Talk:Gender/Archive 9

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Broad concept article approach

I've been following previous discussions on-and-off (mostly off) but I've noticed a certain amount of struggling trying to get to the core of this topic, and also various proposals for lead, definitions, and so on, and I credit everyone participating with good faith. In particular, I noticed the discussion #Article scope and lead above, and the attempts to untie some of the knots there. It seems to me like that discussion (and perhaps others) are somewhat going around in circles, and I was wondering if a new approach might help.

For those not aware, there's a type of Wikipedia article organization called a WP:Broad concept article, or BCA for short. If you're not familiar with it, you can think of it as a turbo-charged disambig page for starters, but actually it is way more than that. BCA's are short pages that introduce a bunch of terms that are interrelated, but have significant differences, that don't make sense to try to cover all of them in detail in one unwieldy, umbrella article. Some good examples are: Particle, Finance minister, and Dead ball. It seems to me that "Gender" as a topic, has a lot in common with those examples.

What made me think of a BCA as a possibility, was something Kolya said above in the first sentence of #Article scope and lead:

This article appears to be about Gender broadly, meaning that it covers grammatical gender, social gender, and sex.

I'm wondering if reorganizing this article as a BCA might be a way to achieve compromise on the discussions taking place here, and in fact allow each point of view to be represented in the appropriate place, respecting NPOV and DUE, and keeping everybody happy (or at least, distributing the discontent and grumbling evenly among everyone ). On the down side, converting this to a BCA would be a radical change to this article, as it would make it a new, parent article to three (or likely more) child articles. If such a change were agreed to, we would have a new organization here, with an intro describing each kind of gender, followed by three (or more) H2/top-level sections detailing each one, with a {{Main}} template pointing to the detail article. I see it looking something like this:

• Gender – this article, vastly pared down (to the size of "Particle" or the other examples), much of the content shipped out to existing articles (where non-redundant), possibly a lot of material spun off to one, new article Social gender. There would be three (or more) major sections (if we follow chrono order, then similar to this):
  • section #Grammatical gender (first, because it was the first use of the term) appearing as the first major section.
  • section #Gender role, a one or two-paragraph description; with {{Main|Gender role}}
  • section #Gender identity ; with {{Main|Gender identity}}
  • section #Sex and gender (or #Sex, or other?) describing some of the conflated terminology; if there isn't just one, solid "Main" target for this, then a multi-valued {{Further}}, e.g., {{Further|Sex|Sex and gender distinction}} etc.
  • A new lead section, introducing and defining "gender" as a term with many interrelated meanings in grammar, social roles, core identity, and additional related meaning. See Particle or any of the examples.

Although this is admittedly a pretty radical change for this article, I think a re-org as a WP:Broad concept article could work well for our readers, resulting in a clear, brief, article covering the various related topics, with prominent links for those who wanted to do a deeper dive. The current article is 148kb, seems to cover various topics, and if we, as Wikipedia editors, can't make a brief, clear statement about "Gender", then I pity our poor readers. There would be a fair amount of work involved in migration to a BCA, especially with respect to figuring out what content to move to the new, Social gender article (or whatever we decide to call it), but it wouldn't have to be done all at once, and in the meantime, a proposed new structure for Gender could be drawn up in a subpage, or at Draft:Gender, and for the proposed new article at Draft:Social gender. I haven't been very active lately, and I greatly respect all the time and effort that the major contributors are putting in. If this approach doesn't help, then so be it; perhaps it might spark other possibilities for finding a good path to improvement of this article. If there does seem to be some support for it, then we should try to get wider buy-in for it before implementing it. (edit conflict) Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 00:39, 1 January 2023 (UTC)

The pillars of no original research and no point of view, as well as the reliable sources and the contents of the article, do not seem to support what is described as a 'pretty radical change' suggested above. Based on sources and article content, I think we can make a brief, clear statement about "gender", and a developing example appears in Draft:Female (gender), with additional discussion on that draft's Talk page. Beccaynr (talk) 00:54, 1 January 2023 (UTC)

A BCA approach is not about developing any new content that would require new sources, therefore there isn't any question here about POV or OR, as nothing would be added. It's simply a re-org of existing content. It's trivial to show that "Gender" was originally strictly a grammatical term, and then gained a new meaning in 1955, and then another one in the 1960s, and this article already covers all that. Where it falls down, is in trying to come up with one definition that covers all of them, and the unending discussions above, and at Draft:Female (gender), demonstrate that something is wrong with that approach. This is an attempt to solve the logjam. Mathglot (talk) 01:06, 1 January 2023 (UTC)

I disagree that the discussions indicate an impasse, and from my view, the creation of a "social gender" article as a subset of this article does not appear supported by a wide range of reliable sources that discuss gender as a multi-faceted concept. Beccaynr (talk) 02:20, 1 January 2023 (UTC)

Okay, then; just carry on; no worries. Regarding reliable sources for "social gender", here are results #201-250 in Google books for "social gender", and here is page 87 of Scholar results for "social gender", containing results #861-870 at Scholar for "social gender". A google web search claims 612,000 results for "social gender", but that is probably a gross exaggeration. But ignoring web results, it looks like we have around a thousand sources for "social gender" (at least; Google results do not go past result #1000.) Mathglot (talk) 03:39, 1 January 2023 (UTC)

I don't have any strong feelings about whether a broad concept article format is used, but I agree that gender is a multi-faceted concept that in practice refers to several different things, such as gender identity, gender roles, gender expression, used as a synonym for sex, etc. Gender is an overloaded term, and however it is treated on Wikipedia should present all facets rather than trying to naively select one "correct" definition, and address only that one definition. Hist9600 (talk) 15:42, 1 January 2023 (UTC)

• In results suggested by Mathglot, there appears to be some discussion of the social construction of sex, and I mention it here because this may help with the presentation of gender as a broad concept.

• In the 2022 law review noted above, there is substantial discussion related to this point at 1855: judges need not be convinced to adopt postmodern theories about the social construction of sex to be persuaded that laws based on biological sex are suspect; explanations of how sex is assigned at birth from mainstream medical experts often suffice. At 1872-1874, there is discussion of the Sex and gender distinction, and the law review includes a critique of what is described in the conclusion at 1897 as the persistence of dualistic thinking about sex as biological and gender as social.
• In Gender (2009) by Raewyn Connell, there is a substantial examination of scientific study related to statements such as at 54 So we cannot think of social gender arrangements as just flowing from the properties of bodies. They also precede bodies, form the conditions in which bodies develop and live and at 66-67 ...we must reject all models of gender that assume social gender differences to be caused by bodily differences producing character differences and at 67, Bodies have agency and bodies are socially constructed. Biological and social analysis cannot be cut apart from one another. But neither can be reduced to the other. While these brief quotes do not capture the breadth of the analysis in the text, I think reliable sources that review the history of science, including social constructions of sex, may help us situate the concept of gender for the purposes of this article.
• In What Gender Is, What Gender Does (2016) by Judith Roof, there is a section titled "The Strange Platonism of Modern Life" that begins The regime of social gender is the familiar version of conventional, normative "gender" that is the subject of sociology, women's studies, popular culture renditions of subjective positioning, psychology, religion, and even science. In the United States, it is imagined to be the apt signifier of biological sex, even though we already know that such an alignment rarely occurs (hence the need for the taxonomic) and goes on to discuss social gender myths [...] that correlate fantasmatically with a binary sexual taxonomy.
• In the The Routledge Handbook of Social Work and Addictive Behaviors (2020), gender is defined as Different from sex assigned at birth. A social and personal construct that is used to categorize people and self as man, woman, or another identity and in a following discussion, states Often, gender is used to describe the sex of an individual (e.g. "it's a boy!"). However, since gender is a socially constructed and personal experience, it is more accurate to refer to the sex of a baby as opposed to its gender, assuming that babies lack awareness of their own gender and then notes the German option as of 2013 on birth certificates for a "blank" sex category. In this source, "social gender" is mentioned as part of the phrase "social gender norms."

These are just a few examples of what appears to be a theme in sources that seem to discourage an attempt to segregate "social gender" as a concept. It may be that the sex article would benefit from further development to account for social constructions of that concept as applied to humans, which may then help clarify the subject matter of this article. Beccaynr (talk) 21:21, 1 January 2023 (UTC)

• I think any such effort to majorly overhaul the structure here is both (a) unnecessary and (b) exponentially more difficult. Gender is a topic in and of itself. That's not to say that current organization is necessarily perfect, but that it's a separate matter.
  As for the "female (gender)" draft that was mentioned, that such an article should even exist has not been established, so no actions should be taken under the assumption it should be a thing. It survived AfD on the grounds it would be draftified and that proponents could develop their vision before the matter was re-examined. Many of us felt it was a POV fork, inherently. We're also not going to be giving undue weight to admittedly postmodern theories about the social construction of sex and numerically illiterate claims that alignment between sex and gender rarely occurs, in this or any other article.
  The problem in the section above is the WP:STONEWALLING by some that gender cannot be defined in terms making any connection with sex whatsoever, apparently under the misguided belief this somehow denies trans people or something, contrary to numerous excellent reliable sources in the very field of gender studies that do just that and that were presented. No one here is saying that gender is the same as or reducible to sex, but that there is a relation there that is part of why it is defined in terms related to male and female (both, neither, etc.) rather than just meaning any kind of identity like age or career. The contrary view seems to treat the definition as basically ineffable and it was outright said it's "turtles all the way down", which is again contrary to reliable sources and also fundamentally illogical and unhelpful.
  Newimpartial, I'm sorry if I missed it, but how would you write this article's opening sentence? For those of us who favor writing it with a reference to sex, I suggest coming up with a specific proposal based on a pile of sources defining the term and presenting that as a specific proposal, cites, quotes in the ref notes, and all. If we can't get enough agreement on this page it'll have to be an RfC. Crossroads ^-talk- 19:25, 2 January 2023 (UTC)

  Crossroads, I think it would be helpful to keep discussion of the lead sentence in its own section and not continue that discussion here. Also, I mentioned the Female (gender) draft as a general resource, for sources, discussion, and possible wording that may be helpful to consider for this article. And I agree that the concept of gender is related to the concept of sex, but the concept of sex as it relates to humans appears to need additional development in light of medical and scientific understanding of the concept. Also, the source that appears to be quoted as "admittedly postmodern theories about the social construction of sex" actually says judges need not be convinced to adopt postmodern theories about the social construction of sex to be persuaded that laws based on biological sex are suspect; explanations of how sex is assigned at birth from mainstream medical experts often suffice, but maybe I am misunderstanding your reference. Thank you, Beccaynr (talk) 20:06, 2 January 2023 (UTC)

  If your response isn't about BCA, please see the next section. Mathglot (talk) 03:22, 3 January 2023 (UTC)

arbitrary break

Per Beccaynr: agreed; here's a place to just carry on with previous discussions (i.e., lead sentence, and anything else unrelated to a BCA approach). (If it weren't a WP:TPO, I'd place this header just before Crossroads's 19:25, 2 Jan. post, so hopefully responses to that comment will show up here.) Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 03:22, 3 January 2023 (UTC)

Newimpartial, I'm sorry if I missed it, but how would you write this article's opening sentence? - in this edit (August 2021), Newimpartial boldly rewrote the lede thusly (and was reverted by myself):

Gender is the range of identities, roles, and forms of expression that define and represent femininity and masculinity. Depending on the context, such characteristics as biological sex, social structures (e.g., hierarchical gender roles), gender identities and forms of gender presentation are used to demarcate and define gender categories.

Not sure if this would still be on the table, perhaps something involving chelonians would be more appropriate in 2023? 😁  Tewdar  09:30, 3 January 2023 (UTC)