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Archive 1Archive 2

Sentence needs attention

"Some intersex children with ambigous genitals, and biologically male transgender children, may also be classified or self-identify as girls."

This sentence needs a lot of attention. It sounds a lot like a statement that people believe, which is that transsexual women are simply men who choose to call themselves women because they are silly. One thing to know is that although this statement (the statement in the preceding sentence of this paragraph) is technically not true, many people think it's true. We need to re-word the sentence in the article that I repeated in quotation marks in this section of the talk page so that it's no longer consistent with this point of view. Georgia guy (talk) 12:21, 29 April 2012 (UTC)

I think this sentance is fine, as it is mirrored on the page for Boy, however I think that it needs to be moved up to the heading of the page to replace the statement asserting all girls are female that the article opens with. 602p (talk) 05:05, 11 August 2014 (UTC)
602p, that sentence used to be in the lead. As for "the statement asserting all girls are female," I changed "any" to "a" (text that the Boy article also uses) since some intersex or transgender people who are biologically/anatomically female may not identify as female. This is where the sex and gender distinction matter comes in. Georgia guy, that's also why "some" is fine in cases like these. Flyer22 (talk) 06:45, 11 August 2014 (UTC)

OIC report misuse of sources, using title to make argument

Sure it comes from Unicef but it is suspect b/c beyond the title it is grouping many countries which are not Islamic and discussing a common problem. Islam is not the agent of the educational crisis. It givesBold text the reader the impression that in Christian world this issue is non-existent. Which is odd considering how terrible education is in Congo. and Southern Africa. Yes some Islamic groups suppress education,but when you set up a casual relationship like that you going to have to explain the trend in Non-Muslim parts of the world where women are also neglected in Education--like rural India. And if Islam is the agent then please explain why Iran has more Women Uni graduates than most Western Countries.? --Inayity (talk) 21:45, 15 September 2014 (UTC)

girls nature

that article is only about girlzz .. guyzz always respects the girls . girls are more sensitive than others .. § — Preceding unsigned comment added by Jenny jennie (talk • contribs) 12:44, 10 October 2015 (UTC)

[Untitled]

The expression "girl next door", meaning a wholesome type, originates many years earlier than this article suggests as a search on songs using this term either in title or the body of lyrics will show. eg "The Boy Next Door" from the 1940's film "Meet me in St Louis" includes in the published sheet music alternative words "How can I ignore the girl next door."86.191.195.69 (talk) 10:45, 31 July 2015 (UTC)

girls are defentley the best xx — Preceding unsigned comment added by 217.37.134.144 (talk) 14:03, 11 September 2015 (UTC)

Not all girls are female. That's like saying gender is the same as sex which it isn't. MarleyWha (talk) 10:34, 16 February 2017 (UTC)

"Not all girls are female"

Higher up on this talk page, someone wrote "not all girls are female". This statement has the understood meaning that gender must be distinguished from sex, as the user is saying. But it also implies that the use of the word "female" is a defining criterion for talking about sex and not gender. Any thoughts on this?? Georgia guy (talk) 14:01, 16 February 2017 (UTC)

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Semi-protected edit request on 13 May 2018 Spelling Error

The term girl may also be used to mean a young woman,[1] and is somtimes used as a synonym for daughter.

This sentence has a spelling error. The word sometimes is misspelled as somtimes. Please fix this error as soon as possible. Thank you. 72.48.66.71 (talk) 00:42, 13 May 2018 (UTC)

 Already done By Jvpwiki Eggishorn (talk) (contrib) 01:53, 13 May 2018 (UTC)

Revisiting the question of bias in the word "outright."

The statement in question runs:

Girls' upbringing ranges from being relatively the same as that of boys to outright sex segregation and completely different gender roles.

I maintain that "outright" constitutes bias. More particularly, it is in violation of the policy of Neutral point of View, and in particular in violation of the policy that recommends non-judgemental language, for the use of "outright" implies a judgement upon the acceptability of sex segregation as some peoples practice it in their societies according to their culture.

Here is the Wiktionary definition of "outright":

Adverb
outright
   Wholly, completely and entirely.

       I refute those allegations outright.

   Openly and without reservation.

       I have just responded outright to that question.

   At once.

       Two people died outright and one more later.

   With no outstanding conditions.

       I have bought the house outright.

   (informal) Blatantly; inexcusably.

       That was an outright stupid thing to say.

It was this last sense of "outright" that I took to be active in the statement "outright sex segregation," although in that expression "outright" is used as an adjective. Here are the relevant examples of "outright" used as an adjective: 

   Total or complete.

       We achieved outright domination.
       Truths, half truths and outright lies.
       With little effort they found dozens of outright lies.
       He found a pattern of non-transparency and outright deception.

Notice that domination, lies, and deception are all moral evils.

Even if the original editor did not intend to imply a negative value judgement of sex segregation, the word "outright" can still invite it. A neutral word would therefore be "complete." I will make the appropriate change. Wordwright (talk) 21:36, 19 September 2018 (UTC)

Original Research and Violation of NPoV

The first two sentences of the last paragraph of the intro currently run:

The treatment and status of girls in any society is usually closely related to the status of women in that culture. In cultures where women have a low societal position, girls may be unwanted by their parents, and the state may invest less in services for girls.

Not only is no authority cited for these claims, but the policy of neutral point of view is violated: if women's status can be high or low or equal, why emphasize low societal position? If girls "may" be unwanted, may they not also be wanted? If the state "may" invest less, may the state not also invest more? The exclusion of the positive possibilities has the effect of promoting the negative possibility as the only possibility worthy of mention. And is that claim true for every society that has ever existed? I will remind everyone that homo sapiens have existed for 250,000 years, that the state as an institution is only a few thousand years old, and that the state is by no means a universal social form, so this statement also violates viewpoint neutrality because it is Eurocentric and presentist: it takes for granted the Western idea that the state has a responsibility to invest money in state services to help parents or agencies to raise children, and it ignores the fact that girls have existed for hundreds of thousands of years and makes a claim that, if it is true at all, cannot possibly be true of all societies that do exist or have ever existed. Thus you need not be an expert, or have any partisan attitudes, to see that these statements are biased and unsubstantiated. They are prima facie rather gross violations of WP policies.

I suggest that a neutral statement about the fact that the status and treatment of girls can vary in many ways, and that the authority cited be the author of a book or article in which no Western institutions or values are presupposed as the norm. Wordwright (talk) 23:37, 19 September 2018 (UTC)

The lede of an article is intended to summarize the body, and this article is intended to be a general summary of the topic. In the lede, citations are often useful, but not required as long as the content is sourced somewhere in the article. Your suggested standards of sourcing are inconsistent with Wikipedia's WP:RS guidelines, and your personal political opinions are not relevant to Wikipedia. Please discuss your concerns (succinctly) based academic sources, not personal familiarity with related topics. Grayfell (talk) 00:32, 20 September 2018 (UTC)

Why should this article be a part of the portal "Feminism"?

"Feminism" is a Western ideology; there is no reason whatever to presuppose that every article that pertains to females must be written and edited to reflect that ideology. In a description of any people's practices of rearing girls one should use neutral language. Consider this statement now in the introduction:

Girls' upbringing ranges from being relatively the same as that of boys to outright sex segregation and completely different gender roles.

We always use "outright" to characterize something negative—nobody says, "He was in engaged in activities that ranged from simple kindness to outright charity." So this statement means that in the range of girls' upbringing, there is the positive extreme of an upbringing that is relatively the same as at of boys to the negative extreme of outright sex segregation and completely different gender roles.

Second, if the sexes are segregated and the gender roles for boys and girls differ, then the segregation and the roles cannot be a part of girls' upbringing alone, for you cannot segregate girls without also segregating boys, and you cannot raise girls with a set of gender roles strictly for girls unless you also raise boys with a set of gender roles strictly for boys. You can conceive of segregation and different gender roles as part of girls' upbringing alone only if you presuppose that they are something that one does to girls that one does not do to boys; and there is nothing to justify this presupposition, either.

This statement is not neutral at all; instead, it is written on the unjustified presupposition that there is some single spectrum along which anybody, regardless of society, culture, and historical era, will place every people's customs for rearing girls, and anybody will see that there is one and only one set of measures or descriptions that will characterize the range from one extreme to the other. And it is also written on the unjustified presupposition that the positive extreme is equality, and the negative extreme is difference. These presuppositions are ideological and unacceptable.

I will change the offending statement, but I suggest that this article be removed from the portal of feminism. Wordwright (talk) 01:42, 18 September 2018 (UTC)

Feminism isn't a monolithic single ideology, nor is it exclusively Western. In fact, the portal you removed links to articles on feminism in non-western countries. Wikt:outright doesn't primarily or exclusively mean what you claim it means. Your comments about boys do not make any sense to me. Nobody is saying that boys are not also segregated from girls, but this article isn't about boys, so... ?
There were many additional problems with your edits which would need to be discussed individually. Your addition of My Girl (The Temptations song) as an example is arbitrary and indicative of exactly the same cultural bias you are broadly accusing the article of having. "Finally" is editorializing, as it presumes there can be no further definitions. This tacitly supports your rewriting to remove mentions of trans people, or even the existence of intersex people, which is unacceptable for a slew of reasons. If absolutely necessary, start new sections for each of these changes and we can discuss further, but be cautious not to insert your own assumptions as facts. Grayfell (talk) 04:02, 18 September 2018 (UTC)
@User:Grayfell. Sorry, didn't see your response.
I cite the evidence below in a new section for the Wiktionary definition of "outright." If you are a native speaker of English, you know perfectly well that the use of "outright" to describe an moral evil is quite common. You must also know that there are some feminists who think that sex segregation is an evil, but that that opinion is not a majority opinion in the world because it does not reflect the people who, in their own societies, according to their own culture, practice sex segregation. My opinion is that female genital mutilation is evil, but in this article I would not write the statement, "Rites of passage for girls entering puberty range from the bat mitzvah that is more or less the same as the bar mitzvah for boys to outright genital mutilation." That "outright" is clearly prejudicial.
It's rather strange that people who use that feminism-isn't-monolithic line so seldom bother to identify the varieties—they don't acknowledge the fact that there is a difference between the range of opinions that actually exist, and those opinions that get the most publicity. People aren't scholars; when they talk about "feminism," they aren't talking about anything that you can understand only if you do anthropological, sociological, demographic, and historical research in every society in the world; they are talking about the set of ideas that are most familiar because they are the talking points of all the feminists who appear in the media.
So it doesn't matter if feminism isn't a monolithic—you don't need "single," that's what mono basically means in Greek—ideology if, in fact, the article only reflects the positions of white middle-class feminists, and not the particular feminism of non-Western women, or indeed—this is important—the attitudes of women who are not feminists. This is an article about girls in general, isn't it? As I point out in my latest submission, homo sapiens have existed for 250,000 years, and there is no reason at all to suppose that the biological and anthropological information that is basic to an understanding of girls must be related to feminism. This is an article about girls in general, not an article about any social or political problems that feminists think are interesting involving girls. It seems to me that a truly good faith editing in each section would deal with girls in some sort of historical perspective.
And wouldn't it be better to write a separate article entitled "Feminist perspectives on girls in contemporary societies"? In an article like that, editors could do more than invoke the tired claim that feminism isn't monolithic, and instead cite feminist authorities of each variety for each society and in a neutral discussion cite any disagreements.
My point about boys was this: the subject of the statement is girls' upbringing, period, so if you are going to make a statement about girls' upbringing, you must not represent sex segregation as if it were a part of their upbringing alone. Sex segregation by its very nature can only be part of the upbringing of children, period.
My addition of the Temptations' song was related to the use of the English word "girl," so an example of a song in English that illustrates the use of an English word is not cultural bias, and the fact that you didn't see this quite obvious point makes me think you did not make this criticism in good faith, but were trying to convict me of a wrong regardless of real evidence. If you and other editors were really serious about the subject of girls, that is, about actual persons of the female sex before the age of reason, you would see that the English word "girl" has nothing to do with girls as human persons, and you would eliminate as irrelevant all the remarks about the different usages of the word "girl." But if they are to be retained, it is perfectly proper for a native English speaker to cite evidence from English to illustrate a point about an English word.
I don't see the word "finally" in my comments, so I don't know what you mean. But again, this is an article about girls—about real persons of the female sex who have not yet reached the age of reason. The fact that there are trans and intersex people does not mean that mention of them is always relevant in every context in which the sexes are discussed. Trans people are not trans by virtue of any biology; and whatever biological processes result in the birth of an intersex person, they are by their very nature not the biological processes that result in the birth of a girl, period. Not to admit this is a biological insult to intersex people, who have their distinctive and important needs, and an insult to trans people, who have their very different and important needs. Girls are important as girls; it is an insult to girls to try to argue that they don't have their own biology, and that when they are the subject under discussion, they don't have any right to be the only subject under discussion. This is an article about girls, period, and I think we should respect girls, and keep our talk about them. To dismiss the discursive topic of trans people and intersex people as irrelevant has nothing at all to do with their real existence; it has to do with the rules of a proper treatment of a topic—you don't introduce topics and themes that are irrelevant. Your failure to see the difference bespeaks either a certain failure of imagination or a commitment to some "political" agenda that makes you indifferent to matters of relevance.
I did not "assert my own assumptions as facts," since by their very nature "assumptions" are conceptual starting points, and not always explicit. I submitted a set of arguments—I always do. Your recommendation rests on the presupposition that girls are not a topic that invites unconscious or even self-conscious ideological or otherwise biassed interventions.
In any event, because this is such a topic, and because the article is sloppy in many ways and needs a lot of improvement, you can be sure that I am going to make a good faith effort to point out every bit of ideological freight I find, and submit conceptual arguments or empirical evidence in support of any improvements I make or recommend. Wordwright (talk) 00:53, 20 September 2018 (UTC)
Please, please try to make your comments more succinct.
You added "finally" in your edits to the article, which I linked in my comment.
As an example of the problems with your approach, "My Girl" is an example which you, presumably, chose because you are familiar with it. This is arbitrary. Wikipedia doesn't favor any national variety of English, so why this one sixty-year-old American song? Why not American Girl (Tom Petty song), or Uptown Girl, or Hollaback Girl, or "Desi Girl" from Dostana (2008 film)? These would all be arbitrary choices for an editor to make, and all would be bad examples because they would presume the reader was already familiar with them.
As one native English speaker to another, please understand that our native-speaking opinions about English are not relevant unless they are supported by reliable sources. Trying to derail this discussion by implying that this is currently "only" about trans or intersex people, or that they are "irrelevant" and therefor not really girls, is disruptive at worst, and a dead-end at best.
Wikipedia articles should be written in a scholarly tone and based on scholarly sources. This isn't the place to share your opinions about precisely how scholarly feminism is as a topic, or what talking points "all feminists" share with the media.
As has already been explained to you, Wikipedia is not interested in original research. You have not sufficiently supported your claims that this is mainly from the POV of "white middle-class feminists", and even if that were the case, that would not justify removing convenience links provided to other article. The templates are specifically to link to articles discussing feminism in depth, so when you argue that this should be a separate article, you're undermining your own claims and completely missing the point.
Again, please be more concise in your replies if you expect anyone to work with you. Another long post like this will probably not be read by anyone. Sorry, that's just how Wikipedia works. Grayfell (talk) 02:03, 20 September 2018 (UTC)

Usually Human (first section)

It just seems like an odd descriptor. The only non-human usage might be hominids or science fiction characters.

Is the term becoming more accepted for young adult females? College students? Perhaps depicting social groups... "Girl's Night Out"? Keelec (talk) 09:29, 3 February 2019 (UTC)

It means some girls are not humans. Weird. 71.31.30.66 (talk) 19:32, 2 June 2019 (UTC)
Well, I'll call a dog a "good girl" from time to time. WanderingWanda (talk) 23:23, 2 June 2019 (UTC)
"Girl" is often used as a term of endearment or affection for inanimate objects - cars, ships etc. "Let's take the old girl out for a spin" and so on. While it's not the primary use, I'll wager it's common enough to warrant the qualifier. Chaheel Riens (talk) 06:31, 3 June 2019 (UTC)
Reverted as completely WP:Undue. Flyer22 Reborn (talk) 00:53, 4 June 2019 (UTC)
Falls under WP:NOTDICT. The article here is not about usage of the word "girl" - the WP:TOPIC is about young female humans, the WP:COMMONNAME for which is girl. -- Netoholic @ 19:47, 5 June 2019 (UTC)
Fair enough. Chaheel Riens (talk) 20:33, 5 June 2019 (UTC)

Girl is also used in English as a synonym of woman, to describe adult human females. The corollary for males is "guy". "Gal" could also be used but it less commons in contemporary speech than "girl." (Example: Q: Were there just guys at the party? A: No, there were some girls there, too.) It sounds odd to put "women" in this sentence because women correlates to "men," not "guys." Please update this to take away the feminist bias in the article, as some feminists have decided very recently that calling an adult female a "girl" is yet another example (they're always imagining more) of oppression and patriarchy and that somehow doing this is demeaning, patronizing, infantilizing, or meant to diminish the object. It's none of those things. The correct dictionary definition of "girl" includes a list of synonyms and among those is "woman." — Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.126.132.38 (talk) 19:42, 5 November 2019 (UTC)

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