Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Feminine essence concept of transsexuality

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The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's
talk page or in a deletion review
). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was delete‎. I see a consensus to Delete this article. Liz Read! Talk! 23:38, 9 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Feminine essence concept of transsexuality

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Feminine essence concept of transsexuality (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log | edits since nomination)
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The article should be deleted under

WP:DEL-REASONs
5, 6, and 8.

It was previously discussed and kept at AFD in 2009, mostly based on claims of enough RS, but the OR making up the majority of the article was recently removed per a talk page discussion. Relevant to note, the article's creator has a COI with Bailey and Blanchard and is notable for promoting fringe viewpoints on trans issues. Your Friendly Neighborhood Sociologist ⚧ Ⓐ (talk) 20:19, 2 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

  • Delete as simply a POVFORK. Alextejthompson (Ping me or leave a message on my talk page) 22:49, 2 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete For the aforementioned reason of any actual information here not being a distinct topic from Gender identity. At most if there's any useful content merge and redirect to Blanchard's transsexualism typology. Galobtter (talk) 02:29, 3 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    @Galobtter, the subject of this article is supposed to be the idea (NB: not the term) of a woman trapped in a man's body, which is the opposite of Blanchard's transsexualism typology. It is the story that trans women had to tell their psychologists (plural, because they had to convince two of them that they believed this) in the 1980s and 1990s, or they'd be denied access to gender-affirming medical treatment. Do you think that's the same as just Gender identity in general? Or maybe Gender essentialism? WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:11, 3 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    Well the article as it exists, both before the recent removals and now, is not really about the story - there was only a small section on it before the removals. It is mostly about Blanchard and his supporters arguing against the concept in general. And I think gender identity/gender essentialism is the right article to talk about someone feeling they are different gender than their body (i.e. a woman trapped in a man's body) and how they might describe it.
    But yeah I guess a redirect might not be right, even if the article as it stands right now is about Blanchard arguing against this, and the specific term of "feminine essence" seems a Blanchardism. Galobtter (talk) 03:28, 3 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    Well, there's an NPOV tag at the top of the article, and I suspect it, or other tags like it, is deserved. Ever since Blanchard published something that re-cast the familiar old narrative in theoretical terms (which is what you'd need to do if someone wanted to do serious research on the subject), we've had problems with POV pushing about it. It's taken significant work by several editors just to keep the article from being any worse than it is.
    @Aquillion, I see you saying something similar. What exactly about Blanchard's typology makes you think that woman trapped in a man's body has anything to do with it? The subject itself goes back at least to Ulrich's anima muliebris virili corpore inclusa, and the fact that Blanchard happened to write something about it does not mean that it's his idea. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:36, 4 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    As you say, the term and its use significantly predate Blanchard's work. That to me suggests that the redirect for woman trapped in a man's body is targeted at the wrong article. What the correct target for that redirect should be I don't know right now. I'd need to have a look at sources, and ultimately that may be something better discussed at RfD.
    Depending on the sources, there may be sufficient coverage to write a broader historical article about how trans women had to use that concept to get healthcare in the 70s-90s, divorced from the strict confines of Blanchard, if such a thing is not already covered in another preexisting article. But I don't think the existence of the redirect should preclude the deletion of this article, if that is where the consensus of this discussion eventually lies. s Sideswipe9th (talk) 00:30, 5 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    This conversation is where the idea for the article started. There were two competing stories at that time. The first was that trans women had some essential quality that made them be true women. Depending on the times/culture, the named quality might be ineffable (e.g., "a woman's soul" during the Victorian era) or physical (e.g., "brain sex"/gender identity is neurologically determined) or something else, but whatever it was, it wasn't genital anatomy and it wasn't necessarily the cause/etiology (in the sense that we'd use that term in a medical article), but it was the thing that makes all women (cis and trans) actually be women. The second story was Blanchard's taxonomy. This article is supposed to be about the first story. A merge/redirect to the story it competes with would be a way of erasing its existence. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:46, 5 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    But this is exactly what I'm talking about below. This is a classic example of a
    false dichotomy. Having "a woman's soul", having a "female brain", neurologically determined gender identity, and the idiom of being "a woman trapped in a man's body" are four different things, no matter whether Blanchard thinks they all sound similar to him. Loki (talk) 02:55, 5 January 2024 (UTC)[reply
    ]
    They're all basically gender essentialism, no? "All real women have women's souls/women's brains/women's ____, and I have one of those, so that makes me a real woman", right?
    I agree that the words "woman trapped in a man's body" is not the same as the idea communicated with those words. Articles, including this one, are generally supposed to be about the ideas, not about the words. The article at Cancer is about a fact of reality, not about the words we use to describe that reality; Woman trapped in a man's body should also be about a fact of reality, not about the words we use to describe that reality. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:10, 5 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    Err, no? For one, "woman trapped in a man's body" really is just a phrase. It's an idiom that conveys, basically, just the concept of being trans itself.
    "Women's soul" is certainly
    gender essentialist, and having a "female brain" is arguably essentialist, but having a neurologically determined gender identity isn't essentialist either. This is why I feel it's so important to distinguish these concepts from each other and why this article ought to be deleted as, again, a strawman Blanchard made up by mashing a bunch of concepts together. Loki (talk) 08:24, 5 January 2024 (UTC)[reply
    ]
    I don't think that these are meaningfully different, and I think that "woman trapped in a man's body" is better described as an explanatory narrative than as "just a phrase". This book calls it the wrong body discourse. This one calls it "the wrong body trans* narrative", and condemns it for being "safe and understandable from a cisgender perspective". This one calls it "a transgressive narrative" that "became the definition of trans femininity during the modernist period despite" being wrong. This one calls it "the 'wrong body' narrative" and says that it was medically constructed and imposed on trans folk by medical gatekeepers. This one also calls it "the wrong body narrative" and says that trans folk differ on whether it is imposed involuntarily on them. This one calls it "a popular experential discourse". This one calls it a "discourse" and says it wasn't a common discourse in Fiji (where one can be "a woman inside" without feeling "trapped in a man's body"). I didn't see any that said it's "just an idiom". Do you have sources saying that it's just words and not a narrative? WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:25, 6 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete. The only significant sources for the article seem to be from advocates of the Blanchard typology who use the idea as a straw man. The original author of the article is also part of the small group that advocates for the Blanchard typology. The sources even after cleanup are from these few advocates (Bailey, Blanchard), not mainstream independent reliable sources. The article subject does not meet criteria for general notability as defined in
    WP:GNG. Hist9600 (talk) 04:30, 3 January 2024 (UTC)[reply
    ]
    @Hist9600, if what the article currently describes is a strawman, what do you think the non-strawman description would say differently? WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:38, 4 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    I'm not sure why that is relevant to this discussion. There is a lack of objective evidence that the subject of this article is generally notable. Just because a metaphor or analogy may have been occasionally used, does not mean that Wikipedia needs an encyclopedia article about it (
    WP:GNG). Hist9600 (talk) 01:00, 5 January 2024 (UTC)[reply
    ]
    Have you looked at the prior
    WP:TNT). WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:56, 5 January 2024 (UTC)[reply
    ]
    Yes, I've read that discussion, and my main takeaway is that some sources were used improperly and should not have been part of the article. The other takeaway was that User:James_Cantor was the main proponent of keeping the article, and that you appear to have been in very close agreement with him on a number of issues. Hist9600 (talk) 14:13, 5 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    Ten editors !voted to keep the article, and you've singled out its initial author as "the main proponent of keeping the article", even though he made only one (1) edit to the AFD page, and three others posted more words on the subject than him? Your conclusion doesn't seem logical to me. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:53, 6 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    I'm not impressed by a few votes when I see the actual discussion, and the poor rationale. It doesn't even begin to hold up today, nor should it have then. We can see that sources were added inappropriately through a process of original research and synthesis. The sources that actually mention this concept specifically are so limited that they basically boil down to two promoters of the Blanchard typology (Blanchard and Bailey). And as we all know, the Blanchard typology is not mainstream. Hist9600 (talk) 05:35, 6 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment: Note that the article, an hour before deletion, had almost ten thousand characters removed from it (it was 14k and was taken down to 5k, so about 60% of it removed); see Special:Permalink/1193096414 for a version from before this removal. jp×g🗯️ 06:35, 3 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    I feel the need to point out that the vast majority of the removal was in this series of recent edits by @Aquillion, and is as mentioned above per consensus on the talk page. The majority of the edit summaries are about removing sources that don't actually relate to the topic, and from what I've seen these descriptions are accurate. Loki (talk) 06:45, 3 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Also, the nominator did specifically say that the "the OR making up the majority of the article was recently removed per a talk page discussion." Of course if someone wants to contest those removals they can, but I'm confident that overall they were proper - most of the sources simply didn't discuss the idea of "feminine essence" at all. --Aquillion (talk) 09:08, 3 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]
--Dustfreeworld (talk) 10:41, 7 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's
talk page or in a deletion review
). No further edits should be made to this page.
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