Talk:Gender-critical feminism

Classifying the movement as cisnormative

I looked it up and saw that the article did not use the word “cisnormativity” at all. Meanwhile, academic sources clearly classify the movement as cisnormative.

In recent years, a form of feminism known as trans exclusionary radical feminism (TERF) has contained cisnormative arguments similar to those of social conservatives, promoting the vilification of people with a trans lived experience in the guise of “gender-critical” feminism. Berger, Israel; Ansara, Y. Gavriel. Cisnormativity. In: Goldberg, Abbie; Beemyn, Genny. The SAGE Encyclopedia of Trans Studies.

Scholars spanning educational contexts, including K-12 (e.g., Carrera-Fernández & DePalma, 2020; Schmidt, 2017) and higher education (e.g., Chang & Leets, Jr., 2018; Nicolazzo, 2017), have identified educational institutions as cisheteronormative spaces whose structures, classrooms, and curricula often- times perpetuate trans-exclusionary ideologies. In many instances, TERFs oppose LGBTQ+ inclusive school policies and educational advancements (Pearce et al., 2020), contributing to understandings of cisnormativity in educational spaces and rendering such heteronormativity inextricable from the discussion of TERFs. In: Encyclopedia of Queer Studies in Education.

We have at least two encyclopedias which focus attention on cisnormativity in TERF movement, so I should we should add it in the acticle.--Reprarina (talk) 14:09, 18 May 2024 (UTC)

This was added recently to the Scholarly Analysis section. Barnards.tar.gz (talk) 12:50, 19 May 2024 (UTC)

views - gay rights

Is there any reason this section solely quotes GC people and makes no mention that most gay people disagree with them. At the moment someone who reads the section would have no idea about the disagreement involved. Perhaps this would be best served linking to an appropriate article but it does strike me as a problem. LunaHasArrived (talk) 18:05, 19 May 2024 (UTC)

I would love to add a popular opinion section if you could get good sources on it. Loki (talk) 20:04, 19 May 2024 (UTC)

From a very very quick search

this source says only 8% of cisgender gay, lesbian and bisexual Britain's have a negative view of trans people. (No mention of gender critical)

this 2nd source Has the juicy quote "The findings seem to disprove claims by groups such as the LGB Alliance and The Lesbian Project, as well as several “gender-critical” pundits, that including the “T” somehow erases the rights of lesbian, gay and bisexual people." And goes more into people saying there is no divide.

I'm sure there's more and not from pinknews alone, but as I said this was a quick search (searching "yougov" on pinknews) LunaHasArrived (talk) 21:10, 19 May 2024 (UTC)

Those could go on a more general page about the relationship between LGB people and trans people, but you're gonna have to get us specifically opinions on gender-critical feminism (or trans-exclusionary radical feminism) for this page.

(See why this is hard?) Loki (talk) 00:41, 20 May 2024 (UTC)

Why is it a problem for a section on the views of gender critical feminists about a specific subject being based on quotes of gender critical feminists giving their views on that subject? Void if removed (talk) 20:15, 19 May 2024 (UTC)

Basic WP:Due weight (emphasis added):

However, these pages should still appropriately reference the majority viewpoint wherever relevant and must not represent content strictly from the minority view's perspective. [...] In addition, the majority view should be explained sufficiently to let the reader understand how the minority view differs from it, and controversies regarding aspects of the minority view should be clearly identified and explained.

This section should put minority viewpoints on the relationship between LGB rights and trans rights within the context of the broader gay rights movement. Some of the sources and material at Lesbian erasure § In relation to transgender people is probably relevant here. It's especially concerning to directly cite "We're being pressured into sex by some trans women" as a source without mentioning any of the widely covered reactions to it. –RoxySaunders 🏳️‍⚧️ (💬 • 📝) 20:29, 19 May 2024 (UTC)

This is not an article about gay rights falsely emphasising the minority opinions of gender-critical feminists about gay rights.

This is an article about gender-critical feminism, describing their views. The best sources for those views are not people who hate them saying why they hate their views and think they're wrong, even if those views are in the majority, any more than the page on Christianity should heavily feature the views of the global Muslim majority. Void if removed (talk) 20:37, 19 May 2024 (UTC)

It is currently heavily one sided, look at the above section on intersex conditions and compare the 2. It reads like a press release from sex matters or get the L out, if we shouldn't have criticism sections we shouldn't have sections that only show one side of the argument either. LunaHasArrived (talk) 20:58, 19 May 2024 (UTC)

• I don't know what Wikipedia you've been reading, but the encyclopedia I know loves to point out when religious or spiritual groups believe in things that contrast with a mainstream (i.e. scientific) consensus; see especially List of topics characterized as pseudoscience § Religious and spiritual beliefs.

Terves Reiki practitioners are perfectly fine sources for the things Reiki practitioners believe, but to achieve NPOV and DUE, we are obliged to at least make note of the fact that their beliefs are not mainstream, and have been criticized by numerous feminists, lesbians, trans men, and scholars who consider their beliefs about... er... the efficacy of Reiki, to be faux-concern, scaremongering,[1] demeaning and wrong.[2], or as part of a right-wing effort to falsely equate their transphobic ideology with Left movements, drive a wedge between trans people and the rest of the LGBTQ community.[3] Some amount of criticism content is absolutely due in this section, and its omission is glaring. –RoxySaunders 🏳️‍⚧️ (💬 • 📝) 00:50, 20 May 2024 (UTC)

(As a note: these were the sources most convenient to me, primarily to demonstrate the existence of substantial sourced critique of gendercrit narratives purporting transbian invasion, butch genocide, etc. They're not the result of an exhaustive search or necessarily the ones that should be included alongside the current content. I hope an interested editor finds the time to do that work.) –RoxySaunders 🏳️‍⚧️ (💬 • 📝) 00:38, 20 May 2024 (UTC)

Academic sources

I can see multiple comments above arguing for the pre-eminence of academic sources on this subject. We need to take a closer look at this. WP:SOURCETYPES tells us:

When available, academic and peer-reviewed publications, scholarly monographs, and textbooks are usually the most reliable sources.

Usually. Not always. It particularly doesn't mean that academic sources have a monopoly on significant viewpoints.

GCF is not the physical sciences, where scientific consensus is widely discussed and results are widely believed to converge on an objective truth. It is a type of social science or philosophy, where ideas diverge and proliferate and different schools of thought emerge. Part of the reason why Wikipedia favours academic sources is because of their objectivity. Scientists, for the most part, take a neutral stance in their publications, and they are kept in check by empirical reality. Not so for ideas where there is no recourse to experiment to settle disputes. There is no apparatus that can objectively answer whether GCF is transphobic, because that is a question about society and its values, not about nature and the universe at large. Without objectivity, academic statements are rigorous opinions. They should not be waved on through to wikivoice just because they are academic.

I also note WP:SCHOLARSHIP's advice on POV and peer review in journals:

Care should be taken with journals that exist mainly to promote a particular point of view.

We have at least one of those being used, where academics wear their POV proudly on their sleeve. That's OK, that comes with the territory. POV sources can be mined for facts and relevant attributed opinions. What it means for us as Wikipedia editors is that we cannot venerate this type of academia as authoritative in the same way as an academic paper on gravity or geology or genetics. Barnards.tar.gz (talk) 21:36, 19 May 2024 (UTC)

So, the general idea that academic sources aren't necessarily the most reliable in every situation I agree with, but it's not really about objectivity.

Wikipedia doesn't really have the concept of an objective source. Arguably, reality doesn't either. There are mainstream and WP:FRINGE points of view but no "objective" point of view.

Which is to say, the question here is whether or not it's the mainstream POV that GCF is transphobic, not whether the sources that say that are "objective". Sometimes academia agrees on things that are politically controversial. If they're reliable otherwise, we just say what they do: not trying to impose a point of view on the sources is a core part of WP:NPOV. Loki (talk) 21:57, 19 May 2024 (UTC)

I do agree that the key factor is mainstream versus fringe, but I argue that mainstream should be evaluated with regards to all reliable sources, without academic opinions having a supervote on the matter. This is unlike the article on, say, organic chemistry, where academic sources definitely should carry higher weight than others. Barnards.tar.gz (talk) 22:13, 19 May 2024 (UTC)

That's not really how this works. WP:FRINGE is defined relative to the mainstream within a particular academic field. If the mainstream of an academic field and the political mainstream have different views on an issue, WP:NPOV demands that we describe both, at a minimum. In some cases WP:PSCI, WP:MEDRS, or other similar policies might require us to give the academic view precedence, but I don't think any of those are relevant here. Loki (talk) 00:05, 20 May 2024 (UTC)

This isn't an academic field - feminism has never been a wholly or even majority academic endeavour. This is a broader subject about which some academics in various fields have strong opinions in opposing directions. Privileging one specific academic POV and claiming that that is the mainstream perspective on this subject and that every other viewpoint is WP:FRINGE is not remotely the way to approach this. Void if removed (talk) 09:18, 20 May 2024 (UTC)

Yes, we should absolutely rely on academic sources. The scholarly consensus is that TERF ideology is a WP:FRINGE, extremist ideology, and a form of transphobia. It started as a fringe movement within radical feminism, which is already quite marginal, even within feminism, and is now increasingly linked to various far-right ideologies and movements. The claim that "There is no apparatus that can objectively answer whether GCF is transphobic" is as inaccurate as saying we should treat antisemitism in a "both sides" way, giving equal validity to antisemitic viewpoints, because scholarship on antisemitism is not physical science but social and historical science. --Amanda A. Brant (talk) 17:34, 20 May 2024 (UTC)

Antisemitism is fringe not just in academia but in society at large. If it were fringe only in academia, but widely accepted everywhere else, we would bothsides it, because academia does not have a monopoly on significant viewpoints, and this brand of academia doesn't have an empirical trump card that gives it access to a higher tier of truth claim than mainstream dialogue. Barnards.tar.gz (talk) 20:15, 20 May 2024 (UTC)

TERFism is fringe in society at large. There isn't a single established, old feminist organization supporting it. (The TERF organizations are all new hate groups and described as such). Why do you think all those big corporations—from Apple to Mercedes-Benz[4]—support queer people? It's the mainstream perspective, the only accepted view in polite society. Apple or Mercedes-Benz wouldn't touch terfism with a barge pole. So this isn't a case of academia vs. society at large. It's a case of academia PLUS society at large, from gender studies scholars to Mercedes-Benz, vs. a fringe group that is considered hateful by academics, international resolutions, think tanks, big corporations etc. So it's really quite similar to the antisemitism situation. Note that the existence of some countries that promote transphobia doesn't change this; those countries rank lower on relevant indices and have poorer reputations regarding democracy, human rights, and civil society. For example, the Russian government promotes all sort of extremist positions and conspiracy theories, but that doesn't make them mainstream or accepted from our perspective. Since people like to mention the UK: It's less than half the size of Russia by population, has left the EU, has a government now considered far-right and populist by many observers (an unpopular government that is likely to loose power soon, to boot), and has the very worst reputation regarding LGBT+ rights in all of western Europe, being compared to Russia by the Council of Europe; in this field it's not really a Western democracy, its policies are more similar to authoritarian countries. So if we don't place much emphasis on the Russian point of view on LGBT+, there is even less reason to give much weight to British transphobia in this context. --Amanda A. Brant (talk) 01:23, 21 May 2024 (UTC)

in this field it's not really a Western democracy, its policies are more similar to authoritarian countries

Given that is a completely absurd claim, all the more reason not to take "this field" seriously.

the only accepted view in polite society

Today we saw yet another (absolutely scathing) employment tribunal judgment in the UK in which someone with gender critical views was found to have been subject to unlawful discrimination. It is firmly established that gender critical views in and of themselves are not bigoted and transphobic, and that employers cannot act as if they are, or call their employees transphobic on the basis that they believe sex in humans is binary and immutable. The likes of Apple and Mercedes are not calling employees with these entirely mainstream views "TERFs" and sacking them.

The hyperbolic and discriminatory language used here is not an approach that is garnering universal respect, it is not mainstream outside of a particular academic niche, and it is categorically not one respected in UK law. Void if removed (talk) 08:52, 21 May 2024 (UTC)

Why would UK law be relevant to Wikipedia, a global encyclopedia? Why would employment tribunal judgments matter in a discussion about the relevance and weight given to academic sources? TucanHolmes (talk) 16:43, 21 May 2024 (UTC)

I couldn't care less about UK or Russian laws; they are not our laws. I care about reliable sources. It's firmly established in academic reliable sources that "gender-critical feminism" is a specific form of transphobia and attempt at rebranding TERF ideology, an extremist, fringe ideology. There is no "right" to subject others to discrimination and prejudice regardless of the context; many employers of the world don't accept antisemitism, transphobia etc. No, TERFism is not mainstream. --Amanda A. Brant (talk) 20:39, 21 May 2024 (UTC)

Amanda, the idea that GC views are fringe is ridiculous (and I say this as someone who doesn't share them, I should note). Every one of your arguments can be turned on its head. You argue that big corporations wouldn't touch "TERFism" with a barge pole. Well, featuring a trans celeb in their advertising worked out really well for Bud Lite and Nike! But really, why are you even suggesting Apple or Mercedes-Benz might take a position on GCF. MB's "the company's commitment to fostering a culture of diversity, appreciation and respect for all employees, including those who belong to the LGBTQIA+ community" is nothing more than their legal obligations under the law. As are their legal obligations towards women, even women who hold GC beliefs.

As others have noted, societal beliefs are something that academics can study and analyse but we must never ever think that academics are the ones we should look to to determine what to think about each other or as examples of what correct societal thinking is. Academics have a really awful track record on this. Whether it is oppression of gay people as being a mental illness or the eugenics movement, which was a set of beliefs hugely promoted by the very brightest and most academic in our countries, but not in the wider population, who were kept in the dark about sterilisation programmes and such. It was academics who performed the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. I suspect if you looked to academia on how to get around or how to heat our homes, and followed what they recommend, one might think driving a car, taking the plane on a foreign holiday, and heating one's home with gas were FRINGE activities. But the opposite is true. A tiny minority in our countries cycle to work or have installed heat pumps or would take a long distance bus or train. We here might agree that the latter is the Right Thing To Do, but Wikipedia couldn't possibly suggest this is actually what people in 2024 think.

• Where Americans stand on 20 transgender policy issues
• Americans’ Complex Views on Gender Identity and Transgender Issues

Pick a GC view? 60% say a person’s gender is determined by their sex assigned at birth, which is actually a number that's been increasing. 58% insist athletes compete on teams according to their sex assigned at birth. 46% favor making it illegal for health care professionals to provide someone younger than 18 with medical care for a gender transition, and 37% consider their parents should be considered child abusers. 41% want to ban elementary schools teaching gender identity. 46% oppose even allowing schools to use a child's prefered gender pronouns. 50% oppose allowing trans people to use the bathroom that matches their gender identity and only 31% support it. 54% oppose puberty blockers and only 19% support their use. And on and on and on.

The majority of US population share some GC views. Many US states have laws that are more aligned with GC views than trans activist views. Your next president... Remember, at least for now anyway, the US is a democracy. That half the population are happy to vote Trump, who wants to lock up physicians offering youth gender affirming care, does not in any way suggest to me that this is a FRINGE view in society. It's time to drop that argument.

The FRINGE idea is actually the idea, expressed by some on this page, that GCF should be treated like white supremacists or child abuses, when greater society, and the law in some countries, requires us all to get along with each other, and agree to disagree with each other. -- Colin°^Talk 13:05, 21 May 2024 (UTC)

What I've observed in opinion polls on trans issues (in the UK and US, especially) is that if you pose questions in generalities, like "do you support trans rights" or "do you have a positive or negative view of trans people", the polls usually come out favorable to the trans cause; who wants to say they're against rights or that they hate a group of people, particularly when a lot of the media keeps hammering in the idea that this group is highly marginalized (which kind of contradicts the idea that all of mainstream society favors them, but never mind...). However, when more specific questions are asked, like whether male-born people identifying as women should be allowed in women's sports, changing rooms, rape crisis centers, prisons, etc., you see a different story. *Dan T.* (talk) 13:55, 21 May 2024 (UTC)

I think it depends on the way the question is framed massively, if one says should trans women be able to access women's sports, changing rooms or whatever (especially if you consider more nuanced positions allowing some requirements) the results change massively. LunaHasArrived (talk) 14:09, 21 May 2024 (UTC)

According to a Survation poll for MurrayBlackburnMackenzie, a third of people don't understand what trans man/woman even mean or get them the wrong way round. Less than a half of Londoners get these terms right.

https://murrayblackburnmackenzie.org/2023/08/07/clarity-matters-how-placating-lobbyists-obscures-public-understanding-of-sex-and-gender/

Any poll that doesn't either test this basic understanding or clearly explain its terms up front can't really be considered a reliable guide IMO. Void if removed (talk) 14:23, 21 May 2024 (UTC)

Anyone interested in the new tribunal ruling can see the full ruling here. It's very interesting reading. *Dan T.* (talk) 13:58, 21 May 2024 (UTC)

This is all irrelevant. Even if it were relevant, you would need citations to back up every one of your non-consecutive claims. TucanHolmes (talk) 16:34, 21 May 2024 (UTC)

I also disagree with your Anglo-/US-centric point of view in general. I believe it has no place on a global encyclopedia like Wikipedia. Selected quotes:

• A tiny minority in our countries cycle to work or have installed heat pumps or would take a long distance bus or train.
• Pick a GC view? 60% say a person’s gender is determined by their sex assigned at birth
• but Wikipedia couldn't possibly suggest this is actually what people [!] in 2024 think. [Sources:] Where Americans [!] stand on 20 transgender policy issues [/] Americans’ [!] Complex Views on Gender Identity and Transgender Issues

I especially take issue with your argument that

The majority of US population share some GC views. Many US states have laws that are more aligned with GC views than trans activist views. Your [whose?] next president... [...] That half the population [again, the world is not America] are happy to vote Trump, who wants to lock up physicians offering youth gender affirming care, does not in any way suggest to me that this is a FRINGE view in society.

This way of discussing a topic has no place on an encyclopedia and is more appropriate to a web forum. TucanHolmes (talk) 16:41, 21 May 2024 (UTC)

The majority of US population share some GC views

No, the majority of the US population share some anti-trans views. Gender critical views specifically are very much fringe in the US.

Trump is by no means a gender-critical feminist or a trans-exclusionary radical feminist because he's not on the left nor does he claim to be on the left. The left in the US is overwhelmingly trans-supportive, and this is the key reason why, while transphobia certainly exists in America, GCF really doesn't. The biggest American GCF organization is WoLF, who are tiny and unambiguously fringe.

You can't just decompose a whole ideology like GCF into a bunch of policy positions. If that worked, I could take polls saying that Americans overwhelmingly support universal healthcare and other European-style welfare policies and claim the average American is a socialist (or at least a social democrat). But that's just not true, because you can't just shove a bunch of policy positions in a trench coat and claim it's a full ideology. Loki (talk) 23:47, 21 May 2024 (UTC)

@TucanHolmes, Amanda has repeatedly claimed GCF views are fringe and certainly not mainstream. I just quoted one GC view, that person’s gender is determined by their sex assigned at birth (i.e. fixed) and cited a well established polling organisation's findings. These views are mainstream. That some think they are held mostly by Republican supporters in the US seems to provide some here some strange cop-out as though such people don't actually count in a civilised society. But those people seem to have forgotten all the liberal journalists who also hold those views.

Wrt the accuracy of polls, I agree they can be very influenced by the sorts of questions asked and even what is in the news that week, but one of the polls I cited asked a question and its opposite in order to try to remove some bias. The point really isn't whether it's 60% agree with the GC view that sex is binary and fixed or 40% but Amanda would have you believe it is 4% and all those 4% are in prison for Evil Beliefs. This is what matters on this page and I wish it didn't have to be debated or people wouldn't persist with ridiculous arguments that the UK is just like Russia. The amazing thing about actual democracies like the UK is that people are free to believe things that you or I utterly detest. And we have to go to work with them, or teach them or fix their teeth. I think one or two people here are so immersed in their silo literature that they think other views don't exist or aren't held by anyone in significant numbers. To that I ask them to offer actual proof of what people believe, not just some ivory tower academic writing to their friends about what they themselves and their friends all believe.

As far as people dismissing legal rulings in the UK go. Well the UK is a bit different to the US. These findings aren't just playing the odds of whether you got a Republican judge or a Democrat judge. And in several cases, the judgement has found an organisation has developed exactly the same silo thinking that is appearing on this page, that All Correct People believe X and all other Heretics Shall be Burned. And a judge has had to remind them that's not how a free democracy works.

Loki and other's comment suggest to me that this article needs to work better to explain what GC and GCF views actually are. Because on the one hand we have people claiming there are no GCF in the US and on the other hand we have people moaning about all the TERFs in the US media and politics. I'm not going to list names, but go on one of those websites that list who the Bad People are in the trans debate, and most of them are mainstream writers in mainstream US publications. Many are liberals. I don't know really where this idea comes from that this is a UK only thing can thus can be dismissed. -- Colin°^Talk 07:43, 22 May 2024 (UTC)

Bit of an aside, but I don't think this is actually a GCF belief: gender is determined by their sex assigned at birth (but it is a conservative belief). Barnards.tar.gz (talk) 08:59, 22 May 2024 (UTC)

Exactly, and I think this is the crucial distinction between "gender critical feminism" and the far more varied grab bag that is "gender critical" which (perversely) doesn't actually require any critique of gender.

From Chapter 6 of Sex and Gender: A Contemporary Reader:

One of the second wave's most important achievements was to develop an important distinction between sex - in the words of British sociologist Ann Oakley (1972) the biological differences between male and female' - and gender, which she described as the social classification into "masculine" and "feminine"' (16). [...] Decoupling sex from gender enabled feminists to successfully argue that women required certain rights and services by virtue of their sex and challenge the sexist assumptions that justified women's inequality with men. They explained that women's biology, particularly their ability to bear children, means they required specific rights and resources. But they used gender to argue that women's biology does not make them inferior to men. They recognised that women's specific needs were neglected by policymakers and medical practitioners not because women's needs were inevitably less important than men's but because the world was male-dominated. They also showed that women's inequality is often justified by the claim that women are best suited to perform 'feminine' roles. Feminists demonstrated that there was no evidence to substantiate this notion that gender is innate. They also showed that masculinity and femininity are not simply different from one another but also inherently unequal (which explained why, for example, 'women's' work was paid less than men's). As Angela Philips (1974) wrote in the feminist magazine Spare Rib, ending women's oppression relied on creating a new relationship between the sexes 'which is not built out of domination [commonly perceived as masculine] and submission [widely defined as feminine]' (31). Feminists therefore critiqued and sought to eradicate gender.

new groups emerged, such as Woman's Place UK (WPUK), founded by socialists and trade unionists in 2017 to campaign for women's sex-based rights. WPUK's conscious debt to the second wave is evidenced by their 'Five Demands' (WPUK 2018), and their distinction between sex as biological - which underpins their emphasis on women's bodily autonomy - and gender as a restrictive construction that feminists must challenge.

Void if removed (talk) 09:32, 22 May 2024 (UTC)

Clearly I have much to learn/remember about this topic! -- Colin°^Talk 10:47, 22 May 2024 (UTC)

ill-suited discussion

This is pointless. Without considering specific sources, this discussion is bound to go off-topic, as is already happening with discussions of polls, arguing about the prevalence of various sentiments towards trans people in the Anglosphere. I invite editors who take issue with the sourcing in this article to consider relevant policies of Wikipedia:

• Wikipedia is written from a global perspective. In particular, an Anglo-American focus is contrary to our neutral point of view policy. To someone not from the Anglosphere, it appears like issues and debates prevalent in certain regions of that sphere are imported to and enacted on Wikipedia, which is unhelpful. The legal status and proceedings surrounding Gender-critical feminism in the UK and elsewhere in particular are irrelevant when it comes to determining the due weight (or "fringeness") of Gender-critical feminism in the wider discourse.
• Wikipedia does not care about the prevalence of beliefs in certain parts of the world when it comes to determining reliability, due weight or balance given to different sources. Wikipedia only cares about those sources, and what those sources have to say. In particular, surveys like Where Americans stand on 20 transgender policy issues are irrelevant for determining these aspects. These are also irrelevant for determining whether a viewpoint is WP:FRINGE. An academic field and the wider population can disagree about the relevance of different aspects of a field, even in the much-heralded "physical sciences": string theory was still widely believed to be a useful candidate for a Theory of Everything by many people long after mainstream physicists had abandoned it as a path to TOE. So, even if, for example, Gender-critical beliefs were prevalent, e.g. in Britain, that would still only mean that a huge part of the British population subscribes to beliefs on the fringes of the academic mainstream.
• Wikipedia is not a British encyclopedia. The more discussions on this talk page revolve around the UK, the more it seems like this article is a regional POV fork in disguise. I particularly distrust the premise of this discussion, which in my opinion veers dangerously close to asking for special exemptions from Wikipedia's general policies on the reliability, weight and quality of sources, just because some editors don't like the academic viewpoint on this topic. TucanHolmes (talk) 14:54, 21 May 2024 (UTC)

fringes of the academic mainstream

The original point is very much whether what is being called the "academic mainstream" actually is, or is in reality an incredibly niche and opinionated part of academia, and whether that should actually dominate this page (as it presently does), and how we establish what terms even mean or what is balanced and neutral.

And that's very hard when people glibly compare the UK to an authoritarian state like Russia. Hence everything goes in circles.

Without agreement on what the following words at their base actually mean and who they apply to, we get nowhere.

• TERF
• Trans-exclusionary radical feminist/ism
• Gender critical feminist/ism
• Gender critical

And different sources can be assembled to give different renderings of each of these, and if you favour one particular - unabashedly partisan - academic perspective as "the only accepted view in polite society" you end up with a highly POV article that does a poor job of educating the reader what any of this is all about.

When people talk about "the academic mainstream" what they're actually referring to is the subset of academia that considers itself an authority on the relationship between sex and gender and is now axiomatically opposed to the notion that sex in humans is binary, immutable, and sometimes important.

So it becomes circular. Once you decide that the subject of this article is not actually "gender critical feminism" or what "gender critical feminists" say and believe and write and publish and campaign for, but actually what academics who hate them say about them, you can't begin to approach a neutral POV, and I seriously think (again) there's a case for splitting by WP:SUBPOV. This is not an academic subject, but a subject about which some academics have opinions, and those opinions should be given their due weight, and no more, because much of this is in the realm of subjective opinion. Void if removed (talk) 15:37, 21 May 2024 (UTC)

Once you decide that the subject of this article is not actually "gender critical feminism" or what "gender critical feminists" say and believe and write and publish and campaign for, but actually what academics who hate them say about them, you can't begin to approach a neutral POV. If that is your view of this subject, or the sources used in this article, and your solution is to explicitly advocate for a content fork, I must remind you of Wikipedia's neutral point of view policy. If you can't gain consensus for your point of view, or it seriously differs from other points of view, content forks are not the solution. TucanHolmes (talk) 16:20, 21 May 2024 (UTC)

Here is the point of view this article prioritises:

• Trans-exclusionary radical feminism is a fringe transphobic belief that trans women aren't women and should be excluded from women's spaces and lesbian sexuality, and is exemplified by lesbian separatists in the 1960s and transphobic works like Janice Raymond's Transsexual Empire in the 70s. Modern attempts to rebrand this as "gender-critical feminism" are mere cover to attempt to make transphobia more palatable. They spread conspiracy theories about "gender ideology", and are biological essentialists who uphold cisnormative, conservative gender roles and think everybody's gender should be determined by sex assigned at birth, and that sex and gender are the same. They are generally called TERFs, which is derogatory but apt, and they spread disinformation and overlap with the far right. Despite being a fringe minority, they are dominant voices in right-wing media.

This relies on academic works by eg. Clare Thurlow, Cristan Williams, Ruth Pearce etc.

Here is the point of view that gender critical feminists advance:

• Second-wave feminists theorised sex and gender as distinct in order to recognise and critique the social construct of gender as an oppressive force on the female sex. With the decline of womens studies and rise of gender studies in academia, especially post-Butler, this straightforward distinction fell out of fashion, especially in the US. By 2008 any feminist that maintained this sex-based analysis was given the newly coined label "TERF", which quickly became a derogatory term applied to anyone - feminist or otherwise - who did not agree that trans women are women, to the point it arguably became a slur. In response, the phrase "gender critical" was used by some feminists to attempt to make clear the analysis was not "trans-exclusionary", but was fundamentally a critique of gender, and covered a range of feminists - radical, socialist, marxist, liberal - who, whatever their analysis, maintained the immutability and importance of sex as a foundation. This has created a number of social, political and legal conflicts over the recognition of self-identified gender identity in place of sex, most notably in the UK.

This relies on academic works by eg. Holly Lawford-Smith, Jane Clare-Jones, Selina Todd etc.

Multiple GCF sources say, it is not about trans, it is about sex, but that just means it conflicts with current political demands for specific forms of recognition of transgender identities. Critical sources say it is about being transphobic, really, and harks back to transphobic feminists who emerged in the 1960/70s.

We have two contradictory, subjective POVs on the same subject and the same history. That is fine, I have no problem trying to balance that - but that means actually striving for balance, whereas what keeps happening is the POV advanced by gender critical feminists is claimed not merely to be an unpopular minority, but actually WP:FRINGE to the point it should not be permitted to speak for itself, but instead given less priority than the opinions of critics when it comes to defining even what the beliefs are in the first place - which renders this page largely useless when you want to link to it from other contexts, eg. any article mentioning the protection of gender-critical beliefs in UK law .

I think we need to revisit some of the sources used on this page. For example, the very first citation on this page is Claire Thurlow's "From TERF to Gender Critical", and that sits at the heart of the claim that TERF/TERF ideology/trans-exclusionary radical feminism/gender critical feminism are all the same.

But it is not so straightforward, since Thurlow actually draws some distinctions between the various terms:

First a word on terminology. I use ‘TERF’ as a representation of what might be called the original trans-exclusionary feminist view, which I outline in the following section, and ‘gender critical’ to represent more contemporary presentations of feminist trans- exclusion. I use ‘trans-exclusionary feminism’ as an umbrella term encompassing both. As will be discussed, the application of these terms is complex and political. They represent positions that are interconnected and often interchangeable, indistinguishable and/or contradictory. Acknowledging these enmeshments as I advance, there is enough of a separable figurative TERF position from that of a figurative gender critical one, at least in how they are presented, to be usefully employed.

Thurlow gives an account of what "anti-trans feminism" looks like, via a reading of Janice Raymond from the 70s:

Raymond’s conclusions can be distilled as (a) trans is a manifestation of patriarchy and is caused, at least in part, by sex-role rigidity, (b) trans people are either delusional or deceiving and to think otherwise is to ‘collude with the falsification of reality’ (1994: xxiii) (c) trans women are violators and penetrators, of space, of bodies, of true womanhood.

Thurlow specifically talks about the attitudes of Janice Raymond and Sheila Jeffreys in the context of the word "TERF". None of this, yet, is about "gender critical feminism":

It was individuals with the type of trans-exclusionary opinions outlined in this section that would retrospectively be termed TERFs (short for trans-exclusionary radical feminist), and it is these types of sentiments I intend to capture in my use of ‘TERF’.

Thurlow talks of the shift in the late 80s to poststructural and queer theory becoming dominant in academia. Again, nothing yet about "gender critical feminism":

the late 1980s onwards saw increased focus on differences within womanhood, including the work of power dynamics in privileging and marginalising voices and experiences. There was an increasing focus on a critique of categories such as woman, man, straight, gay and the policing they accrue. This came not least from poststructural scholarship and, particularly in this context, queer theory. This combination of events led to growing understanding and inclusion of trans people within feminism

This is absolutely in line with the narrative set out in eg. Sex and Gender: A Contemporary Reader. The assertion there though is that with this shift in the academy towards a model dominated by trans inclusion, especially in the US, absolutely every feminist that did not follow this shift became "trans-exclusionary" by default, regardless of theoretical/practical lineage. Thurlow accepts TERF has become widely applied as an insult:

While it remained accurate to a subsect of trans-exclusionary feminists (some radical feminists), TERF came to signify trans-exclusionary views more generally. [...] Moreover, once the term was popularized, being trans-exclusionary and therefore liable to being labelled a TERF did not necessitate being a feminist at all, with the term also being used to describe trans- exclusionary positions from right-wing or religious perspectives. This diffusion of the application of ‘TERF’ coupled with the overt transphobia of earlier feminist writings on trans-exclusion, promoted the terms pejorative use by some. It has been argued that TERF now meets the definition of a slur

Thurlow describes the coinage of gender critical by feminists as a response to being denigrated as TERFs (which multiple sources concur with), but suggests it is a rebranding. This latter is Thurlow's opinion, but this is absolutely the key of the dispute at the heart of this page’s scope:

Amidst the melee of controversy and connotations attached to ‘TERF’, the term ‘gender critical feminism/ feminist’ began to be used by proponents of trans-exclusionary feminism. While this constitutes a late 2010s renaming of TERF, it would be more accurately described as a rebranding.

Are "gender critical feminists" really the "fringe transphobic feminists" allegedly referred to as "TERFs"? Or was TERF applied to everyone who maintained sex is binary and immutable, including a wide range of feminists, who coined "gender critical" to refocus discourse on what feminism is supposed to be about? Thurlow even agrees "gender critical feminism" is a tautology:

Leaving aside that the term ‘gender critical feminism’ is tautology

Something that gender critical feminists have also said (ie, to them, all feminism is gender critical, and they are simply feminists, see Holly Lawford-Smith "Gender Critical Feminism"), and also why some radical feminists (especially those at the Sheila Jeffreys end of things) never accepted or used the term, regarding it as completely redundant. This again fits with the narrative that it was the poststructuralist/queer theory shift inside academia towards prioritising transgender identities which ended up creating conflict with a wide range of second-wave continuity feminists for whom sex remained a material, immutable binary and gender was still something to be critiqued/dismantled.

So while Thurlow frames everyone not on board with this shift in academia as being because they must be part of a purported "TERF" lineage, the alternative is very much that many feminists of different schools of thought entirely independent of Raymond and Jeffreys were branded TERFs - a widely used insult - because they continued to maintain the sex/gender distinction of the second wave in some form or another, and that was sufficient to be regarded as "transphobic".

Thurlow then describes the language shift as one that cannot possibly be good faith:

its adoption represented the beginnings of a pivot by trans-exclusionary feminists towards language which obscures their trans- exclusionary focus. Alongside a shift from TERF to gender critical, ‘anti-trans’ became ‘pro-women’ and ‘trans-exclusion’ became the protection of ‘sex-based rights’ (‘We defend sex-based rights’ (Fair Play for Women, 2021: para.6)). These rather innocuous- sounding terms have been transformed into the language of division; exemplifying dog- whistle politics whereby the phrases act as a coded message of anti-transness to those initiated, while appearing ‘reasonable’

No evidence is given for any of this - it is entirely Thurlow's opinion.

Frankly, the piece as a whole is somewhat confused, simultaneously conceding TERF and gender critical feminism are not the same, but sometimes saying they are, and accusing the latter of recycling the "tropes" of the former. Regardless, we should be including this as a critique but to call it definitively true in wikivoice is a result of the privileging of this sort of academic text from a specific section of academia above all others - and that is what is questionable, and at the basis of this section's discussion. I think a reasonable rundown is:

1. TERF was coined around 2008, to (allegedly) describe a specific strain of radical feminism, with most common named figures being Janice Raymond and Sheila Jeffreys

2. TERF became widely used as an insult and applied to everyone deemed transphobic, feminist or not

3. In the mid 2010s, some feminists coined "gender critical feminism" as a tautological response to being branded TERFs that feminism’s priority is a critique of gender, and it became used by a wide variety of feminist thought, whose only real commonality was some level of continuity with the second wave sex/gender distinction

4. Gender critical feminists insist that gender critical feminism is not about "trans" it is about "sex", which simply brings it into conflict with current "trans-inclusive" approaches in academia that are largely predicated on gender identity

5. Critics insist gender-critical feminism is just a rebranding of TERF to whitewash longstanding anti-trans antipathy

I think you can absolutely tell this narrative neutrally with both hostile and non-hostile sources in balance. Points 1 and 2 aren’t really debatable, they are very well supported. 3 is murkier, and we can give a good balanced opposing account of both 4 and 5.

Once you get into things like the protection of "gender critical beliefs" in UK law you absolutely need that neutral rendition of what those beliefs actually are as a starting point - but none of that is possible if you start from the POV that opinions like Thurlow's are fact which override the reliable sources stating the actual beliefs of GCFs by claiming WP:FRINGE.

A neutral rendition of this page starts from: what do they say, what do critics say.

Not the current situation which is: what they say is so awful and fringe, we should prioritise the critics explanations of it. Void if removed (talk) 10:30, 23 May 2024 (UTC)

This is a very good explanation. I also agree that UK law (despite all the rants about Council of Europe and UK being no better than Russia) has not just suddenly decided transphobia is just fine. Being transphobic towards one's colleagues will still get you fired and legally fired. So what's the distinction that UK law has decided is a protected belief? Readers of this article should be able to find out. -- Colin°^Talk 11:20, 23 May 2024 (UTC)

The UK has plummeted in its ranking of treatment of LGBTQIA+ rights according to ILGA, especially due to their sudden shift around transgender rights - The UK’s lower rating comes amid a delay on banning of so-called ‘conversion practices’, the government’s trans guidance for schools having the potential for forcibly out trans, non-binary and gender non-conforming student to their parents and the NHS announcing that trans women will be banned from female wards in England.

There is certainly a shift happening in the UK and the push of the TERF movement certainly has strong parts to do with it, since it is influencing some of the laws or actions of their government with regards to infringing rights. Since especially a lot of this movement is centered in the UK, this is something that needs to be taken into account with the weight given to some of the beliefs that the article discusses. Raladic (talk) 16:33, 25 May 2024 (UTC)

I'm referring to our courts, which are proudly independent of government and have been a right royal pain in the backside to this Conservative government which has said and attempted all sorts of terrible things (but achieved very little). Perhaps other countries courts are more political and follow government wishes but UK's doesn't. The refrain of "UK Bad" on this and similar pages is disruptive and needs to stop. Reality is far more nuanced and the existence of a few hateful (now ex-) government ministers can't be extended to the population or our courts. Wrt your quote, the number of counties who have banned conversion practices is a handful,[5] so UK delay is hardly a solid argument. And the trans guidance for schools will in fact never see the light of day because of the announced general election. Newspapers have a habit of claiming that the government is to make this or that illegal or to give this or that guidance when in fact all that has happened is some consultation document has been drawn up. @User:Raladic, can you actually cite any "shift in transgender rights" in the UK that has actually come into law. I'm struggling right now to think of one, despite all the talk.

You mention "weight given to some of the beliefs that the article discusses". I'm afraid the "weight" given to GCF beliefs in this article is unquestionable, as that is what this article is about. What talk page do you think you are on? Perhaps you are confusing how much "weight" Wikipedia should give to the opinions of those who disagree. That's certainly got weight too. This article should fully explain GCF beliefs to sources with a track record of accuracy and fairness, per our RS policy, on describing said beliefs. Void has demonstrated amply that many anti-TERF trans-inclusive feminist sources are unreliable on this matter. I wish that weren't so but it's well documented that activism in this culture war has poisoned both sides into making false claims about the other side. I have no problem citing those sources for their negative opinions, however, and making it clear to the reader the extent of support of GCF beliefs. But let's not confuse that kind of weight with our encyclopaedic mission to accurately and fairly document those beliefs in the first place. -- Colin°^Talk 09:23, 26 May 2024 (UTC)

An excellent analysis by Void. Sweet6970 (talk) 14:55, 23 May 2024 (UTC)

The Australian academic you mention is known for anti-trans activism, is exceedingly fringe in any academic context, and has faced major protests by faculty and students at her own university. She has taken part in "Posie Parker's" extremist anti-trans rallies attended by Neo-Nazis[6] Those other anti-trans academics are similarly primarily known for anti-trans activists, and are quite fringe in academia. We can not accept a WP:FALSEBALANCE here; TERF ideology, a form of transphobia, should not be treated as if it were any more accepted than white supremacism, antisemitism and other forms of prejudice. What we do have is a growing body of research on anti-gender movements (including the TERF movement/ideology), by mainstream academics in gender studies and the social sciences generally, including studies of democracy, populism, extremism, radicalization and related topics. --Amanda A. Brant (talk) 15:15, 25 May 2024 (UTC)

When a textbook gets published by a respectable academic press, we are well out of fringe territory. You haven't responded to any of the points of substance that Void made, you are just repeating your GCF==transphobia theory. There's no consensus for that, and there's no consensus for it at Template:Transgender topics either. Barnards.tar.gz (talk) 20:05, 25 May 2024 (UTC)

Amanda, you keep repeating this but it doesn't make it so any more than Wikipedia can document conservative evangelical Christianity or Islam should be treated like "white supremacism, antisemitism and other forms of prejudice". There are lots of beliefs that you or I may disagree with and even find offensive, but simplistic rot like this isn't acceptable on Wikipedia any more than if you went over to the article on Islam and started banging on about how hateful Muslims are towards LGBTQ people, or an article on some African country that imposes a life prison sentence for being LGBTQ. The Australian academic is still an Australian academic, not languishing in some jail or refused a visa to travel. UK law requires GCF beliefs are permitted to be held and expressed without fear of sanction like losing one's job. That is not like "white supremacism, antisemitism and other forms of prejudice". So there's a disconnect between your world and the reality that other opinions exist. The world is a big place with many beliefs.

Did you actually read WP:FALSEBALANCE before citing it? Again it isn't about beliefs but about claims that can be tested and show to be wrong (or at lease, very unlikely). Is the earth flat? Were the Apollo Moon landings were a hoax? These are totally separate from whether Jesus is your Lord and Saviour or whether Taylor Swift writes great songs or whether marriage is for opposite sex people or healthcare should be funded through taxation or insurance or whether lesbians can be trans women. The numbers of people holding said beliefs are a statistic but not really any influence how how accurately we should describe them. -- Colin°^Talk 09:54, 26 May 2024 (UTC)

Since you bring up the "Posie Parker rallies with Nazis" thing, a popular talking point used as guilt by association to smear her and by association the entire gender-critical movement, I must point out that the Nazis in question weren't invited or wanted by Parker, and that people at pro-Palestinian rallies have been spotted doing Nazi salutes, drawing swastikas, and chanting "Gas the Jews", so is Queers for Palestine to be labeled as having Nazis on their side? I hate to be put in the position of defending Posie Parker, who has some views that are on the fringes of the gender-critical side and have gotten her criticism from that direction (like a recent speech of hers advocating blatant employment discrimination against gender-non-conforming people), but that particular criticism is without merit. *Dan T.* (talk) 17:32, 26 May 2024 (UTC)

I would say I agree (guilt being association is a nasty thing), however kjk does actively promote people that voice the "people founding the LGBTQ movement are all Jews" conspiracy theory and as time and time again had Nazis or at least far right presence turn up and not do anything. In this specific instance (let women speak Melbourne) kjk was warned in advance that they'd attend and there was no conflict when they did arrive. Whilst saying "there were nazi salutes at her rally so she hangs around with Nazis" is faulty logic it doesn't mean that kjk doesn't hang out with Nazis or promote some far right conspiracy theories LunaHasArrived (talk) 18:25, 26 May 2024 (UTC)

Remember, we aren't even discussing kjk as a source. This x-degrees-of-separation stuff is the sort of unintellectual game that plays on Twitter but is nothing whatsoever to do with our reliable-sources policies. -- Colin°^Talk 13:33, 28 May 2024 (UTC)

The original point is very much whether what is being called the "academic mainstream" actually is, or is in reality an incredibly niche and opinionated part of academia, and whether that should actually dominate this page (as it presently does), and how we establish what terms even mean or what is balanced and neutral. Well, then get reliable sources to back up that assertion.

And that's very hard when people glibly compare the UK to an authoritarian state like Russia. Hence everything goes in circles. It's not Wikipedians' fault that the European Human Rights Council named the UK in one breath with Russia et al.; this all goes to underscore that the views prevalent in some parts of the Anglosphere are minority views. The fact that people have to resort to random polls and surveys to argue their case of what is fringe and not fringe is at least one indicator that the academic consensus – not just in social studies – seems to go against gender-critical feminism. TucanHolmes (talk) 16:24, 21 May 2024 (UTC)

No such exemption is requested. Exactly the opposite in fact. I started the discussion in response to multiple comments elsewhere on the talk page which seemed founded in the misguided and simplistic notion that academic sources are always weightier or higher quality than other types of sources and are the only factor in evaluating due weight and fringeness. WP:CONTEXTMATTERS. Barnards.tar.gz (talk) 15:39, 21 May 2024 (UTC)

Which sources? Again, without concrete sources to discuss and weigh against each other, this discussion will go nowhere, endlessly revolving in circles around abstract notions of weight and balance, which are already answered by the numerous policies and essays about those policies, by Wikipedia and Wikipedians. If the issue is with those policies, or interpretations of those policies, this talk page is not the appropriate place to discuss those, and the issue should be raised elsewhere. TucanHolmes (talk) 16:17, 21 May 2024 (UTC)

Tucan, I don't agree with really anything you wrote. People here are misusing the word "academic" and what aspects of academic sources Wikipedia values. Honestly this debate is as facepalmingly embarrassing to watch as if a bunch of atheists had all got together and decided Christianity is a fringe viewpoint (because no real scientists believes in God) and any article on Anglicanism, say, must be written by Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hichens and other haters of religion.

It is mildly interesting to note that in academic feminist literature, GCF views are in a tiny minority. One sentence in the article thank you very much. That fact also has a bearing on whether GCF views get a mention in our articles on feminism. But in the actual article on Gender critical feminism, I want to know what GCFs think. I really really do not want to know what people who hate GCFs think they think, which is what people seem to be pushing for here, and has ended up with this mess where it seems virtually no editor on this page actually knows what GCFs think other than that they are Really Really Bad People. And anyone playing the Council of Europe card, comparing UK with Putin's Russia, is IMO making a Godwin's law mistake and lacking self awareness of whatever their own countries populations actually think. -- Colin°^Talk 07:56, 22 May 2024 (UTC)

This is not how Wikipedia works. You have misunderstood the point of an encyclopedia. If you advertise your obvious point of view (that academic sources – which? – hate GCF) and can't get consensus for that (or provide citations for your opinion that we should discard those sources because they hate GCFs), then that is not a problem with this article. Wikipedia doesn't automatically give exposé space to ideologies; all ideologies are evaluated (critically), especially if they are deemed to be WP:FRINGE. You can't have it both ways: Either gender-critical feminism is a feminist / feminist-adjacent movement (in which case it gets a Wikipedia article but is evaluated accordingly), or it is part of a broader gender-critical movement, as your comments here seem to suggest. But in that case, this article will need to be folded into the bigger topic.

Wikipedia doesn't care what countries populations think when evaluating sources. This is only relevant when the actual point of contention is what those populations think (nevermind that I highly doubt that you could provide enough reliable sources to back up your assertions). TucanHolmes (talk) 09:24, 22 May 2024 (UTC)

It matters what countries populations think when evaluating if a social concept is fringe. People are throwing around the WP:FRINGE guideline as though it can be used to insist only TERF-hating sources can be used. It can't any more than religion-hating sources can be insistent upon to write about the Free Church of Scotland.

A source written by a feminist who rejects/hates GCF is a fine source for what that feminist thinks, and I don't reject the idea this article should remind readers that most academic feminists think that way. I'm not quite sure how we've got ourselves into the mess of thinking it is an appropriate source for what a GCF thinks.

GCF is a set of beliefs. I think we should be able to write about those beliefs just as we write about the beliefs of the Free Church of Scotland or Mormons or what the Green Party of England and Wales thinks. Why on earth should it matter if most academic sources in the USA spare no time thinking about the Green Party of England and Wales? What's that got to do with the fact that it exists and has beliefs? It matters if one is writing an overview article on environmental issues or consumerism or whatever, and whether to mention the GPoEW viewpoint, but not when you are actually writing an article on that topic itself. The point of an encyclopaedia is to tell me about the subject of the article. If I only want to know about the views people who hate the subject of the article, I could go on Twitter. -- Colin°^Talk Colin°^Talk 10:46, 22 May 2024 (UTC)

The issue is the rush to say this is not merely a minority but actually WP:FRINGE, a far stronger claim which relies on a) the prevalence of views hostile to gender critical feminism within a certain section of academia and b) ignoring all the reliable sources - including academic publications - that say it is not, but closer to a quite unremarkable continuity of second-wave feminism. The basis of claiming WP:FRINGE is that it:departs significantly from the prevailing views or mainstream views in its particular field.

But what is "the field"? Feminism is not a wholly - or even majority - academic subject, and it is a subject marked by splits and subdivisions. So per fringe: However, there are at least two caveats: not every identified subject matter has its own academic specialization, and the opinion of a scholar whose expertise is in a different field should not be given undue weight.

Academic feminism is a minority subset of feminism, and gender studies academics whose field is predicated on a particular interpretation of sex and gender do not have the final word on other feminist interpretations. These are different philosophical perspectives. This article has been approached by picking works in a field that foundationally understands sex and gender in one specific way, and saying "this is the entirety of the field, with the correct interpretation of sex and gender as its basis, all others are WP:FRINGE and transphobic bigots".

Yet we have multiple, reliable, respectable academic sources saying exactly what gender critical feminism is and it is a far cry from WP:FRINGE. We are not cobbling together incoherent ramblings from dubious sources as you would expect with a claim of WP:FRINGE, we have multiple, high quality academic textbooks and papers to draw from. This is not a hard science subject where theories that violate physical laws are being expounded, but a difference of philosophical opinion. WP:FRINGE does not mean a simple minority, nor is it revealed by strength of feeling of academic opponents.

Yet the speculation and opinion of some academics who take a contradictory view pervades the very premise of this article. Rather than what GCFs say being presented neutrally and offset with what other academics say about them, we start from the position that GCFs are WP:FRINGE to sideline what they say about themselves and give free rein to hyperbolic criticism at the outset.

There is an overreliance on overblown claims of WP:FRINGE to downplay or dismiss use of reliable, non-hostile sources as an accurate basis of what this belief even is, in order to write from the perspective of specific, hostile academic opinions. Void if removed (talk) 11:16, 22 May 2024 (UTC)

WP:FRINGE says:Fringe theories in a nutshell: To maintain a neutral point of view, an idea that is not broadly supported by scholarship in its field must not be given undue weight in an article about a mainstream idea. More extensive treatment should be reserved for an article about the idea, which must meet the test of notability. Additionally, in an article about the minority viewpoint itself, the proper contextual relationship between minority and majority viewpoints must be made clear.

Therefore, this article should be the ‘more extensive treatment' i.e. we need to explain in detail what g-c feminist views actually are, and the other viewpoints should only be mentioned to add context. Sweet6970 (talk) 11:35, 22 May 2024 (UTC)

Additionally, in an article about the minority viewpoint itself, the proper contextual relationship between minority and majority viewpoints must be made clear. TucanHolmes (talk) 15:00, 23 May 2024 (UTC)

I don't see where the article doesn't follow this guideline. TucanHolmes (talk) 15:18, 23 May 2024 (UTC)

Clarification: I am not saying that g-c views are fringe, but that anyone who seeks to rely on WP:FRINGE to say that g-c views should not be the main content of this article would not be following the guideline. Sweet6970 (talk) 12:19, 22 May 2024 (UTC)

I think Void and Sweet6970 make good points here. Nobody here is campaigning for GCF to be given serious weight in our articles on feminism. Time to put the WP:FRINGE hammer down and walk away from that one. Just think of this like a minority religious denomination and you'll have a far better idea of how Wikipedia should deal with it. -- Colin°^Talk 08:34, 23 May 2024 (UTC)

That is not how WP:FRINGE works. If we start from the premise that GC feminism is a fringe theory in feminism, then how Wikipedia should cover it doesn't magically change just because it has its own article (that would be a POV fork). TucanHolmes (talk) 14:56, 23 May 2024 (UTC)

I have stated what WP:FRINGE says. It seems you disagree with the guideline. Sweet6970 (talk) 15:16, 23 May 2024 (UTC)

Also, what? Just think of this like a minority religious denomination and you'll have a far better idea of how Wikipedia should deal with it. (?) That's not how that works. That's not how any of this works. TucanHolmes (talk) 15:11, 23 May 2024 (UTC)

Here is an extreme example (from the article about Arianism, first sentence):

Arianism (Koine Greek: Ἀρειανισμός, Areianismós) is a Christological doctrine considered heretical by all mainstream branches of Christianity.

I don't want to draw any comparison to Gender-critical feminism, this has nothing to do with the content of this article, I just want to point out that Wikipedia covers minority religious denominations in quite stark/drastic terms if the disagreement is serious. TucanHolmes (talk) 15:21, 23 May 2024 (UTC)

I get that this article is overly critical and negative, but that's because the sources themselves are overly critical and negative. The only country where gender-critical feminism has some degree of mainstream acceptance (but is still very controversial) is the UK; in most other countries, it is virtually unknown, or only known negatively. TucanHolmes (talk) 15:25, 23 May 2024 (UTC)

Tucan, you keep writing "that's not how WP:FRINGE works". I think this is an WP:UPPERCASE mistake of reading certain sources-one-agrees-with that claim GCF is a tiny minority belief among feminists (in their opinion and silo world view) and thinking that has anything at all to do with WP:FRINGE. The way we deal with "Do we, and how much do we, mention GCF beliefs in our articles on feminism, etc, is bog standard WP:DUE. How much do our sources, when discussing feminism, spend time on this or that branch of the subject. There's no need to consult WP:FRINGE to work out that this is a very minor part of feminism.

Please read WP:FRINGE from beginning to end. It is pretty much all about nutty scientific ideas or conspiracy theories. The problem is that beliefs are not theories. Wikipedia doesn't confuse the two. A belief that the concept of marriage should apply to same-sex partnerships is very very much a minority belief worldwide. Worldwide, most reliable sources will disagree with it and point out that it is illegal. Marriage is a concept we, as societies, decide among ourselves, and has changed in my lifetime both socially and legally. It isn't perpetually and universally true or false. It isn't something one can measure with a ruler or a scientific theory one can use to explain how the stars move in the sky. If we were to write Same-sex marriage the way people here want to write this article, the lead would be reminding readers of its illegality in 83% of the world and that it is an abomination in the eyes of God. This difference-of-opinions about what constitutes "marriage" isn't fundamentally different to the GCF idea that a lesbian couple cannot include a trans woman. What the word "lesbian" means and what the word "marriage" means, and the consequences for who gets included and excluded into parts of society, is a matter for our societies to work out. Confusing this sort of thing with conspiracy theories on moon landings or fringe science on vaccines is not at all what that guideline is meant to deal with.

That only small number of people hold a certain belief, and that a LOT of people hate them, is quite a separate thing from our Wikipedia WP:FRINGE article. There are all sorts of things that small numbers of people believe that we can write about neutrally and with respect. Some Americans have beliefs about walking about with guns, or arming primary school teachers, that make the entire rest of the world gape in shock. Scots think that men getting married wearing a colourful woolen skirt is great. The arguments used here would have us write an article on kilts by people who think men shouldn't wear skirts. Clearly that's daft. Which leaves us with the alternative that this is wikilawyering to prevent GCF's beliefs being sourced to actual GCF's. I have no doubt this is being done in good faith and deeply held beliefs about how terrible GCFs are, but they are wrongheaded. -- Colin°^Talk 10:48, 24 May 2024 (UTC)

You're comparing apples and oranges, and honestly, that makes it difficult to engage with your points. Your walls of text also don't make things easier.

A belief that the concept of marriage should apply to same-sex partnerships is very very much a minority belief worldwide. Again, I don't like that you constantly pull these factoids out of nowhere. You cannot know what the world believes, I cannot know what the world believes; the actual fact which your statement is adjacent to is that same-sex partnerships are treated as criminal activity in many countries. However, this doesn't have anything to do with fringeness, because these countries are no authority in the field, nor have their legal systems anything to do with how Wikipedia should write about same-sex partnerships (in the same way that UK court rulings have nothing to do with how Wikipedia should write about gender-critical feminism, I should point out). An actual useful comparison would have been how psychologists view/treat same-sex partnerships. Seventy years ago, Wikipedia would have treated same-sex partnerships as a form of mental illness (and actual physical encyclopedias did so). That was wrong, but only because psychologists at large were wrong. That homosexuality was benign and nothing to worry about was a minority view at the time (see Magnus Hirschfeld), and would have been considered fringe by most psychologists.

The fact that WP:FRINGE mainly uses conspiracy theories as example is probably because these are the most common fringe beliefs, and examples are meant to be useful. I shouldn't have to remind you that examples are non-exhaustive, and saying that "X is not Y" because "X is not in the list of examples of Y" is fallacious reasoning.

the lead would be reminding readers of its illegality in 83% of the world and that it is an abomination in the eyes of God. Incidentally, the second sentence in the article about same-sex marriage reads

As of 2024, marriage between same-sex couples is legally performed and recognized in 37 countries, with a total population of 1.4 billion people (17% of the world's population).

and the last paragraph of the lead

Opposition is based on claims such as that homosexuality is unnatural and abnormal, that the recognition of same-sex unions will promote homosexuality in society, and that children are better off when raised by opposite-sex couples. These claims are refuted by scientific studies, which show that homosexuality is a natural and normal variation in human sexuality, that sexual orientation is not a choice, and that children of same-sex couples fare just as well as the children of opposite-sex couples.

Why would Wikipedia care about the eyes of God? (unnecessary hyperbole)

The problem is that beliefs are not theories. What? TucanHolmes (talk) 09:31, 27 May 2024 (UTC)

I think I see what your problem is. "authority in the field". You seem to think, that on the matter of how we view sex, gender, LGBTQ, etc, there is actually an "authority", and perhaps like Amanda, thinks it is academia we should look to to tell us what to believe. Western society decided "nah" to that game when we had the Reformation and people figured out that they would believe things for themselves, after reading things for themselves, not what some authority told them to believe. It continues to be so in our secular age.

We trust academics to document what society thinks about issues like this and in what numbers, if they are able to do so in a neutral manner rather than in opinionated polemics. You can see the difference in style when you look at a respecting polling organisation, which doesn't agree or disagree with one side or the other. The same is so with the best newspaper reporting vs opinion pieces. We absolutely do not care what academics themselves think about issues like this, other than to document that "Alice thinks..." much as we might document what politicians think or major religious leaders think. They are just another group whose personal opinions get written about and thus have weight to be mentioned. Wikipedia doesn't care if some minor Christian denomination is right or the larger Anglican church is right or Islam is right or socialism is right and similarly shouldn't care if GCF is right. It is a belief. There isn't a universal "right". We document what it is, who believes it, who doesn't, what the criticisms are, and so on. Editors using this page as a forum to demand Wikipedia documents how "wrong" GCF is, are on the wrong website. Your example of the shift in attitude wrt same-sex partnerships isn't really relevant to this but I think demonstrates your continued wrongthinking about the issue. Yes Wikipedia would have documented that shift in view, but Wikipedia doesn't, in wikivoice, express any view on what is correct. Go read Same-sex marriage. It doesn't tell the reader if it is right or wrong.

Tucan, remind me what your actual point is? Amanda and some others are advancing FRINGE to demand only their sources are used to describe GCF and to exclude sources that are actually published academics who have written books on GCF published by the most respected university press in the world. This is, to put it mildly, an astounding claim, and ridiculous for the reasons I have given. -- Colin°^Talk 13:59, 28 May 2024 (UTC)

When writing any Wikipedia article, you should not use sources that promote positions that are rejected in the academic community by experts on the subject. If someday in the academic environment among gender researchers the position begins to dominate that in 2024 “gender-critical” feminists promoted scientific views, and they were opposed by a sect of trans activists, then we will prioritize these sources. I'm sorry, but the days when the cisnormative approach was dominant are over. Nowadays, it is the articles in the Transgender Health Journal that are massively positively cited by representatives of a variety of sciences, but the works of “gender-critical” ones are ignored at best, and harshly criticized at worst. In a situation of such scientific consensus, if cisnormativists are supported by some media, this is an argument against the reliability of these media. Reprarina (talk) 04:53, 29 May 2024 (UTC)

As Colin has already explained, gender-critical feminism is not a matter of science, but of philosophical belief, so any arguments about science are irrelevant to this article, which should be setting out what this belief consists of. Sweet6970 (talk) 13:38, 29 May 2024 (UTC)

What are you talking about? Academic sources need not be scientific, they can be – to take one incidental example – philosophical, or legal. People can hold philosophical beliefs to their heart's content, but if these beliefs are wrong or can be proven non-sensical / internally inconsistent, or are rejected by experts in the relevant field on valid grounds, or even just evaluated critically across the board, Wikipedia notes that – prominently even, depending on the weight and breadth of the issue / contention. If a belief also imposes real-world issues or challenges, and academic sources point that out, well, that's a problem with the belief, not the sources. If somebody, e.g. believes that "women's human rights are based upon sex" and legal scholars point out that they obviously don't know what they're talking about, well, that's their problem.

(And if the actual activism that flows from this veers awfully close to transphobia or even explicit anti-trans activism, well, that's also a problem with the belief, and not the sources documenting and investigating it.) TucanHolmes (talk) 17:26, 29 May 2024 (UTC)

The problem there is that legal scholars say they do know what they're talking about.

The issue (at the heart of this topic on talk) is choosing the scholars who say "they don't know what they're talking about" and using that as the basis of the article, rather than putting forward what they actually say, and then adding in responsive opinion after.

And then when MacKinnon is cited in the context of a feminist opinion of US laws, and by implication this is some universal truth no-one can disagree with in any jurisdiction, that's bunk. The US is not some feminist utopia every other country aspires to emulate, far, far from it.

Consider our current section:

Gender critical feminists advocate what they call "sex-based rights," arguing that "women's human rights are based upon sex" and that "these rights are being eroded by the promotion of 'gender identity.'" Human rights scholar Sandra Duffy described the concept of "sex-based rights" as "a fiction with the pretense of legality," noting that the word "sex" in international human rights law does not share the implications of the word "sex" in gender-critical discourse and is widely agreed to also refer to gender. Catharine A. MacKinnon noted that "the recognition [that discrimination against trans people is discrimination on the basis of sex, that is gender, the social meaning of sex] does not, contrary to allegations of anti-trans self-identified feminists, endanger women or feminism", they expand by saying "women do not have 'sex-based rights' in the affirmative sense some in this group seem to think."".

The citations for this are: Sally Hines - who is critical of gender critical feminists and thinks there is a moral duty to call them TERFs - a blog by Sandra Duffy parsing the WHRC declaration, and a paper by MacKinnon which says at the outset that women don't have positive sex-based rights in the US.

This entire section is constructed from random criticism. Rather than educating the reader about what gender-critical feminists actually believe, and why, it is simply yet another opportunity to shoehorn in invective.

IMO, this can be scrapped entirely and rewritten using eg. Sex and Gender: A Contemporary Reader as a source, which gives an account of what they actually believe, but there is resistance to doing this sort of thing because of the insistence on privileging what critical scholars say.

You keep trying to defer to experts when there is no ultimate authority on feminism. Gender critical feminists are the experts on what they believe and stand for. And that is what this whole section of talk is supposed to sort out - we need to stop using claims of FRINGE and so on to privilege critical scholarship when there is ample reliable scholarship written by actual gender critical feminists that can be used as a basis instead.

And until that is agreed as a general approach, we can't really make progress on improving this page. Void if removed (talk) 18:22, 29 May 2024 (UTC)

Wikipedia articles are written based on third-party sources and not sources affiliated with the subject. No, “gender-critical” feminists are not experts in “gender-critical” feminism for Wikipedia, and this principle works in other Wikipedia articles about other movements. Reprarina (talk) 22:25, 29 May 2024 (UTC)

This is completely untrue. For an example, the page on Communism uses primary texts from Communists to describe what they believe and advocate, and does not take eg. The Road to Serfdom as an authoritative basis and starting point for the article. Void if removed (talk) 09:41, 30 May 2024 (UTC)

Let's just say that if some "gender-critical" work is a primary source, then some sentence in it may be important for its author, they may focus on it, but if it is not important for third-party sources, it is not important for Wikipedia. Reprarina (talk) 22:38, 29 May 2024 (UTC)

Even in philosophy, one can be wrong (see, e.g. logical fallacy). This doesn't mean that gender-critical feminism is wrong; but claiming that something is a "philosophical belief" is no free-for-all, no magic wand to protect it from critical inquiry. TucanHolmes (talk) 17:30, 29 May 2024 (UTC)

I was not claiming that something is a "philosophical belief" is a magic wand to protect it from critical inquiry. Please read what I actually said. Sweet6970 (talk) 18:35, 29 May 2024 (UTC)

No matter. We write Wikipedia prioritizing highly-cited academic sources. Other sources can be used if they don't contradict significantly highly-cited academic sources. No matter if the topic is theory of gravity, feminist movement or contemprorary pop music. If we have a huge number of highly cited academic sources on a topic, we use them in the article. If not, then we can refer to other sources, but provided that they do not diverge from the scientific picture of the world. In the case of “gender-critical” feminism, we have a huge number of academic sources, and the position in them is quite definite. Reprarina (talk) 21:55, 29 May 2024 (UTC) PS. By highly cited sources, I mean those whose citations are not caused by the fact that large numbers of scholars have written scathing reviews of them, as is the case with some of the work of “gender-critical” feminists on trans people, such as Raymond and Jeffries.--Reprarina (talk) 21:58, 29 May 2024 (UTC)

Re: "Once you decide that the subject of this article is not actually "gender critical feminism" or what "gender critical feminists" say and believe and write and publish and campaign for, but actually what academics who hate them say about them, you can't begin to approach a neutral POV": The article on antisemitism is not an article that presents what antisemites "say and believe and write and publish and campaign for." Instead, it's based on scholarship on antisemitism. Hence, the article defines antisemitism as "hostility to, prejudice towards, or discrimination against Jews [and] a form of racism." TERF ideology similarly is hostility to, prejudice towards, or discrimination against transgender people and a form of transphobia; this reflects the consensus in scholarship on the phenomenon. --Amanda A. Brant (talk) 07:49, 22 May 2024 (UTC)

Amanda, have have an article on transphobia. Please take your transphobia==GCF elsewhere. I don't think that's a basis from which an encyclopaedic article on GCF can be written in NPOV. I hear your frequent claims that GCF's are so horrible that we must treat them like antisemits or white supremacists or child abusers. I think you really need to go to the VP and start an RFC if you want that view to reflect the sources we can use. It is really odd, when I can pick ANY mainstream newspaper or magazine in the US or UK and find opinion columns by staff writers who are GCFs. What's going on there, Amanda. Which viewpoint is reality? -- Colin°^Talk 08:01, 22 May 2024 (UTC)

The scholarly consensus is that TERF ideology is a form of transphobia, but one specific form of it. Not all transphobia is trans-exclusionary radical feminism. Also, both transphobia and homophobia, and in fact antisemitism, are "common" in many parts of the world. Even governments promote both antisemitism and homophobia in some countries, even newspapers in countries like Iran or various Arab countries publish antisemitic columns. In Russia columnists write the say things about gay people. So the situation is really quite similar. It's a form of prejudice and hatred, and this is how scholars describe it. This applies to antisemitism, homophobia, and transphobia (including TERF ideology). --Amanda A. Brant (talk) 12:18, 22 May 2024 (UTC)

I don't think that is so at all. Whatever writers you are reading on that are confusing things to make their activist/political point or are just plain confused. It is as wrongheaded as to say conservative evangelicals are a form of transphobia or Islam is a form of transphobia or rightwing politics is a form of transphobia. It is a failure to understand the root beliefs of a set of people, which is typical of people writing about "others" they hate. Those root beliefs might tend or might even inevitably result in transphobia (at least from the POV of those who disagree with them) but to claim the root beliefs are instead a form of transphobia, and all these other things like sex is binary and immutable are merely fancy words and smoke and mirrors hiding one's underlying transphobia is exactly the sort of "You can't actually look inside people's heads" wrong thinking that results from reading too much written by "others" about "others".

The point of having this article is to educate our readers about what GCF is. Several on this page, myself included, would like to know that. I think you've got yourself unstuck by banging on about "TERF ideology" as though that is actually a thing that can be well defined. Instead, it is whatever haters want it to be and thus can be rejected by those who say, well, actually, I believe this instead. It is a clumsy concept that isn't helping.

Part of the problem with this culture war is those on the extremes of either side are utterly misunderstanding the other side. They so hate each other (I blame Twitter for a lot) that they have no wish to understand the other side. They end up writing stuff like we see on this page, comparing the other side to the most extreme hated kinds of humanity, which results in everyone outside of the war rolling their eyes. An encyclopaedia, rooted in NPOV, has a role to play in helping explain the positions accurately and fairly. Can you imagine, for a moment, if the articles on transgender we all being written using sources from the kinds of dunderheads that write in the Daily Mail? You'd be wondering how on earth such a hateful and wrongheaded person could possibly accurately write about transgender issues. We have the same behaviour here, were some people are insisting an article be written from a activist-hater POV. I really don't think that's Wikipedia's job. I have no problem at all in ensuring our articles make quite clear what academic opinion and societal opinion is about this group, or that our articles on feminism demonstrate how minority this belief is. But I think the same about the wee free church of Scotland. -- Colin°^Talk 08:28, 23 May 2024 (UTC)

I don't think that is so at all. And here we have the problem with this discussion: Assertions, mere opinions without citations to back them.

The point of having this article is to educate our readers about what GCF is. And the whole problem is that there is disagreement about what that education entails. You have your version/vision, but you can't get consensus for it.

Part of the problem with this culture war is those on the extremes of either side are utterly misunderstanding the other side. They so hate each other (I blame Twitter for a lot) that they have no wish to understand the other side. Wikipedia isn't for writing great wrongs; if reliable sources are, in your opinion, biased, the solution isn't to discard or disregard those sources.

• Whatever writers you are reading on that are confusing things to make their activist/political point or are just plain confused.
• which results in everyone outside of the war rolling their eyes.
• We have the same behaviour here, were some people are insisting an article be written from a activist-hater POV.

These are just opinions – original research – and you shouldn't present them as facts; neither should we accept them as grounds to remove or disregard reliable sources. I also dislike that you claim to know what other editors are reading and/or thinking. You're not inside their heads. TucanHolmes (talk) 14:53, 23 May 2024 (UTC)

last sentence of the lede

The "in some countries" seems very out of place, looking at the article at the moment the by country section contains 3, the United Kingdom (seems to be about 90% of the section), the United states and south Korea. The only organisation mentioned in either of the latter 2 is Wolf (which looking at their page has been criticised for allying itself with the right wing). Looking at the UK ones there are definitely organisations that are criticised for allying with far right organisations.

I suggest removing the "In some countries" part but want to feel out what consensus would be on the swap. I personally think "some major Gender critical feminist groups" but I'm very happy to compromise with "some gender critical" or other suggestions. LunaHasArrived (talk) 21:42, 25 May 2024 (UTC)

What exactly in the body of the article is the last sentence of the lead ‘In some countries, gender-critical feminist groups have formed alliances with right-wing, far-right, and anti-feminist organisations’ based on? Sweet6970 (talk) 16:20, 26 May 2024 (UTC)

First section of controversies covers it pretty fully. LunaHasArrived (talk) 17:44, 26 May 2024 (UTC)

The citations for the line in the lede are two pieces that don't explicitly say this AFAICT, a piece in Der Freitag that we quote attributed text from in the body, because it is arguably opinion, and a piece that seems to be WP:RSOPINION and makes the claim with no citations (so again, this should really be attributed). I don't think that's enough to construct this definitive claim in wikivoice. What that source says is:

To this end, a key issue in the current political and scholarly landscape is the growing convergence, and sometimes conscious alliances, between “gender-critical” feminists (sometimes known as TERFs - Trans- Exclusionary Radical Feminists), religious and social conservatives, as well as right-wing politics and even neo-Nazi and fascist movements. Their target are transgender people, queer activism and theorising that support an expansive approach to gender identity. An example from the USA is the colloquium, “The Inequality of the Equality Act: Concerns from the Left,” sponsored by the conservative Heritage Foundation (2019), a think tank that is promoting tough immigration politics, traditional marriage laws (keeping it heterosexual), and stricter abortion legislation.

The citations for the first line in the "controversies" section of the body are about WoLF appearing on a Heritage-organised panel in 2019, and a citation that seems completely irrelevant (again, AFAICT).

A far lengthier and more detailed critique of WoLF appears on the WPUK site here. Part of that critique is:

The problem here is that alliances with the Christian right are being continually used as a stick to beat all gender-critical feminists with, including women who’ve taken a consistent and principled stand against them. The mud has been raked very successfully. A radical feminist critique of the political erasure of sex has been linked, perhaps terminally in the US context, with religious homophobes and racists.

Seems to me that - to avoid the weasel wording of "some groups" and vague "alliances" etc - there is the specific controversy of US-based radical feminist group WoLF appearing on a Heritage-sponsored panel in 2019, something that was criticised by left-wing gender-critical feminists in the UK. Rather than expanding this claim to ever increasing vagueness and implication it should be narrowed. Void if removed (talk) 08:45, 27 May 2024 (UTC)

Note: These incidents are connected to Hands Across the Aisle Coalition, a group which explicitly wants to bring together "trans-exclusionary radical feminists" and "conservative Christian anti-LGBT" groups.

As far as I know, the connection goes deeper than that, though I would need time to dig up sources on this. Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull in particular seems to be a connecting hinge. Then again, she is also connected to WoLF. TucanHolmes (talk) 09:04, 27 May 2024 (UTC)

But she is explicitly neither gender-critical, nor a feminist. Void if removed (talk) 09:24, 27 May 2024 (UTC)

This discussion is probably better off on kjks page, but Wikipedia currently describes kjk as gender critical. LunaHasArrived (talk) 09:37, 27 May 2024 (UTC)

The CTV source in the lede states

"The Canadian Anti-Hate Network is tracking anti-trans hate and TERF groups in the country, and one thing that’s come out of their work, is that despite labelling themselves as feminists, these groups often collaborate with conservative and far-right groups, and many of these groups are out of Vancouver."

This seems pretty explicit with reference to Canada. LunaHasArrived (talk) 09:28, 27 May 2024 (UTC)

But the problem is the conflation of "TERF" with "gender-critical feminist".

We have so many reliable sources saying that TERF is a derogatory epithet for anyone deemed transphobic, and not straightforwardly the same thing as "gender-crtical feminist", especially outside of academia, that relying on this source for his claim is basically WP:SYNTH. Void if removed (talk) 09:33, 27 May 2024 (UTC)

I would possibly agree however it's groups that self label as feminist, and in the article in general they make reference to anti-trans hate groups so TERF isn't claiming that role. In reference to TERF throughout the article they talk about these groups believing in conflict between women's rights and transgender people's rights, they talk about "sex based rights". They say these groups relate to the "Women's Human rights campaign". It is very clear that this source is not using TERF as a stand in for Transphobe and that the groups mentioned are gender critical (and especially use feminism) LunaHasArrived (talk) 09:55, 27 May 2024 (UTC)

But the problem is the conflation of "TERF" with "gender-critical feminist

The distinction between the two is muddied, the lines blurred. That's why this article states

Gender-critical feminism, also known as trans-exclusionary radical feminism or TERFism

That's also why this article acknowledges that some sources say that "gender-critical feminism" is merely a rebrand. TucanHolmes (talk) 20:06, 27 May 2024 (UTC)

views - sex based rights

In the United kingdom section the first bullet point (starting existing exceptions) whilst not saying anything wrong (I think it has to be proportional means of achieving a legitimate aim in certain circumstances or and some other stuff, but I am no legal scholar and haven't read the exact document for a while), seems badly sourced. The ehrc link fails verification for me and the wpuk page about suella braverman I was surprised to see linked at all. I tried doing a search but a quick look at gov UK and the ehrc but didn't find anything that would support the current text and it seems a shame to get rid of it.

Any help finding better sources for this bullet point would be appreciated. LunaHasArrived (talk) 11:48, 26 May 2024 (UTC)

I think this is the updated link to the current EHRC page:

https://www.equalityhumanrights.com/equality/equality-act-2010/separate-and-single-sex-service-providers-guide-equality-act-sex-and Void if removed (talk) 12:20, 26 May 2024 (UTC)

Yes this is what I was thinking of in terms of a source backing this up. Thank you LunaHasArrived (talk) 14:01, 26 May 2024 (UTC)

For a better cite for the other (ie, this is what is meant by GCFs in this context) how about page 135-6 of Sex and Gender: A contemporary reader:

This chapter has surveyed the history and current state of English and international laws on sex and gender. It has shown that, where laws relating to sex have been enacted, they have been intended to remedy the disadvantages suffered directly and indirectly by women. These disadvantages have always been based on women’s biology as females and on the social constructs built upon their biology. In consequence, the law has defined women as females and has provided rights and protections to counter the historical and continuing restrictions imposed by these.

Our conclusion is that there are just too many situations – those envisaged in the Equality Act exemptions being prime examples – where removal of the protected category of sex will reduce, and possibly remove, the very protections that were enacted to help natal women and redress their historical disadvantage. It is for this reason we argue that we need to retain the protected characteristic of sex in the EA, since its replacement by ‘gender identity’ would obliterate its historical and continuing basis in biology, cut women off from our heritage (women’s lives matter, just as black lives do) and blur the distinction between people who have been discriminated against because of their bodies and those discriminated against because of their identities.

And RE: WPUK, on page 99

Woman’s Place UK (WPUK), founded by socialists and trade unionists in 2017 to campaign for women’s sex-based rights. WPUK’s conscious debt to the second wave is evidenced by their ‘Five Demands’ (WPUK 2018), and their distinction between sex as biological – which underpins their emphasis on women’s bodily autonomy – and gender as a restrictive construction that feminists must challenge.

Void if removed (talk) 12:39, 26 May 2024 (UTC)

Correct me if I'm wrong here but the top 2 show nothing about the phrase "sex based rights" (a very particular phrase used a lot) and the bottom is just wpuk was founded because people wanted to protect sex based rights. None show gcf's saying that sex being a protected characteristic is an existing sex based right. Also the middle paragraph seems to be interesting as it's arguing against people wanting to remove sex as a protected characteristic in the UK (something I don't think I've ever seen, ironically the only one I've seen people arguing to remove is gender reassignment). What we want is a source backing up that sex being a protected characteristic is a sex based right. LunaHasArrived (talk) 20:37, 26 May 2024 (UTC)

The description of this chapter (8) in the introduction says

The reasons why British and some international law safeguards sex-based rights are explained by Rosemary Auchmuty and Rosa Freedman in Chapter 8. In Chapter 9, Callie Burt examines the basis of challenges to sex-based legal rights in the US and the consequences of these. Together, these chapters argue that legal recognition of sex, and sex-based rights, is essential.

Void if removed (talk) 21:38, 26 May 2024 (UTC)