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Updated 2018

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Gender trouble: revisiting PUL policy for establishing gender in Authority records

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:

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.

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.

Specific issues regarding PUL’s guidelines:

  • 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.

Recommendations:

  • 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.

Further considerations:

Kelly Thompson suggests three questions that catalogers should ask themselves to help guide authority work:

  • Is there potential for this information to harm the author through outing or violating the right to privacy?
  • Is there an indication that the author consents to having this information shared publicly?
  • Will including this information help a library user in the search process?

References:

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

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).

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