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Updated 2018July 2022

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• Past PUL policy
• Ethical issues
• PUL-specific issues
• Recommendations
• Further considerations
• References

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Up to December 2017, Princeton’s guidelines for RDA NACO state that the field 375 Gender should be included in the authority record. It reads:

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375 Gender Include if you know or can readily tell from name. If gender is not easily identifiable, do not enter anything

Males $2 lcdgt

Females $2 lcdgt

It specifies that "All fields (except gender) need to be justified by information contained in the 670".

We propose that PUL revisit its guidelines on assigning gender, following the suggestions from the Report of the PCC Ad Hoc Task Group on Gender in Name Authority Records

PCC Recommendations on Recording Gender in Personal NARs, April 2022

In April 2022, the PCC Ad Hoc Task Group on Recording Gender in Personal Name Authority Records released the Revised Report on Recording Gender in Personal Name Authority Records, which updates the 2016 report linked in the References section below.

The NACO Participants Manual, 4th Edition,  p. 46 adopts the following recommendations from the Ad Hoc Task Group's Report:

• Do not record this field (375) in NACO records.
• When updating a NACO record for another reason, delete any 375 fields already present in the record.
• Gender information may optionally be recorded in the 670 field(s) of NACO records, based on cataloger’s judgment and only if the information is explicitly presented in the source of information. 

Furthermore, the revised report states: 

"... avoid outing, misgendering, or deadnaming the person, or recording details about a person’s gender transition. Respect requests from the person to remove or update information pertaining to the person’s gender or name changes." (p. 3)

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Recommendations Recommendations

Additional PUL Recommendations:

• DO NOT RECORD a person's gender in the MARC 375 field (RDA gender element), following the NACO Participants' Manual, 4th Edition and the 2022 PCC Ad Hoc Task Group report. Delete any 375 fields when revising/updating NACO records for another reason.
• Optionally,  unstructured information about a person’s gender included in 670 fields may continue to be recorded, including source information that contains gendered personal pronouns, occupational terms, relational terms, honorifics, etc.
• DO NOT misgender the person, include deadnames, or include personal information about the person's transition. 
• Record dates associated with a particular gender identity in 670 only when the person explicitly provides them.
• Record information about gender as the person self-identifies and explicitly discloses, taking information from readily and publicly available sources. Do not infer gender based on a person’s name or photograph.
• If you find resources in which the person publicly self-identifies their gender identity and wish to record it in a 670, it is best practice to seek the author's informed consent before including it. See section 3.2 of the Transgender Metadata Collective's 2022 Best Practices Report.
• Do not dig for given names or genders assigned at birth. If the person has never used their given name for a published work, and the name has never been an “earlier form of heading,” it is not bibliographically significant and should not be stated in a 400 field.

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Ethical Ethical

Ethical issues in assigning gender in Authority records:

• Gender identities are complex and varied.
• Gender in RDA is seen as fixed, stable and binary. Even though it allows for changes in gender, it does not take into account the person’s lived experiences (for instance, Caitlyn Jenner’s 375 fields mark 2015 as the “end date” of her male gender and the “start date” of her female gender, coinciding with the date she publicly came out as trans, not taking into consideration how she might have identified previous to that date).
  • This also brings up discussions on what is considered to be the marker for a “start” and “end” date. MARC documentation describes it as “starting [or end] date of a person's identification with a specified gender”, but practice usually associates it to when a person publicly comes out. According to Billey, Drabinsky and Roberto: “The idea of being a single gender one year and then another the next does not conform to many trans people's narratives”.
• Different cultures and languages may have different naming traditions that don’t necessarily conform to the Euro-western system of naming or to the binary cis-centered understandings of gender, gender identity and transitions status.
• Documenting personal information that relates to name changes or other aspects of a person's identity violates their right to privacy. Stating a person’s gender, particularly if they are transgender, removes their agency to choose what information about them is disclosed and made public.
• Other legally protected information pertaining to a person’s identity, such as race, religion, and sexual orientation, are not addressed by RDA. Gender identity should be conceptualized in the same way.

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• In RDA, gender is not a core or required attribute, even though it is required of PUL catalogers.
• Establishing gender based on the person’s name is in discordance with RDA, since it defines gender as “a gender with which a person identifies”. Asking catalogers to make assumptions about a person can not only be harmful, but wrong (for instance, the names Andrea or Carol can be read as male or female). A cataloger's judgement is subjective and culturally informed.
• The use of only two gender categories (male or female) reaffirms the ideas about gender as a binary system. Princeton fails to account for those who experience their gender outside the bounds of male or female.

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• Record information about gender as the person self-identifies and explicitly discloses, taking information from readily and publicly available sources. Do not infer gender based on a person’s name or photograph.
• Record gender terms from LCDGT or other controlled vocabulary in accordance with the terms used by the person in the sources consulted (for instance, if a person is a transgender man but identifies simply as a man, only input $a Males $2 lcdgt . If they identity as a transman, input $a Males $a Transgender people $2 lcdgt).
• Justify gender data recorded in the 375 field in a subfield $v or 670 field or both.
• Record dates associated with a particular gender identity in subfield $s and $t only when the person explicitly provides them.
• Do not dig for given names or genders assigned at birth. If the person has never used their given name for a published work, and the name has never been an “earlier form of heading,” it is not bibliographically significant and should not be stated in a 400 field.

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Further Further

Further considerations:

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Billey, Drabinksi, and Roberto. “What’s Gender Got to Do with It? A Critique of RDA 9.7,” Cataloging & Classification Quarterly 52, no. 4 (2014).

Billey et. al. "Revised Report on Recording Gender in Personal Name Authority Records" (2022)

Billey et al. "Report of the PCC Ad Hoc Task Group on Gender in Name Authority Records" (2016)

NACO Participants Manual, 4th Edition. (2020)

Thompson. “More Than a Name: A Content Analysis of Name Authority Records for Authors Who Self-Identify as Trans,” Library Resources & Technical Services 60, no. 3 (July 2016).

Transgender Metadata Collective. "Metadata Best Practices for Trans and Gender Diverse Resources." (2022)