You just said that anyone that thinks differently doesn’t matter.
One phrasing that might work better than “biological sex” is “gender assigned at birth”.
We can determine it.
It is true for genders if someone decides they are non-binary and that data is added to the database at that time it is correct, if a year later they decode they are third gender instead then that data ceases to be correct. If we added begin/end dates then we could store the change but you are against that idea, therefore your proposal as it stands is different to the way all other data works. Other data is only wrong if it was always wrong, it doesn’t start correct and then become wrong.
No we said the opposite, you said it was valid for me to claim to be black I said it was invalid, that is the opposite view.
But they are different, but I see no meaningful difference between non-binary and 3rd person. And you are not confidence of the difference, i put it to you you they are not different just different word for the same thing.
So now you’ll be proposing we set 99% of artist to no gender, good move !
I meant about people born men joining womens groups.
I have quoted your whole sentence without leaving anything out or twisting anything. I just split it up to reply to the individual parts of the sentence.
But by making the “gender identity field” an additional and optional field to another gender field you are saying that gender identity is optional and whatever the other gender is (which doesn’t exist) is the correct one.
I’m saying you should select a gender for a person based on their statements and not based on your preferences. Sure, it’s not avoidable that you make assumptions about people that are male or female, because they don’t come out and generally are not asked about their gender. But an editor should not assume anyone is agender just because the editor thinks they don’t look male or female for example.
No I said that what others think about a persons gender doesn’t matter, only what the person thinks/says themselves.
This is also impossible to determine. If a person changed their legal sex before they got famous you’ll probably not find any documentation about their sex assigned at birth (it’s sex btw, because the doctor can’t know what gender the baby identifies as).
Nope. Non-binary is an umbrella term so unless they specifically state “I now identify as third gender and reject the term non-binary” it is not wrong - just not specific.
I am not strictly against start and end dates for genders. All I said is that this is likely to be misused. Yours is a good example where it would be wrong to use start and end dates. Finding out more specifically about who you are doesn’t make your previous findings incorrect.
Yes sure there may be examples where a person’s gender identity really changes over time and not just knowledge about their identity, but disregarding genderfluid people this is very rare. I have heard of a genderfluid person who identifies as female most of the time, but as male during some activities like sports. Would you then want to enter the gender data for this person like: “… was male from August 23rd 2018, 17:05 until August 23rd 2018, 17:13?”
Just change the order of the two parts of your sentence and you’ll get my point.
Wtf? I’m proposing to change the gender for every artist who publicly identifies with something else than male or female from “other” (or whatever it is set to currently) to their actual gender identity (which may be more than one value), nothing more nothing less.
2 Likes
And what exactly will be the undeniable reliable source of that?
Will pre-defined nomenclatures such as you have proposed suffice?
Or, since both language and the matter at hand are quite dynamic, should it be a field that accepts anything an editor or a real person enters?
This thread really seems to go nowhere.
You don’t seem willing or able to consider the matter at hand with an objective or open mind, and seem to lack the ability of taking a ‘helicopter view’, or including some relativity in the matter. It seems a far too personal matter for that being an option at the moment.
That’s a pity because the basis of the issue is valid. But the way this is going doesn’t seem to do ‘the cause’ any good, and it doesn’t seem likely that it will be producing-, or lead to agreeing on- a sensible proposal anytime soon.
I’m going to grab my edition of Don Quixote.
It’s very similar to what this thread’s real intentions seem to be, and it’s much more fun to read.
Its certainly not clear that non-binary is an umbrella term that encompasses third gender from the definition. But you are totally missing the general point that gender identity can change and therefore is not a good candidate to be stored as a field in database. You then go on give me the example of a person whose gender identity does change often and therefore would be silly to store begin/end dates. Well yes maybe it is silly to attempt to store it at all which is why I like Hiccups idea of adding a gender identity field to allow to store current gender without messing up the more reliable existing gender field.
I cannot understand your point about changing the order of my sentence.
In the musicbrainz context, standardized terms are best, but it’s not really possible to get everything you need perfect a priori. That’s why Paula’s proposal calls for a “gender editor” class analogous to our current “location editor” class. Someone(s) who are empowered to add new gender categories as needed, so we have that flexibility without the mess that would come from a free-form field.
It’s not clear to me what you’re asking for for sources. We permit information sourced from a wide range of places, from printed on the releases, to the artist’s website, to interviews and other news reporting related to the artist. This isn’t any different.
Look, there’s a lot going on in this thread but the fundamental nature of the proposal is that nothing will change for the vast majority of artists on musicbrainz. What Paula’s proposal is dealing with is the small percentage of people who we are currently lumping into “other”. There’s no new evidentiary standard, there’s no change being proposed to how we handle the binary majority, this is just about adding detail.
5 Likes
There is no argument there.
That’s exactly why I suggested something like adding an optional or more fine-grained field such as ‘gender identity’.
Then you wouldn’t need to make big changes to the current system that is working fine for the vast majority of artists, and/or for who additional information on ‘gender identity’ is simply not available.
If and when additional info on ‘gender identity’ for an artist is or becomes available, then you could use/activate such a more fine-grained information field.
But that suggestion immediately got trashed with the response “gender identity is not optional”.
Getting such responses doesn’t instill much confidence in the willingness to reach a realistic and agreeable solution.
hiccup, my understanding of your proposal was that it would allow combinations like: “male, identifies as female” or “female, identifies as nonbinary” which don’t seem appropriate. If that wasn’t your intent then maybe you could elaborate.
3 Likes
The problem in answering any question, or taking any stance in this thread, is that if you take this all to the extreme level of accuracy, and take it all very, very seriously, you cannot use ‘gender’ at all, and nobody is right.
But the worldwide population just happens to use it as some basis.
So in my opinion MusicBrainz also only needs to get it ‘right’ on a basic level as well.
It can’t and shouldn’t assume it could be an expert on gender identification.
Nor should anybody take it serious on a level where big words such as ‘offending’ or ‘human rights’ are used.
As a basis I think pretty much everybody will agree there should be ‘male’ and ‘female’.
Then, the next step, in case there is more information available, there could be the option to add additional information.
I don’t have an opinion if for example when that ‘additional information’ field is activated, perhaps ‘male’ or ‘female’ should be deactivated or blanked.
But that’s probably something to be discussed in round two. And then the people who are responsible for the implementation will need to get involved.
But this thread still seems to be stuck in round one.
Just wondering if Miley Cyrus could perhaps chip-in and give her opinion on the matter?
The problem here is that you’re setting up a system where “male” and “female” are sort of impliclty real or primary genders, while any other ones are secondary and implied less important or less real. It’s important the non-binary genders be part of the same field as male and female for that reason.
That said, you can do interface simplifications during selection. OKCupid with a select-one drop down menu with the choices Man/Woman/More Options. If you select more options, the interface changes to the full list, including Man and Woman, and you can select up to five. Once you’ve chosen, whatever you choose is displayed in the same place as Man or Woman on your profile, because it’s the same field.
In the musicbrainz context, I imagine the default interface would be a search field like locations, like instruments, etc; not much custom interface work would be needed for that. But if we ended up with something like how OKCupid handles it, that wouldn’t be bad either.
Snarky remarks about Miley Cyrus are not productive in this conversation. Please remember that many musicbrainz editors are trans and non-binary. Being disrespectful of these issues hurts the musicbrainz community and alienates people.
5 Likes
A gender is assigned on birth certificates.
From wikipedia - Gender identity - Wikipedia
Gender identity is the personal sense of one’s own gender.[1] Gender identity can correlate with assigned sex at birth, or can differ from it.[2] All societies have a set of gender categories that can serve as the basis of the formation of a person’s social identity in relation to other members of society.[3] In most societies, there is a basic division between gender attributes assigned to males and females,[4] a gender binary to which most people adhere and which includes expectations of masculinity and femininity in all aspects of sex and gender: biological sex, gender identity, and gender expression.[5] Some people do not identify with some, or all, of the aspects of gender assigned to their biological sex;[6] some of those people are transgender, genderqueer or non-binary. There are some societies that have third gender categories.
and
Gender is the range of characteristics pertaining to, and differentiating between, masculinity and femininity. Depending on the context, these characteristics may include biological sex (i.e., the state of being male, female, or an intersex variation), sex-based social structures (i.e., gender roles), or gender identity.[1][2][3] Traditionally, people who identify as men or women or use masculine or feminine gender pronouns are using a system of gender binary whereas those who exist outside these groups fall under the umbrella terms non-binary or genderqueer . Some cultures have specific gender roles that are distinct from “man” and “woman,” such as the hijras of South Asia. These are often referred to as third genders .
Sexologist John Money introduced the terminological distinction between biological sex and gender as a role in 1955. Before his work, it was uncommon to use the word gender to refer to anything but grammatical categories.[1][2] However, Money’s meaning of the word did not become widespread until the 1970s, when feminist theory embraced the concept of a distinction between biological sex and the social construct of gender. Today the distinction is strictly followed in some contexts, especially the social sciences[4][5] and documents written by the World Health Organization (WHO).[3]
So its seems to me we have a clear difference between Biological Sex and Gender Identity, whether Gender is the exactly the same as Gender Identity I’m not sure. It seems perfectly reasonable to have two different fields to capture these two different aspects. Biological Sex (currently named Gender) can still have Other field (maybe it should be renamed Intersex) to indicate where unclear from birth. But going back to Miley Cyrus she can have Biological Sex set to Female, and then Gender Identity set to genderfluid.
I don’t think anybody is using the gender field that way now. The gender field is obviously already about gender identity, it’s just missing many options.
1 Like
I can understand that you say that, and agree if you just take that remark by itself.
The reason for writing it was not just an attempt of being snarky, but a result that it occurred to me that maybe many of the artists that we are discussing here, might think “wow, the people at MusicBrainz are taking this all at a far more serious level then I am myself”.
And Miley Cyrus seemed like a good example of a person that doesn’t seem to have any big issues with it.
So I would actually be interested to hear her/his opinion.
I am (again) guessing, many wouldn’t mind at all if MusicBrainz MusicBrainz kept it very simple by having just
m/f/other, and might even feel uncomfortable about other people deciding that they must be put in a much more specified box.
But of course those are all assumptions about other people. But I think it is a valid consideration that we discuss this.
So this was a handicapped attempt to lighten the discussion a bit, and to point out that we have not heard the opinion from one single artist about this matter.
But we (all) are making many assumptions on how ‘they’ might feel about all this.
My brief and unexplained ‘Miley Cyrus’ remark understandably wasn’t read in this way by everybody, so I hope this explanation clarifies it.
Maybe, by accident, I think its a mishmash of both. Because the majority of people have had their gender set based on their biolgical sex rather than based on any Gender Identity statement they have made. Then when a gender identity statement has been made contradicting their biological sex it has been changed to Other.
Our Wiki says:
Gender
The gender is used to explicitly state whether a person or character identifies as male, female or neither. Groups do not have genders.
That’s because that’s how it’s stuck in your head.
PS: From the guidelines:
Gender
Use the gender the artist identifies as. Use “other” if the artist identifies as something other than “male” or “female”.
For characters, the fictional gender of the character should be used. This might not match the gender of a person who performed the character.
The “other” gender option is meant to represent a gender that is neither male nor female, and is not intended for use with entities for which the concept of gender is illogical, such as companies.
PPS: To keep this discussion on topic please start a new discussion if you want to advocate for adding a “biological sex” field.
2 Likes
Are you seriously saying that when most people add an artist to MusicBrainz they go of to find some evidence of gender identity statement and select based on that ?
No of course not. But if someone finds a statement by the artist about their gender identity than they change the gender field accordingly and other editors will accept that, because it’s in accordance with the guidelines.
4 Likes
Yes so thats my point, its is intended to be used as Gender Identity, but is actually used as Biological Sex until a conflicting Gender Identity statement is come across. You might say so what ?, since the majority of people accept their biological sex and haven’t given much thought to their gender identity. But my argument is if you could ask every single person in the database to consider their gender identity look at the list you have created there are some options that may be quite appealing to many people such as gender non-conforming , but it would be quite reasonable for them to decide they were gender non-conforming but still male or female based on their biological sex. So firstly it very important that if these options are added then there must be a way to allow multiple values to be selected, but personally I would prefer gender and biological-sex to be kept seperate that will give us a a more accurate and useful database.