BY DANIELLE ROCHE

Australia's highest-profile music awards has announced it will be removing its gendered categories to promote equal opportunity and treatment of artists of all genders next month.

The Australian Recording Industry Association (ARIA) Awards categories Best Male Artist and Best Female Artist, each with five nominees respectively, will be removed from the list of awards.

Instead, this year’s online awards ceremony in November will see the two segregated categories replaced with one gender neutral Best Artist category, featuring 10 nominees, as announced in a statement last month.

ARIA Chief Executive Annabelle Herd said in the statement that the move aligns with the music industry’s demands for a “more equal, inclusive, safe and supportive space for everyone”. 

"The time for separating artists based on gendered categories that exclude non-binary artists altogether has passed," she said.

In the years before the COVID-19 pandemic, Australian festivals such as Falls Festival, Days Like This and ORIGIN NYE were heavily criticised for their lack of gender diverse line ups.

Internationally, according to a 2020 USC Annenberg study, of the 172 artists featured in 2019's Hot 100 year-end Billboard Chart, only one gender non-conforming artist was credited.

In the most recent Australian census, more than half of the sex and/or gender diverse identifying people were aged 15 to 34, indicating an increasing generational acceptance of gender diversity.

Ms Herd said in the statement that she recognises the removal of gender-based categories is just one step in the continuous journey of reassessment, progression and ultimately evolution that the ARIAs are committed to undertaking.

Transgender Victoria joint founder and media representative Sally Goldner said transgender and non-binary artists are vital to the Australian music industry because of their unique creative ability to move through conceptual boundaries such as the gender binary.

“We've overcome that sort of huge artificial barrier where creativity opens up,” she said.

Ms Goldner said the support main stage representation provides lessens the unnecessary boundaries that often disadvantage emerging non-binary artists.

“It is so much easier when there is something else to turn to and you don't have to build a structure to underpin that creativity,” she said.

Non-binary Adelaide musician Sione Teumohenga, who performs as Lonelyspeck, said they view the increasing support for non-binary artists as a sign of the rising trend in gender-diverse acceptance within the music community.

“It definitely marks a shift in the discourse,” Mx Teumohenga said.

“I think it’s really important for people to see [the] joy and different ways of being within that [non-binary] identity.”

The ARIA Awards are not the first to make this shift towards inclusive language in recent years, following the Grammy Awards’ and the Music Victoria Awards’ removal of gendered categories for artist awards in 2012 and 2018 respectively.