RationalWiki:Articles for deletion/Xenogender March 2021

Xenogender | Result: Keep (yet again)

This article has been requested to be deleted before. See here and here for those discussions.

Xenogender (edit|talk|history|protect|delete|links|watch|logs) – (View log)

Delete

1. Third time up for deletion(!), but I think this one needs to go. I'll just copypaste my screed on the talkpage with a couple revisions: First of all, this page links twice to MOGAIpedia, which is clearly a transmedicalist source, as shown by what this page links to (which promotes pro-transmedicalist talking points, such as how "demedicalisation" will result in health insurance no longer covering transition (which is a strawman), needing gender dysphoria to be trans, mocking there being a large number of genders, etc.) Other such wonderful sources that are being used include random forum posts and tweets/blogs from irrelevant people. The scientific studies being used are being taken out of context, promoting another common transmedicalist talking point that trans people are valid because their brains are of the opposite gender. There are many problems with this: 1, this is an average, and there is no way to definitively tell a male brain from a female brain (similarly to how you can't tell someone's sex from their height even though they have different averages), 2, gay men have similarly been found to have brains structured like the other sex but not all gay men are trans, 3, as sex is not a binary, many brains do not fit in with a "feminine vs masculine" model, 4, most of the people who promote this point have not had their brain scans. The article is promoting other transmedicalist viewpoints, like gender not being a social construct, which is easily debunked if you look at how masculinity and femininity have varied over time or between cultures or how many cultures have more than two genders in their societies and nowhere in the studies cited do any of them say that gender is not a social construct It's similar to the problems that got Intuitive eating deleted: The subject may be missional, but when an article promotes pseudoscience (in this case, transmedicalism), then it is unsalvageable in its current state and anyone who wants to create an article on the subject would be better off starting from scratch. Basically, I think this article should be deleted, but the one time I tried to remove some of the problematic content I got quickly reverted, so what do I know. Plutocow (talk) 03:48, 27 February 2021 (UTC)

   tl;dr The article is poorly sourced, relying on transmedicalist websites and random people's tweets and blogs as sources, with the studies it does have not saying what the article says they say, and the whole article consists mainly of transmedicalist talking points, while transmedicalism is an idea we consider to be pseudoscientific and harmful (judging by the article on the subject). Plutocow (talk) 07:12, 27 February 2021 (UTC)

   @Plutocow You say "sex is not binary", which amounts to saying there is a third alternative to XX and XY inherited pairs of chromosomes. Intersex conditions are just variant combinations of XX or XY chromosomes. Proposing that sex is non-binary, would require something fundamentally different than patterns of XX and XY combinations. Furthermore, your proposal clearly violates the law of excluded middle, an indispensable tool of our best logic, and it violates Occam's razor by multiplying entities beyond necessity. Leucippus^Talk 17:55, 27 February 2021 (UTC)

   Sex not being binary isn't some fringe concept, it's scientific fact. The argument based on chromosomes is irrelevant, as that is not the only determinator of sex (there's also gonads, hormone levels, internal and external genitalia, and secondary sex characteristics that are used to determine sex). And yes, intersex people are enough to disprove the sex binary. For example, in something that is truly binary like binary code, you can only have a one or a zero. You can't have a .5 or a two and attribute it to an error, if those were in binary code, then it would be functionally nonbinary. And you can't have a .9 and then round it to a one, that would be an example of the Texas sharpshooter fallacy. You talk about Occam's Razor, but the only thing needed to disprove the sex binary is to find one person who doesn't fit the sex binary, while to assume otherwise would mean assuming every single person fits on the sex binary, which requires a lot more assumptions. Here are examples of intersex conditions which do not fit the sex binary. Plutocow (talk) 21:40, 27 February 2021 (UTC)

   @Plutocow I never said, or meant to imply, that 'non-binary sex' is a fringe concept; the binary notion that there are only XX and XY chromosomal pairs is obviously false. The other determinants of sex that you have listed, and those listed by the first link, are all caused by the 23rd pair of chromosomes, and their interactions with the environment i.e., epigenetics. My point was that intersex-conditions involve alterations to inherited XX or XY chromosomal pairs, not something that is fundamentally distinct e.g. a Z chromosome. Hence, this is why intersex conditions may result in an individual presenting both male and female sexual characteristics, but again, intersex conditions don't result in fundamentally distinct biological characteristics e.g. something completely distinct from a vagina or a penis. Addendum: my quibbles here are merely with the concept of 'sex', not gender. Leucippus^Talk 01:21, 28 February 2021 (UTC)

   Did you even read the article I presented? Some intersex conditions do result in ambiguous genetalia, and not all of them are the result of different chromosomes. Plutocow (talk) 01:34, 28 February 2021 (UTC)

   The genitalia are ambiguous because they cannot tell whether they are male or female, that is, they aren't ambiguous because they think its a new genital called, idk "a nape". Yes, but in each case the origin of the sexual differentiation lies in the 23rd pair of chromosomes i.e., if hormones play a dominant role in causing the "ambiguous genitalia" they (the hormones) still originate from the influence of the sex chromosomes; without the relevant sex-chromosomes you wouldn't have hormonal influence in the first place. Leucippus^Talk 01:49, 28 February 2021 (UTC)

   I don’t see how any of this relates to whether the xenogender page should be deleted, if you two want to argue you could make a debate thread. Christopher (talk) 21:45, 27 February 2021 (UTC)

2. This article is neither well-written nor missional, so I support its deletion (And I'm voting delete especially because it isn't missional in the slightest). I never understood how it managed to exist for so long. MarioSuperstar77 (talk) 10:19, 27 February 2021 (UTC)
3. In addition to Plutocow's comments, I'll just add that its impressive that this thing can't even convincingly source it becoming "quasi-mainstream" in mid-2020 beyond random tweets, even seeming to claim not being transmedicalist was invented by the MOGAI community. Maybe a page on Xenogender could have value but as it stands this article frankly has nothing salvageable on it at all. Invare (talk) 18:18, 27 February 2021 (UTC)

   It’s definitely gained popularity, but I agree it’s far from “mainstream”. We don’t have a notability criterion, but the article should definitely be edited to reflect the fact that this is still a fairly obscure idea. Christopher (talk) 18:23, 27 February 2021 (UTC)

   Doing a little research, it seems that the main "popularity" this has gained was with transmedicalists like Blaire White and Kalvin Garrah using it to target "transtrenders" or as nutpicking to make fun of their opponents. And often the people that they target aren't even xenogender (like when Blaire White targeted a person for identifying as a dog when that person was actually just doing it as part of a fetish and didn't legitimately identify as a dog, or Kalvin Garrah's "autism gender" video that resulted in a disabled person beeing severely harassed and accused of faking their disability. If there is any missionality in this article at all, it would be from the fact that it is essentially a moral panic among transmedicalists and other transphobes and a reasoning for them to attack any trans people they feel are "transtrenders". Plutocow (talk) 22:00, 27 February 2021 (UTC)

   Googling “xenogender” turns up exclusively postitive results on the first page at least; I don’t see any nutpicking, just a load of nuts. Christopher (talk) 22:07, 27 February 2021 (UTC)

   Xenogenders date back to the Tumblr days of cranky shit. They gained "popularity" in the sense that it moved to Twitter, which simply put it in front of a lot more people. Even back then, Xenogender stuff was often a large part of the reason why people thought Tumblr was mostly filled with weirdos and overtly sensitive teenagers (that and Otherkin). Techpriest ^{(I am Alpharius! / / / )} 22:21, 27 February 2021 (UTC)

Keep

1. ? Kevlarstar and his dog (Woof!) 06:59, 27 February 2021 (UTC)

   Can you elaborate your reasons for voting keep? Plutocow (talk) 07:08, 27 February 2021 (UTC)

2. Per keep rationale in previous AfD, if you don’t like some of the websites it links to then remove the links. To be clear, do you believe Xenogenders are just as “valid” as man/woman or “regular” nonbinary genders @Plutocow? If you’re only going to be happy with an article that says we must respect that people identify as cats you’ll meet a lot of resistance from other editors, me included (although I’m not particularly invested in the debate, I do think it’s ridiculous). Christopher (talk) 09:26, 27 February 2021 (UTC)

   I don’t see this going too differently from the last AfD, nothing’s changed. Christopher (talk) 11:16, 27 February 2021 (UTC)

   No, that's not really my problem with it. Think of it like David Duke writing an article about Israeli atrocities in Palestine, where evan though the topic is missional, we'd want to delete that article because it would be written with the author's harmful assumptions baked into it. This article is a similar case. Plutocow (talk) 16:57, 27 February 2021 (UTC)

   I don’t see why I should think of this article as comparable to Nazi propaganda. I personally don’t see any major problems at all, although I’m not saying you’re wrong, I could’ve missed something as I don’t know much about this sort of thing. Do you really think that you couldn’t rewrite the article? Is your problem with the article that it isn’t supportive of xenogenders? I’m still not sure, the comparison to intuitive eating suggests it is. Christopher (talk) 17:14, 27 February 2021 (UTC)

   My problem is the promotion of transmedicalism, and it's hypocritical to have articles criticizing transmedicalism and Blaire White when we have an article promoting those ideas. It is a fair comparison, since it is an article about nonbinary people written with an ideology that is anti nonbinary, which is similar to having a raging antisemite write an article about Israel. And considering the whole article is written using a transmedicalist bent (especially considering one person wrote most of it) there really is nothing to salvage, and any article written on the subject would be better off starting from scratch. Plutocow (talk) 22:05, 27 February 2021 (UTC)

   As I said before I still don’t see the issue, but I’m really not familiar with this sort of thing. Having different articles written from different viewpoints is par for the course on RationalWiki, it’s to be expected that an article on something like xenogenders (which does sound like an attack helicopter level straw man of trans people) would contain some “problematic” stuff, I still think the solution is rewriting any problems the article has instead of nuking. Everyone else agrees, it’s currently 7:3 keep and there’s no way opinions will change if you nominate the article for a fourth time, looks like rewriting is your only option if you think the article has issues. Christopher (talk) 22:16, 27 February 2021 (UTC)

3. Enough people claim to be xenogenders to make our article worthwhile. I certainly don't see anything wrong with it. IveBeenFrank (talk) 11:14, 27 February 2021 (UTC)
4. Fix the goddamn sources or rewrite the page instead of nuking it. As before I support a complete rewrite of the page but AfD is not the way to go about it. I agree that it veers a bit into transmedicalist territory, but it's nothing unfixable. Techpriest ^{(I am Alpharius! / / / )} 12:31, 27 February 2021 (UTC)

   It's not a question of fixing/removing a few sources when every single source is terrible, and yes thinking an entire rewrite is necessary is a valid reason for voting delete (see the page on intuitive eating). The page's content was almost entirely added by a single user, so there really is nothing to salvage. Plutocow (talk) 16:57, 27 February 2021 (UTC)

   At that one I would suggest you're just plain wrong? Intuitive eating was deleted because it was a puff piece for some obscure kind of woo. In this case, it seems to be a mixture of cranky shit (Xenogenders are about as coherently defined as otherkin) that the article has a decent amount of coverage of and a few really out of place lines of transmed junk that the article can easily be rid of. Replace the transmed stuff with non transmed stuff and the page is functionally fixed. Also your edit was reverted because you flat out nuked the argument from autism section, which even if it's the main section with transmed junk, you shouldn't remove segments without a prior discussion (we have a talkpage! use it!). The argument from autism is deeply flawed, but it can be proven without the need to steep to transmedicalism, which you frankly should just have changed instead of nuking it. AfDing the whole page over a single messy segment is not how you do this kinda stuff. Techpriest ^{(I am Alpharius! / / / )} 22:18, 27 February 2021 (UTC)

5. The notion that somebody can be a "gender" not on the human spectrum is arguably woo. What's next, therians and otherkin? People with shamanist animal totems?-Hastur! (talk) 17:06, 27 February 2021 (UTC)

   Have you read my paragraph on the article's current state? Plutocow (talk) 17:17, 27 February 2021 (UTC)

6. We did this a month ago. The article is missional, as it debunks a crank concept. Chef Moosolini’s Ristorante Italiano^{Make a Reservation} 17:28, 27 February 2021 (UTC)

   Even if it is missional, the article is horribly sourced and promotes transmedicalism. Intuitive eating is missional and we still deleted that one, and honestly that was better sourced than this article (and I agreed with that decision). Just because something is missional doesn't mean we have to keep a terribly written article. Plutocow (talk) 17:40, 27 February 2021 (UTC)

   I think he was talking to me because I said this was not missional. This article is about a concept that is just "ooh-ooh quirky Tumblr thing uwu", it harms absolutely nobody. In the meantime, the article itself promotes Transphobia, therefore, this article is not only pointless but also horrid. MarioSuperstar77 (talk) 19:22, 27 February 2021 (UTC)

7. Hopelessly vague concept. Article probably needs a substantial re-write tho (as others have pointed out) Leucippus^Talk 18:21, 27 February 2021 (UTC)
8. Hi! 16:39, 28 February 2021 (UTC)
9. it's been less than 4 weeks since the last AfD ended as 4-1 for keep. I don't see what can be achieved here. If it's badly written and sourced, make it better. Speedy close, anyone? Avida Dollars^{her again} 10:40, 1 March 2021 (UTC)
10. Yes. Speedily closed. And it would be the decent thing to wait for say three months before nominating an article for deletion again. Spud (talk) 11:05, 1 March 2021 (UTC)