Talk:Gender self-identification

Requested move 20 September 2024

The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review after discussing it on the closer's talk page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

The result of the move request was: Not moved. Participants were largely unconvinced by the proposal after giving reasonable consideration to usage in sources and to arguments based on the article-title criteria. (closed by non-admin page mover) SilverLocust 💬 07:13, 7 October 2024 (UTC)

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Gender self-identification → Gender self-determination – This page is about the legal human right to determine one's gender in documents. Gender self-identification refers to the act of self-identifying or self-conceptualizing one's own gender identity. Self-determination includes not only the freedom to self-identify, but also the freedom to disidentification (not identifying as something doesn't automatically mean self-identifying as another thing). And thus gender self-determination is more precise and concise. --MikutoH ^talk! 23:52, 20 September 2024 (UTC) — Relisting. 98𝚃𝙸𝙶𝙴𝚁𝙸𝚄𝚂 ^{[𝚃𝙰𝙻𝙺]} 01:16, 28 September 2024 (UTC)

Note: WikiProject Gender studies, WikiProject Law, WikiProject LGBT studies, and WikiProject Feminism have been notified of this discussion. --MikutoH ^talk! 23:52, 20 September 2024 (UTC)

More specifically, this article is about the legal right to determine one's own legal gender based solely on self-identification. I'm mainly familiar with sources using the term "gender self-identification" to describe this concept. I know there are some that use "gender self-determination", but I have experienced those as being a minority.

As some cursory evidence, I get about 33,000 Google News results for ["gender self-identification"] and 1,880 for ["gender self-determination"]. All sources on the first page for "identification" are about this legal concept, while some of the first-page "determination" results refer to a proposed Portuguese law about a different concept (treatment of kids in school). Firefangledfeathers (talk / contribs) 01:53, 21 September 2024 (UTC)

• Ambivalent about it, but I just boldly added Gender self-determination as an alternate bold term to the lead as the two terms are used synonymously by people as is showcased even by the current interchangeable use of the two terms in the article already. Personally I prefer the term that people self-identify. The fact that a paper confirms this as legal recognition of this identification is a side-effect. Google scholar shows a pretty close split of 1,690 for self-determination and 1,380 for self-identification. On more data, we have google ngram showing an about equal rise in both terms with a slight edge for self-determination. So I think we could go either way for the article title and even currently, the inverse redirects here, so arguably, given that determination seems to have a slight edge in both scholar and ngrams we could swap them, but then again as FFF has pointed out, news seems to be showing an inverse to this, though we usually take precendence for scholar/ngrams over news, so again, could go either way. As another singular, but rather big global body, the UN uses Gender-identity, but also gender self-determination in this Report on Gender Identity where they discuss the right to self-determination for ones gender identity. Raladic (talk) 02:46, 21 September 2024 (UTC)

  At least for me, a quick scan of the Scholar results shows a similar discrepancy in the subject matter. "Determination sources" include some that are discussing other concepts and rights: either self-determination meaning control over one's life and social position or self-determination referring to acceptance/identity itself, with no reference to legal recognition. Firefangledfeathers (talk / contribs) 03:01, 21 September 2024 (UTC)

• Oppose Google news searches strongly favour "identification" and it has a natural, often used contracted form "id", so I think that is the title more familiar to the widest readership for the legal concept. "Determination" is much more general in meaning, a quick skim of those sources includes wider themes of autonomy. Conflating the two is going to lead to confusion with linking articles where eg. the subject expresses opinions narrowly on self-identification that don't carry over broadly to self-determination. RE: ngrams, the British English corpus shows a starkly opposite trend so it may represent another transatlantic difference on this issue. Void if removed (talk) 11:49, 21 September 2024 (UTC)

By google scholar search, "gender self-determination" is at about 1500, while "self-identification" is around 1500 (with fluctuations of a couple hundred on repeat searches for each). The latter term probably has to be disentangled a bit more from social self-identification. There's not so much gender "self-determination" in the sociology literature I would guess (from college, and from the last time I've read some of the gender literature a few years ago), since you don't get to self-determine a social construct. To me it would 'make sense' if "self-identification" is the social and psychological term while "self-determination" is strictly the legal term, but clearly the RS are not restricting themselves -- both news and legal sources are freely using "self-identification" to refer to, often explicitly in their respective works, a legal right of self-determination.

I'm not read up on the sources as of late, so my input is weak, but I'd suggest status quo of bolding both terms in the article, per indeterminate RS. SamuelRiv (talk) 23:56, 21 September 2024 (UTC)

• Oppose; per the above, "self-identification" is the most common term for this. Crossroads ^-talk- 23:19, 22 September 2024 (UTC)

• Support because people seem to think only about "common name" when the guidance on WP:article titles also says that an article title should also be "concise, natural, precise, and consistent". This would be more precise and consistent and natural given the existence of the article self-determination compared to self-identification which is a marginal term that might not even be common name anyways.

Jorahm (talk) 16:51, 29 September 2024 (UTC)

Self-determination is about a people's right to form its own political entity, and internal self-determination is the right to representative government with full suffrage, which is not at all the same thing as the topic here. The article is not about transgender people forming a political entity or a government. This is, if anything, an argument against the change. The assertion this is a "marginal term" is unsupported. Crossroads ^-talk- 18:26, 30 September 2024 (UTC)

Some countries don't have gender markers in ID/documents, such as Netherlands. So they don't have self-id? Web-julio (talk) 02:19, 4 October 2024 (UTC)

The Netherlands still has a sex marker on passports. Void if removed (talk) 11:32, 4 October 2024 (UTC)

Some more numbers from my dear beloved, The Wikipedia Library

EBSCOhost (all databases)

Search term	All results	Only peer-reviewed
"gender self-identification"	98	49
"gender self-determination"	70	59

ProQuest

Search term	All results	Only peer-reviewed
"gender self-identification"	1438	124
"gender self-determination"	1197	126

A quick skim through the ProQuest results however suggests that many of the "self-determination" sources, as Firefangledfeathers suggested, are extending the concept of self-determination to gender, or are just talking about the old self-determination, and happened to have the word gender next to it once. As such I hold that gender self-identification better fulfills the precision criterion for article titles. Oppose. -- Maddy from Celeste (WAVEDASH) 22:24, 6 October 2024 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

The map is missing Country

The map doesn't include Uruguay to the list of gender self-identification , and(as the article says) has been since 2019.

Gender self-identification#Uruguay 186.53.82.165 (talk) 23:11, 24 October 2024 (UTC)

Thank you for pointing this out! It seems there's an error in the SVG file. I'm on it. -- Maddy from Celeste (WAVEDASH) 18:46, 25 October 2024 (UTC)

Fixed! -- Maddy from Celeste (WAVEDASH) 18:52, 25 October 2024 (UTC)