
Other is not literally wrong if you don’t identify as male or female and those are the only two other options. In that case it’s “only” disrespectful. Other is however wrong if you identify e.g. as genderfluid or bi-gender. If you identify partly as male and female you are not “other”. Technically it’s not correct either if you identify as neither, as that is not other.
Yeah I got that, but it doesn’t make sense to me.
Let’s take a different approach: What can we actually know about an artist?
- gender identity?
- yes, if they publicly state what they identify as
- no, but we can guess if they are stated to be born with a certain biological sex and haven’t (yet) publicly stated that they don’t identify with the according gender.
- legal sex/gender?
- yes, if the country they are citizens of publicly share this info. But from this we can not make conclusions about the biological sex or the gender identity. In my Austrian passport I am (still) labeled with: “Sex: M”. I can, like most trans people do, have it changed, but then actually it would be wrong unless I have a gender-affirming surgery and therefore actually (to some degree) change my “sex”.
- biological sex?
- no. We can try to derive that from the birth certificate (which usually represents one doctor’s opinion after seeing you for a few seconds while you are still covered in your mother’s goo) or from your passport (which may be the eqal value to what’s in your birth certificate, but could be changed by request of your parents if they learned you are intersex and choose the gender they want to raise you as before you can have a say in it [this is afaik legal in most countries], or changed by your request to have it match your gender identity [if your country allows an option that matches your gender identity - so usually just male or female, sometimes “X”])
You are confusing gender identity with a) thoughtlessness and b) sexuality here.
People who don’t think about their gender identity don’t usually “come out”. Coming out is the result of a long and deep inner thought process in which you learn about yourself until you finally know who you are.
I’m guessing with “not caring about the sex of her partners” you mean “accepting the gender identity of her partners, no matter what that may be” (which would make her pansexual/panromantic) or “not restricting the pool of sexual partners by what “parts” they are equipped with” (which would be even less any of our business). Anyways it doesn’t have anything to do with being gender-fluid.
Like I said: genderfluid includes both binary genders, so I’m not disagreeing that she is female. I’m just saying we should label her as female because that is what she identifies as and not because she may have been born with XX chromosomes (which we don’t know).
Oh, that’s always a good idea! 
This is a tough question, but personally I wouldn’t have a problem with that.
You’re comparing apples and oranges here though. When it comes to your ethnicity and culture there is the notion of “appropriation” which can be very discriminating. On the other hand “appropriating” e.g. the clothing styles of a gender that may not match your biological sex doesn’t hurt anyone.
Yeah, and you don’t have to.
Yes, but that is simply a matter of fixing the search function.
I’d also expect to get people from Queensbridge in the results if I search for people from the USA, but that currently is not the case. Currently not even a search for artists from Queens includes artists from Queensbridge.
Tbh I’m not an expert here either and I believe “transsplaining” what it means to be third gender is just as bad as mansplaining what it means to be a woman.
Sorry, but this is not a thing.
If you want to go and stick needles in unexpected celebrities to do extensive tests on their genetics, epigenetics and endicrinology to determine their biological sex so you can store that in the DB then go ahead, but this has nothing to do with gender. Gender is always gender identity and people are born with the gender they at any point in their life came out as identifying with.
Yes, I’m sorry I lost my cool, but in my defense you said yourself:
which by definition makes your opposing view an anti-human-rights point of view.
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From the beginning of raising this matter I felt that bringing this up as some ‘human rights’ thing is like shooting at a mouse with a Howitzer.
It is introducing some heavy social/political burdon on MusicBrainz, while it is a matter only relevant to what MusicBrainz main objectives are on a secondary level.
Yes, of course somebody can take this all very personal, make it a very serious matter, and use terminology such as ‘offending’, ‘human rights’, etc. etc., but I believe this is the wrong place to fight a battle on this level.
Why not keep things pretty much as they are, and introduce an optional additional field: “identifies as”, and let editors that believe they can speak for an artist and put a certain label on their gender identity do so?
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So you are basically saying that as long as nobody has strong feelings about it we can create new options for things that exist (like character besides person and group), but as soon as somebody is offended by the status quo it should be kept at all cause?
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Did you read where I said "and introduce an optional additional field: “identifies as”?
Could you explain what could be considered offensive about having that option?
We are never going to agree on this, whilst I would always treat a [person based on their current gender I don’t not believe that the gender they were born as ceases to exist as a fact. If you think it logically that would then mean if you enters a persons new gender and then they changed at some point then changed it again the data in the database would be wrong. I don’t think there is any other data in MusicBrainz that can be complelety correct one day, only to be completely incorrect the next, so for this reason I think it is poor data to be added to the database. You mention artist intent but isn’t that is about their art rather than themself. When I presented the race question you say you wouldn’t have a problem with me calling myself black. Frankly, I think alot of black people would be profoundly offended by that and I would never do such a thing. So we have a different view of things here, your view seems to be ‘i am what I think I am’, and that transcends any evidence to the contrary I don’t agree with that view.
This is really a distraction, most people have their gender set in MusicBrainz without needing to find documentary evidence to back it up.
Not really, if you dont really know the difference how on earth could we fix the database search to return both results, and would that be correct or not. Another analogy, we have an extensive instrument list but we ensure we dont add the same instrument just with a slightly different name. If you are not sure what the difference is then you should not be proposing we add both. And free text fields are generally bad as we generally end up with a lot of bad data/misspellings ectera (see folksonomy tags)
Since when, it certainly didn’t use to mean that maybe it does now but as I explain earlier MusicBrainz doesnt store any other data that could be considered transient, i.e correct one day and wrong the next.
No, incorrect I am most certainly not ant-human rights. These things aren’t clear cut, there are multiple valid point of views. For example there are many women groups unhappy about people born as men now self-identifying as women and joining women-only groups. I don’t think these women would consider themselves as anti-human rights. I don’t have a clear view on this issue one way or another by point it is there is not one clear right answer to any of these issues.
As this example shows it rather more than appropriating the clothing styles of a Gender
and Im very surprised you said this, that seems to belittle the whole notion of Gender
That is probably not what you meant to say.
Yes, but I didn’t take it seriously.
Because lots of real options that exist in the world are missing.
because your gender identity is not an optional additional gender, but it is your gender.
I am talking about real human beings here who gathered all their courage to come out as what they are even though they most likely have to face discrimination because of it. I am not talking about letting editors pick and choose what genders they think fit for an artist.
Probably not.
You mean sex, not gender. And no: the sex doesn’t cease to exist, but it is something we can’t determine anyway.
Neither is this true for genders. If a person comes out as a gender that they haven’t been labeled as before then their previous gender label has always been wrong.
Artist intent can be claimed about the capitalization of their name. What does that have to do with their art?
No we don’t. I said exactly the same thing.
What evidence? Have you seen any artist’s genetic, epigenetic and endocrinological test results? Have you studied genetics and can confidently say that you can determine a person’s biological sex from these test results? And have you studied gender studies and can confidently determine a person’s gender from their biological sex? I hardly think so. So the only evidence that exists about a person’s gender is their statement about their gender identity.
Yes, and for every artist that doesn’t identify as male or female this is wrong!
If you don’t know what you are searching for then it’s not the data’s fault that you don’t get the results that you want.
But we do add slightly different instruments. Instead we could also just say: distinguishing between instruments is hard so let’s just merge them all to three instruments: Guitar, drums and other. Miles Davis would be turning in his grave.
I don’t know the difference between a clarinet and an oboe, but I am still able to transcribe info from liner notes correctly if they contain any of the two. I am confident you can also choose correctly between non-binary and third gender if you add an artist that publicly stated that they are third gender even though you don’t know the difference.
Since the word “gender” was invented to distinguish it from “sex” I would guess.
Artist can change their name, move and die, which means their name field, area field and “deceased?” checkbox may be subject to change.
Then why don’t you leave it to people who actually took their time to learn about the subject matter?
How so? Just because I’m not offended if a person who identifies as and is perceived by others as a woman wears “men’s clothes” doesn’t mean I don’t take genders seriously.
What do you mean?
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That’s a peculiar way of participating in a discussion.
You (again) ignore what I said after the comma of that sentence.
You are forcefully and intentionally twisting my words here.
I meant an optional field that can be used or not.
It’s complete freedom to use that field or not.
Please don’t twist this and make it about ‘gender’ being an optional choice.
You are confusing me again.
So you are now saying that editors should not be allowed to enter or select something for a finer-grained gender field?
What actual ‘real human beings’ will be entering such data in MusicBrainz then?