What's Gender Got to Do with It? A Critique of RDA 9.7

The Library of Congress (LC) and the Program for Cooperative Cataloging (PCC) interpretation of Resource Description and Access (RDA) 9.7 regarding gender when identifying persons reinforces regressive conceptions of gender identity. The rule instructs catalogers to record gender when identifying persons, and although RDA gives catalogers the flexibility to record more than two gender labels, LC limits Name Authority Cooperative Program (NACO) catalogers to a binary label: male, female, or not known. In this article, the authors challenge gender as a descriptive attribute for personal names, critique how LC is instructing NACO catalogers to record elements about gender, and make recommendations to address describing persons in LC authority records.