Ok, since we seem back on track with some objectivity and more light-hearted perspective I’ll stick around for a bit.
Looking at this from the perspective of an editor with an album in his hands (or the music in his ears):
Gender is probably not specified in the liner notes.
In most cases it will be sourced by websites, wikipedia, artist photos, interviews, listening to the vocals, etc.
The editor will get it ‘correct’ in most cases, but of course, not in all.
(only listening to Andreas Scholll could give you the wrong idea and make the wrong choice here)
But in the vast majority of cases, going with this you will be able to make an educated guess to choose ‘male’ or ‘female’, and in the vast majority of cases everybody, the artist included will agree it to be ‘sufficiently correct’.
In the very, very rare instances that an artist disagrees with such a designation, or it is factually wrong, it can easily be voiced and corrected.
But indeed Musicbrainz would need to accomodate for the exceptions where:
- The editor can’t decide on one of these two for whatever reason.
- The artist in question himself specifically states something else than male or female.
We can probably agree that the vast majority of artists present themselves quite clearly as male or female, but for the cases where that is not so clear for the ‘editor on watch’, there needs to be a choice other than male or female.
That would lead to having some drop-down menu with ‘male’, ‘female’ and ‘unspecified’ (or ‘unknown’, or ‘other’? or ‘n/a’?).
But, exception no. 2 also needs to be covered.
The only person that can state his personal preference how to be addressed is the artist himself.
But, how can an editor know the correct or preferred designation to enter for gender in these cases?
The source would have to be reliably coming from the artist’s own website, credible interviews, or possibly wikipedia?
I am assuming nobody else, and certainly not an editor should, or should be forced to decide on that.
If I understand correctly that the amount variations of designations could be immense, it doesn’t seem realistic to try and create a dropdown list for those.
So in my mind that would result in having four options:
- male
- female
- unspecified/unknown/other (the choice of words here is probably best for the stakeholders to agree and decide on)
- free entry field
.
edit:
I want to add that I personally still don’t really see the added value for MusicBrainz to have such a ‘free entry’ field, and I only added it as some sort of compromise.
It really feels like delving into somebodies private life, without having that additional personal information contributing much to the essence of MusicBrainz. (music)
So, rethinking this (again) I revise my suggestion, and believe these four options would suffice:
- male
- female
- other (non-binary)
- unknown
(the last one for the cases where the liner notes only credits a persons name that is not clear to the editor to be male or female, and no other information is available.)