I am happy the recent comments all have been very constructive and less personal. I am sure we can discuss this with taking everyone serious, without accusations of bad intent, putting legitimate concerns and viewpoints into quotation marks or flagging posts out of disagreement.
Maybe we can get to some agreement on some baselines. First some facts:
- The name of the artist this debate arose around is Patricia Taxxon. That seems to be both her personal name and the name under which she expresses herself artistically.
- A few years back she released music under a different name, one that is perceived as a male name. She has changed all occurrences online of this to her current name (at least as far as it is under her control).
Also some difference between let’s say MusicBrainz and music and distribution platforms like Bandcamp, Spotify etc.:
Platforms like Bandcamp and Spotify allow an artist to both promote and distribute their music. The artist is free to choose how they are represented there and what parts of their music catalogue is available.
MusicBrainz (like Discogs and other music databases) on the other hand deal with the history of data. They record when what kind of music was released. They are not a promotional tool. Their goal is to document the release of music, hence historical accuracy is of importance for them.
I hope we can all agree on the above, no matter from which point of view we are coming from.
Now my take on the case. First the above should make it pretty clear that the usual / default approach for MB is to credit released music exactly how it is credited at time of release. So if names change this usually is reflected only on releases after the name change. That’s independent of the reason of the name change, which can be a change of the legal name for some reason or just change of an artistic name for any reason.
Now people changing the name because they want their name to reflect their gender identity is a special challenge for those people. I think @anon18945670 explained this very well on her post at The Data Removal Policy and outing trans people. With all respect of being accurate in describing the past, it is also important to take care of an artist’s well being. Hence I think the naming style guidelines must be extended to give clear guidelines for trans people. As almost always, there is no one size fits all answer, it all depends on the specific case. I see a couple of cases, some of them more easy, others difficult.
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Some artists just keep their old music up under the old name. That can have various reasons. They might be personally fine with their past as long as they are treated as they wish now. It could also be a business decision, because the old name is just too popular to ignore. Whatever the reason, I think we all have no issue with this. The way the artist show their music matches how it is recorded. On MB the primary artist name will be set to their current name, releases will be credited accordingly.
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If an artist is really popular even before their transition this is well known. The artist might de-emphasize their older releases, there might be re-releases of old music under new name, re-recorded or not, but their original releases are very public and known to many. I think we must do our best to make sure the artist on MB fits the current name and identity, but we still should credit the original releases as they have been. If there have been re-releases under the new name they should be added as new releases.
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If artists are not well known, especially before their transition, things are very different. All of the issues of deadnaming can apply here, especially also issues of the artists health and well being. If the artist clearly shows that they don’t wish that their former name being used, we should try to respect this as best as possible.
In the given case I think there are quite some arguments in favour of changing the names to the current one. The artist has clearly changed all occurrences of her name online. The releases themselves have been out longer (I think, I don’t know exactly when the name changed, but it seems to be a while) under the new name then they had been available under the old. In any case they never prominently featured the artist’s name on the cover. And all releases have been digital.
I therefore think our guidelines should be extended to give better guidance on how to deal with transgender artists:
- It should be encouraged that both release groups, works and recordings get credited under their current name, even if at the time of the first release they were known under a different name. At the very minimum this should apply when they also have released the same music under their current name.
- We should come up with some criteria when it is acceptable to change the name on releases to the current name, even if at time of release another name was in use. This will be subject to discussion case by case I fear, as things like how popular an artist originally was, will not have a clear answer. Also it might just not be really possible, e.g. I don’t see this works well with physical releases or in general releases that prominently show the artist’s name on the cover or booklet.
- The style guides should give some pointers to the issue of deadnaming to make editors sensitive for this issue.
- How do we deal with the old name as an alias. Is it acceptable to keep the old name as a search hint? Or for which cases we want to avoid even that?
We could also discuss if in some cases it is better to distribute the two releases over two separate artists. In that case the old one would be merely an artistic persona. But it would give a clear separation in cases where someone really does not want their new name showing up anywhere in the current artist profile. I even have seen artists promoting their older works that way on their homepage.
I am also in favour of [STYLE-1885] Add “Withdrawn” as a Release Status. I like this very much. With the proper presentation it would allow us to still have these information available without it feeling like deadnaming, as @briaguya put it. It’s also useful in some other cases where artists do not want a release to exist, but due to lack of a time machine cannot change that.
I also find the arguments brought up by @zigg very convincing. Especially the view from someone making use of the database, who wants the current name to be shown, but still find the data with the old one. That definitely would be an argument to keep the old name as a search hint, have old releases available, but don’t list them by default and link them to updated versions of the same release showing the proper name. And for file tagging having the ability in the tagger to de-prioritize those “withdrawn” releases would be great. I’m happy to add this functionality to Picard as soon as the MB server has something like this implemented.
One thing to keep in mind is that MB always records it’s edit history, and is an open database so everyone can add information. No one can prevent someone to enter a release under the old name, and people might do so without even knowing. And then the fact that a person is transgender will e.g. show up in discussions like the one we are currently having, because you cannot discuss theses things without mentioning it. In the end I think once someone has publicly released something under a certain identity there is simply no way to get rid of this completely. But we should strive to represent the artist’s current identity as good as possible.
I don’t actually see much of a problem with requesting votes per se. It is quite common to have votes requested here or on IRC. Those are usually from inside the community. But the commentors on the external discussion who actually tried to be constructive and helpful all seem to have some experience with MB as editors and thus are part of our community, they are the ones who came over to vote. I have no issue with that, although I think it would have been better to raise this issue here on the forums additionally. As @jonny7 admitted above that they “had kind of hoped by doing these changes in small badges, I could get them passed, while avoiding a confrontation like this”. While I find this totally understandable, I think it was the wrong move here. Having it posted also here on the forums would have avoided the bad taste of this being an attempt to “brigading” (I don’t share this view, but I understand why it was perceived as such by some).
The actual issue I have with that external thread is that a few people there were quick to jump to conclusions while obviously not having the slightest idea of MB and its community, and some comments there are simply wrong, disrespectful and even insulting.