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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[edit]

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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 Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Feminine essence theory of transsexuality? We decided back then that there was objective evidence that the subject of this article was generally notable, and there won't be fewer sources available now than there were back then. Even the editor nominating the article agreed that the subject pre-dated Blanchard's comments on it and that his concern was with who wrote it (it's tricky to balance Wikipedia:Comment on content, not on the contributor with Wikipedia:Conflict of interest) and the generally terrible state of the article (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]
  • Delete I've been wanting this article gone for years now. It's clearly a WP:POVFORK of causes of gender incongruence, made by supporters of Blanchard's typology to push their WP:FRINGE theory. If you look on Google Scholar, there are almost no mentions of it, and those that there are all attribute the term to Blanchard. Loki (talk) 06:40, 3 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    Your comment is about "the term". What can you tell us about "the subject", which has gone by a variety of names in different centuries? Where would you describe the narrative that trans women were required to parrot when they wanted to access medical transition before you were born? WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:40, 4 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    I don't think that there is a single subject that has gone by a variety of names. I think and have thought for quite a while that term is Blanchard collecting a bunch of separate but facially similar concepts into what looks like a single non-scientific folk tale to strawman his opponents. Each of those names he's subsuming into his strawman actually refers to something different and attempting to collect them is an intellectual mistake. Loki (talk) 01:39, 5 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete. The majority of the article previously was WP:OR / WP:SYNTH that strung together unrelated sources in order to present essentially an editor's argument for Blanchard's position; the sources that are actually about the topic aren't sufficient for an independent article. There's essentially only a single paper directly discussing this concept directly, plus a handful of followups, virtually all of them by the same two authors; if it must be covered it could go on Blanchard's transsexualism typology, but the fact that it isn't currently mentioned even there shows how marginal it really is and makes me skeptical of suggesting even a merge. --Aquillion (talk) 09:08, 3 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete or merge per Aquillion. -sche (talk) 08:13, 4 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete, simply a POVFORK from pages such as causes of gender incongruence and gender identity. Noorullah (talk) 05:21, 5 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • Merge; as @WhatamIdoing pointed out, previous discussions already established the notability of this topic. The information in this article should included somewhere, at least, preferably summarized and without all the strange POV issues. Veilure (talk) 16:34, 5 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep. Per:
--Dustfreeworld (talk) 10:41, 7 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comments as nominator:
    • Addressing merging: The article consists almost entirely of primary sources from Bailey/Blanchard (and in once case, Dreger). Their views are considered WP:FRINGE to the extreme, and there is no Wikipedia article that would be improved by shoehorning in their primary opinions.
    • Addressing keeping: As other's and myself have noted, the concept is itself a non-notable strawman that conflates 1) a narrative and 2) all scientific arguments that there is a biological basis for gender identity (though I'm more partial to the earlier term "psychological sex").
      • All arguments towards keeping have relied on claims of notability but 1) the original AFD was including the OR in the citation count, 2) WAID's research is showing the notability of a different topic with a different name, not Blanchard's strawman (though I appreciate it and would be happy to work with them to include the "Wrong Body discourse" in a standalone article or broader one), and 3) google searching "feminine essence" and "trans" returns a lot of sources completely unrelated to the topic and is most likely how the article got filled with OR in the first place.
      • The etiology of transsexuality requires top-tier MEDRS sourcing. Blanchard says[1] Contemporary proponents of this view also generally hold that the female-typical structure of the gender identity center(s) is congenital and Dreger says Thus the trans person has a sort of neurological intersex condition, typically understood to be inborn. The Endocrine society's position[2]: Considerable scientific evidence has emerged demonstrating a durable biological element underlying gender identity.
      • Bailey and Blancard are explicit[3] it's a narrative in their eyes because According to the feminine essence theory, the differences between homosexual and heterosexual transsexuals have no bearing on the origins of transsexualism per se. Here's the CDC's statement[4]: Gender identity and sexual orientation are different facets of identity. Everyone has a gender identity and a sexual orientation, but a person’s gender does not determine a person’s sexual orientation.
    • We have articles already on gender identity, gender essentialism, the Causes of gender incongruence, Sex-gender distinction, and Classification of transsexual and transgender people that cover from a NPOV the various topics Bailey and Blanchard conflated to rail against. This article has never existed as anything other than a poorly-sourced and OR-filled POV rant about how all scientific arguments for a biological basis for transsexuality must be a "narrative" because "according to us [Blanchard and Bailey], any trans woman who's not straight must in fact be transitioning for a different reason than the straight ones". TLDR: there is no way to salvage such an egregious POV-fork of multiple topics written by a FRINGE activist to prop up his FRINGE activist friends. In case my position wasn't clear: delete. Your Friendly Neighborhood Sociologist ⚧ Ⓐ (talk) 21:24, 7 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    I don't think that it's "a different topic with a different name". I think it's the same topic, which has had multiple names. The choice of names can be very political, even within medical/scientific subjects. If a pariah calls it "feminine essence theory", then all the people who need to talk about that subject but want to show their virtue by shunning him are going to come up with a different name. It's still the same story: trans women are trans women because they are in the wrong body, not because they're whatever names Blanchard et al. called them. When the real world uses multiple names for something, we're supposed to have a single article about them – not one for Chronic fatigue syndrome, a separate one for Myalgic encephalomyelitis, a third one for post-viral fatigue syndrome, a fourth one for ME/CFS, and so forth.
    I'd love to see a source that explains how the common and popular (among lay people) wrong body discourse/narrative is significantly different from what Dreger and Blanchard described. Have you found such a source yet? I haven't. I'd rather have the article at a title like Wrong body narrative than under its current title. I think that a good article (which we don't have), outlining the variations, popularity among the Western public, and criticism of it (e.g., that it's fundamentally cissexist and Western), would IMO be valuable. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:25, 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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