Interesting question raised by GUEST,Johnmc. I've been thinking about this recently myself, but in the context of 'contemporary' songs.

For some reason I've never given a lot of thought, I'm happy to sing old folk songs 'out of gender', i.e. to sing as if I'm the female. It somehow seems OK to do this, and people seem happy to accept it and 'overlook' the fact that I'm a male singing a 'female' song.

But with contemporary songs, I feel obliged to alter the gender or person to make it 'right'. For instance I recently reworded a song to suit myself (with the author's permission) to 3rd person instead of 1st person, because it's about a female and wouldn't make (as) much sense to change it to a male gender. So I changed the person instead, and I sing "She did this/that" instead of "I did this/that". Somehow I feel more comfortable singing it that way. Of course, there are some songs I just wouldn't attempt as a male, at all, because I can't find a way to make it work, or maybe I just wouldn't feel comfortable about it.

As I say, I've never really thought much about this before, so I'm not sure why I feel this way, or where I would draw the line. In practice if I don't feel happy about singing a song then I won't do it anyway.