Talk:Epicenity

Relationship to gender & sexuality
The summary states that epicenity includes: effeminacy, androgyny and asexuality. As far as I know, effeminacy and androgyny are related to gender identities but asexuality is a sexual identity. Is asexuality the right word here? Wouldn't third gender or genderqueer be more appropriate? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Memorygap (talk • contribs) 10:28, 18 August 2009 (UTC)


 * Good question Memorygap!
 * Reliable sources come from a range of scholastic disciplines, and others reflect contemporary colloquial speech.
 * When it comes to language for gender and sexuality, there are three sets of terminology, which do not always agree.
 * There is scientific language, which is summarised in the gender taxonomy. There is the language of the LGBT movement. There is also the popular language of people in general, which is not always well defined, or when it is, it does not always admit the possibility of interpretations that science and/or the LGBT community would like to articulate in their specialist vocabularies.
 * Medically, effeminacy would probably fall into the area of gender role rather than gender identity. That is, "effeminacy" refers to people with male sex and masculine gender identity who may either appear, or genuinely prefer, social behaviours considered to be feminine in their social context. Effeminate men might have androphilic erotic preference (that is, they might be gay), but it is possible to be an effeminate man, without being gay, just as it's possible to be gay without being effeminate (contrary to popular, but uninformed belief).
 * Likewise, androgeny has more to do with behaviour than self-identification. A man or woman may choose to act (dress, speak or pursue occupations) in ways normally associated with their own sex/gender, but also act in ways normally associated with the opposite sex/gender. This, again, is gender role and NOT gender identity. Androgeny is not about uncertainty with regard to gender identity, in fact, few people ever are uncertain about their gender identity, but what is very widely observed is individuals whose behaviour and sexual preference differ to norms for their biological sex and gender identity.
 * It appears that you, Memorygap, make a distinction between gender identity and sexual identity. I'm not familiar with that terminology (I should consider looking it up in a reliable LGBT source).
 * The scientific classification system doesn't make such a distinction. In psychology, gender identity is the self-identification of oneself with either people of one's own sex, or with people of the opposite sex. There are biologically male people who "feel" they are really women, and biologically female people who feel they are really men. This is described, scientifically, as having such-and-such sex, but so-and-so gender identity.
 * Scientifically speaking, there is no need for a classification like "third gender", because, in fact, people who might be classified by some as "third gender" actually have biological sex, gender identity, roles and sexual preferences just like other people, only that there are various "cross-overs" at different levels, for reasons that are well understood in most cases (but not all).
 * "Third gender" and "gender queer" seem like perfectly sensible and comprehensible catch-all categories to me, but the scientific terminology has the advantage of being more precise by being better defined, and also by having evidential data to explain some of the rich variety of gender related diversity that exists in the human population.
 * You posted this note some time ago. Sorry for such a delayed response. Perhaps in some months or years another passer by might further this long term discussion and help us refine and clarify the article.
 * Cheers, Alastair Haines (talk) 06:15, 24 March 2010 (UTC)

Pushing the rules beyond common sense


No offense to whoever moved the article to the current namespace, but it seems pretty arbitrary to me. Why not epicenicity? That would be much more general and accurate to what currently stands in the text. Epicen-ism suggests an ideology or movement. Indeed, the gender neutral movement could justly be called epicenism, only it isn't.

The thing is, if I remember rightly, the policy for nomenclature wasn't completely written in stone: nouns and in the singular is the rule, but it is honoured in the breach as well as in the observance in many articles. And so it must be. Here is a case in point.

However, epicene is sometimes used substantively (i.e. as a noun). It is analogous to dandy: first an adjective for finery, it became a nickname for those who adopted finery. Perhaps more tellingly, we have the adjective gay, now very widely used substantively with a different referent. Gays, as in gays and lesbians, is not an adjective any more. Lesbian is even more obviously an adjective, and just as obviously regularly used substantively.

If anyone cares, please return this article to a sensible namespace. Alastair Haines (talk) 15:06, 14 May 2009 (UTC)

"He" as epicine
The statement that the word "he" is regarded as epicine by some has been flagged with "", unnecessarily, I believe. "He" is the proper singular pronoun for a person of unknown gender, and so this seems a perfectly reasonable claim to make: after reading this article I now consider the word to be epicine, at least in this use. Mnealon (talk) 18:45, 13 December 2010 (UTC)

Article is largely about the linguistic concept
As per this section title; while the lead section is about the general concept of epicenity and the lack of gender-distinction, the rest of the article is entirely about the linguistic concept in English, French, and Spanish and less about the general concept itself. Seems like we want to add more information about the concept in general, and bunch the various linguistics section as subsections under "In linguistics". Does anyone have any good sources/info on the more general concept? Edderiofer (talk) 14:06, 12 May 2023 (UTC)