Talk:Atypical gender identities

Cleanup request
You have put up a message header on Atypical Gender Identies requesting improvements. Unfortunately you have given no idea of what you want. A clear message on the discussion page for that article would be greatly appreciated. &#37329; (Kim) 19:26, 20 August 2005 (UTC)
 * Pearle did not add the cleanup request; User:Bcat did, at 20:01, 28 June 2005. Pearle is merely sorting these requests by month, which is why the edit summary says "Changing  to  " and why the tag now says "This article has been tagged since June 2005."  As far as I can tell, Bcat did not leave a message on Cleanup/June or this talk page specifying what type of cleanup is needed.  Skimming this article, though, it needs some wikification, including section headers and more links. It is also not NPOV, e.g. "would serve to deceive".  But more importantly, there is enough overlap with gender identity, intersexuality, and sex to completely merge this text into those articles.  If that's not done, then all of those articles would need to link here and probably some content from them moved in or copied. -- Beland 19:52, 20 August 2005 (UTC)

The article was split off from "Gender identity" because people could not even handle the vanilla cases clearly and objected to inclusion of the non-vanilla cases. Gender identities involve two things: (1) how individuals feel about themselves (e.g., "I am a woman trapped in a man's body.") (2) how communities categorize individuals ("I don't care what Marie says, he's got male genitals and he's a man.") Intersexuality involves "ambiguous" genitalia. People with atypical gender identities don't have to have atypical genitalia; as far as I know it wouldn't be correct even to assert that they often have atypical genitalia. So what happens to objective discussion of phenomena if we create the appearance of a connection between two phenomena? And the whole point of talking about gender in addition to talking about sex, starting with John Money, was that how one feels about oneself as a "man," "woman," "hijra," or whatever, often is discordant with what other people observe about one's chromosomal sex, external genitalia, internal genitalia, etc., etc. I strongly disagree with the suggestion to merge articles. If anything needs to be done it is to change the title to "Atypical gender identities and roles" since the interests of individuals and societies most often come into conflict when there is a perceived discord between one's gender identity and one's gender role. The individual says, "I am X and should behave in an X way," and the community says, "No, you are Y and should behave in a Y way." Very few societies have been tolerant enough to refrain from trying to compel the individual to conform to the demands of the society. Very few families fail to experience discomfort when "John" decides e is a girl. We need an article that says, "Even though societies all over the world segregate individuals into the categories of 'men' and 'women,' there are societies that make a place at the table for people who say, as the Hijra in India have recently done on the Indian political scene, that they are neither men nor women but something else and deserve the right to live a third kind of social existence." &#37329; (Kim) 17:58, 21 August 2005 (UTC)

Sex vs Gender as well as their Identification
Sex is a concrete noun (refering to male, female, intersex). Gender is an abstract noun (refering to masculine, feminine, androgynous). However, laypeople sometimes borrow the word Gender to refer to concrete noun (male/female/intersex). Sexuality is an abstract noun. Sexuality and Gender can be used interchangably. Sexuality can refer to sexual-identity (masculine, feminine, androgynous), sexual-orientation (heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual), and sexual-receptivity (celibacy, hypersexuality) depending on the context. Gender Identity and Sexual Identity can also be used interchangably. aCute 04:36, 25 February 2006 (UTC)


 * 1) For the abstract usage, atypical gender identities should be merged with both gender identity and sexual identity.
 * 2) For the concrete usage, atypical gender identities should be merged with both sex and intersexuality.

aCute 04:46, 25 February 2006 (UTC)


 * I just went over the difference between gender identity and sexual identity and why they cannot be used interchangably in the talk page of a related article where it was in response to aCute, so I won't go over it again here. Suffice it to say, there are real reasons for keeping the terms separate.


 * There is a reason for this article -- when we were all trying to get gender identity and gender role articles straightened out, and separated from sex, most people were unhappy with discussing the "kinky" kinds of gender identities in the midst of trying to explain the expected kind of thing clearly (for the average reader). Before we "deport" chunks of this article to articles where they will not be welcomed, we should try to get a more complete sampling of the atypical identities and roles. There is a reason for keeping some gender identity and sexual identity references in the same article along with sex and intersexuality. When one person's sex (as defined by the capacity to produce sperm or eggs) is known, the person has a sexual identity. Pigeons on the street have sex, but they rarely have sexual identities because the observer cannot assign an identity "from the outside." It is generally much easier for humans to have putative sexual identities.  When one's sexual identity is harmonious with both one's awareness of gender identity and one's assumption of gender role, and, moreover, one's community is satisfied that everything matches properly, there would rarely if ever be any question of atypical gender identities.


 * Generally, an atypical gender identity and/or an atypical gender role will occur when there is a mis-match between the person's sexual identity and the person's gender role/identity. Individuals with male external genitalia who do not perceive themselves as men and who act as something other than men are conceptually difficult for most people in society to deal with. Intersexual and transsexual individuals are conceptually difficult to deal with because they are existing and living outside the limited view of reality that set up the original categories and expectations.  The hijra and other such groups are probably the most well understood of these special cases. I wonder what even more unusual gender role/identities there may be in this world. 金 (Kim) 07:10, 26 February 2006 (UTC)

Hopeless case
This article is so hopelessly bad, that I think it needs to be rewritten entirely. Until then, I make it into a redir. Among the points against it:
 * Intersex has per se nothing to do with having an atypical gender identity. Even if it had, this part would belong to Intersex.
 * How one manages to give examples for AGI and not mention western transgender people is something I don't think I want to understand.
 * Hijra - Exactly what is " ... and frequently are transexual as a part of the ritual requirement of their gender role" supposed to mean? It does not make any sense.
 * Winkte - if refering to Native Americans in general, this is the wrong term. The proper one is Two-Spirit.
 * Yinyang ren 陰陽人 - The example gives no indication at all of an AGI - it sounds like a plain bisexual man. (And it is directly copied from the article.) -- AlexR 23:21, 8 May 2006 (UTC)


 * Great; I contribute to an article and it vanishes the next day... (I added the subsection on Polynesian fa'afafine). Redirecting this to gender identities is absurd: the latter does not adress the issue of non-Western identities which happen to be outside the male/female bounds. If it's going to claim to be an encylcopedia article, that needs remedying. I'll see if I can recover what I wrote in this article, and transfer it to gender identities. Aridd 15:19, 10 May 2006 (UTC)
 * Yes, well, and this article was not only an almagation of often rather unrelated ideas, it did not bother to mention western AGIs, either. Well, you see what I wrote above. If you want this to be an article again instead of a redit, why not write it? The old one was hopelessly bad. This of course does not preclude a new one from being written. -- AlexR 16:10, 10 May 2006 (UTC)