Regarding the issue itself, I share @zigg’s perspective. Thank you for articulating it like that.
I also want to comment on the nature of this discussion itself. It’s concerning to me with how little care some of the people here, especially those with auto-editor privileges, are approaching this subject. Deadnaming being put into quotation marks, the issue itself being dismissed as some ideology or mere feelings.
There is also a dismissiveness of labelling some of the things here as transphobia, so let’s talk about that. Transphobia is not an irrational fear of transgender people, like arachnophobia, for example, is an irrational fear of spiders. Transphobia describes patterns of thought and behaviour that originate with the idea that transgender people are not the gender that they say they are. By extension not taking the issues that arise out of being transgender seriously is transphobia. You can perfectly articulate how you want to preserve release history as entered into the DB, without being outwardly dismissive. Some of you have asked us to leave feelings out of this discussion, and I ask of you the same when a perfectly accurate descriptive term is being used.
Within discussions surrounding this issue, I have been linked to MB’s style guideline regarding Artist Credit. These guidelines are clearly written without transgender people in mind. In fact the only kind of reference to transgender people in the entire style guideline seems to be the Gender section for Artists.
These guidelines clearly cannot apply in this case, as they have not considered this case. And I do not agree that a trans person’s name change can be directly compared with a generic name change. This is why I wrote:
Not all name changes are equal. To assert that there is no difference between me changing my name from John to Lars, because I think it’s annoying how commonplace the name John is and a transgender person changing their name from a traditionally masculine name to a traditionally feminine name, because only the latter corresponds to their gender and inherent sense of self, is intellectually disingenuous. Transgender people, if they so desire, should be an exception to the rule.
If you are not willing to write a rule for transgender people specifically, than at least for any person that has changed their name and wants that change to cascade into the past. And if the other side is not willing to fully remove a person’s deadname form the DB, at least consider to what extend editing policy on MB could accommodate trans people. Being explicitly allowed to change names on Release Groups and Recordings would be a good start, with that being explicitly reflected in the style guidelines. The ticket @tastytea linked is also interesting, especially if auto taggers were to understand semantically that they should privilege official releases over withdrawn ones.
If you have other suggestions, feel free to add them.