Talk:Gender-critical feminism

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:

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:

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—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)
 * Your opinion showing much? Wikipedia is not meant to be your soapbox for your opinions. 86.187.165.42 (talk) 03:48, 9 July 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. &#42;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. &#42;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)
 * 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:
 * 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)
 * The GCF page is extremely biased. It equates GCF with transphobia and anti-trans rights. All the GCFeminists I have ever heard believe that trans people deserve the human rights they already enjoy as humans. If they want the right to enter women's groups and spaces, that is another matter! And the article equates the belief that trans women are not women but rather TRANS WOMEN, with transphobia. That is not at all accurate.  Believing that trans women are trans women is a sign of being well-grounded in reality and has nothing to do with thinking that trans people should not exist. 71.235.161.214 (talk) 18:21, 19 June 2024 (UTC)
 * Do you have any specific parts of the article you want to improve. Remember these improvements would have to be backed up by sources using Wikipedia policy. I'll kindly remind you that Wikipedia is NOTFORUM LunaHasArrived (talk) 19:44, 19 June 2024 (UTC)
 * The GCF page is extremely biased. It equates GCF with transphobia and anti-trans rights. All the GCFeminists I have ever heard believe that trans people deserve the human rights they already enjoy as humans. If they want the right to enter women's groups and spaces, that is another matter! And the article equates the belief that trans women are not women but rather TRANS WOMEN, with transphobia. That is not at all accurate.  Believing that trans women are trans women is a sign of being well-grounded in reality and has nothing to do with thinking that trans people should not exist. 71.235.161.214 (talk) 18:21, 19 June 2024 (UTC)
 * Do you have any specific parts of the article you want to improve. Remember these improvements would have to be backed up by sources using Wikipedia policy. I'll kindly remind you that Wikipedia is NOTFORUM LunaHasArrived (talk) 19:44, 19 June 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:
 * Thurlow gives an account of what "anti-trans feminism" looks like, via a reading of Janice Raymond from the 70s:
 * 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":
 * 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":
 * 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:
 * 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:
 * 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:
 * 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:
 * 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, 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 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. &#42;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)
 * Adding to this a new, recent source which echoes a lot of the distinctions I think this article needs to draw. I note that this is a critical source, but it does actually seem to engage with the distinctions that many other critical sources deny exist - even if only to argue for more strategic ways of politically countering those positions.
 * https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10894160.2024.2356496 ("Confronting complex alliances: Situating Britain’s gender critical politics within the wider transnational anti-gender movement" by Sarah Lamble)
 * Some relevant quotes.
 * First, it is distinct from any "anti-gender movement":
 * On history:
 * On GCF vs conservative gender positions, and perspectives on gay rights:
 * [...]
 * On non right-wing nature:
 * On claims within academia of silencing and no-platforming of GCF perspectives:
 * On distinctions between factions within the bread "gender-critical" umbrella, and overuse of "TERF":
 * On left-wing positions and politics:
 * I think this is one of the few critical sources that accurately renders the gender-critical feminist position that they oppose gender identity on the grounds that it is "reinforcing stereotypes". Void if removed (talk) 18:40, 9 June 2024 (UTC)
 * Yes, this looks like a very useful source. (By the way, I think you mean ‘broad’, not ‘bread’.) Sweet6970 (talk) 19:55, 9 June 2024 (UTC)
 * For once, an opponent of gender critical ideas seems to be making a serious effort to pass the Ideological Turing Test in their arguments against it. This is commendable. &#42;Dan T.* (talk) 18:12, 10 June 2024 (UTC)
 * Whilst the above source is interesting, I think certain editors might be prone to "I just like it" kind of thinking and forget that this is just one academic source. It mainly seems to be a soft rebuttle to Butlers new book and describes the gender critical movement as a mainly English centric movement and a single issue movement. It distinctly mentions that the these views are a minority in the UK and specifically mentions that lesbians and bisexual women are the most trans inclusive in Britain (this should probably be mentioned in the gay rights sections of views). Also it mentions that safety concerns are a big pusher for the gender critical movement and "In conditions of fearmongering and resource scarcity, trans people
 * provide a convenient target to blame for wider problems" but that such safety concerns are misdericted and "there
 * is no credible empirical evidence that trans rights pose a threat to women" LunaHasArrived (talk) 19:01, 10 June 2024 (UTC)
 * I also think that this paper's assertion that gender critical feminism is left-wing is very much incorrect in practice. Just common sense here: if it was left wing, do you think the Torygraph and the Daily Mail would put out articles almost every single day covering it favorably? Because they definitely do that.
 * What I would say is that GCF has historical ties to the British left that protect it from a lot of the ideological gatekeeping that the left would normally do. So it's less taboo, especially in the British center-left, than religious transphobia or overt homophobia would be. Loki (talk) 19:54, 10 June 2024 (UTC)
 * I don't think it asserts that gender critical feminism is left wing, just that gender critical feminists can come from the left wing. I mean it specifically calls these feminists "white feminists" which is very against the intersectionality of modern feminism and the left wing. LunaHasArrived (talk) 20:00, 10 June 2024 (UTC)
 * if it was left wing, do you think the Torygraph and the Daily Mail would put out articles almost every single day covering it favorably?
 * You're asking if right-wing papers would gleefully publish stories about divisions on the left? Stories about mild-mannered left-wing academics and feminists and lesbians being cancelled by "the left"? You can't imagine they have anything to gain by making "the left" look like its eating itself in a deranged purity spiral? That "the left" has abandoned its own and only "the right" can be trusted to "protect women"?
 * Not only do I not find that hard to believe, I find it obvious that they would do that in the divisive and selective manner that they have.
 * Anyway, back before this was particularly mainstream, one of the few places that covered eg. the protests at Women's Place events was the Morning Star. Materialist, marxist left-wing feminists consider sex to be an important, material axis of oppression, and gender identity to be liberal idealism. These are quite predictable philosophical differences. Void if removed (talk) 22:02, 10 June 2024 (UTC)
 * The source did not say once say that GC feminism is left-wing, it said it's taken hold of politics across the UK as a whole, initially championed by white feminists in the UK and more associated with the UK left. It says that the left and right GC camps agree on framing trans people as a threat, just provide different reasonings. It says leftists and feminists worldwide generally do not agree. "Some leftists say this thing in this country".
 * And as a materialist marxist feminist, who organizes in my community with other materialist marxist feminists, your claim that we "consider sex to be an important, material axis of oppression, and gender identity to be liberal idealism" is pretty off-base and pure unsourced speculation. For a start, it ignores that "gender identity" is an empirical/material thing that every single health organization agrees exists because conversion therapy doesn't work on trans people . One can be a marxist, materialist, and feminist and intersectional. Your Friendly Neighborhood Sociologist ⚧ Ⓐ (talk) 23:00, 10 June 2024 (UTC)
 * FWIW, the only survey I'm aware of on this topic finds that the vast majority of self-identified feminists are trans-friendly. Loki (talk) 02:21, 11 June 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:
 * 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)
 * This sentence "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" is the basis of frequent argument by Reprarina and Amanda and others. But what are they expecting these "experts" to tell us? They are expecting our experts to tell us what are RightTM beliefs to hold. And what is the "position" that has been "rejected"? This isn't a position like "I think vaccines save many more lives than the small risk of harm" or "Driving too fast is a common cause of death and injury on our roads" or "Humankind is responsible for global warming" or "Trump lost the 2020 US presidential election". It is as fundamentally wrongthinking to consider GCF a "position" that "experts" can declare "accepted" or "rejected" as it is to consider if Anglicans or Baptists are right or if the UK should be a member of the European Union or if university education should be free or charge tuition fees. These are all things people can have an opinion on, and pollsters can measure the extent of those opinions, but no serious thinker would make the mistake that because there are more Anglicans than Methodists, the latter must be a wrong kind of Christianity. That because there are more theology academic papers written by Anglicans, their theology is correct, and Wikipedia must make sure any articles on Methodists are never sourced to Methodists. That because there are more countries that drive on the right, that this is the "correct" side and lefties are "rejected" and we must never cite any sources to the UK and Japan on road safety.
 * This is frankly the most wrongheaded argument I've seen on Wikipedia and I've seen some bad ones. We are concerned with whether our sources accurately and fairly describe gender-critical feminism, the aspects of the beliefs such people hold, and to document its acceptance or its criticism by others. Are our sources reliable with a reputation for fact checking and accuracy? We are not concerned with whether our sources are RightTM. This isn't that kind of article. -- Colin°Talk 17:19, 11 June 2024 (UTC)
 * Trumpism is also a broad ideology or movement with multiple associated beliefs. And its article still predominantly uses academic and other reliable sources that those who subscribe to the ideology may disagree with. PBZE (talk) 21:40, 11 June 2024 (UTC)
 * All analogies are imperfect. To what extent is your analogy helping? Well that article is a good example of a subject written about, it seems, entirely by detractors of Trump, who's self-invented term "Trumpism" seems to be basically "All of Trump's characteristics and beliefs that I hate". I mean, anyone can write a listicle about "The characteristics of Trumpism" having done some basic googling and a dislike of the man. I can see some analogy with how some authors have written about TERFs, which, as we have discussed repeatedly on this page, is a term no longer any more specific than "transphobic woman that I hate". The term really just becomes a box that haters can fill with whatever they like, and no real need to figure out what actually is important to the subject one is writing about.
 * The analogy breaks down when one considers that GCF is not about the supposed beliefs or psychological analysis of some political/ideological messiah, which is then at the mercy of all the disconnects there may be between what many followers believe and what the messiah may have once said but also contradictorily said another time and all the possibly incorrect things others have ever said about the messiah. Instead GCF writers who are expressing and writing about their own GC beliefs and concerns are arguing their own case, and it is important we figure out what their shared (and perhaps disagreed) beliefs actually are. Only then can we decide what it is about their actual beliefs that we agree or disagree with. Deciding that one disagrees with invented supposed beliefs would seem to be a supreme waste of one's short time on earth.
 * This encyclopaedia should be able to source and write about this topic just as we write about Environmentalism. It's just a set of beliefs. -- Colin°Talk 12:02, 12 June 2024 (UTC)
 * It's rather commonplace in many political camps for people to lump together everything they dislike in modern society and package it neatly as instances of whatever ideology they hate the most. It's all Cultural Marxism, or Late Capitalism, or Neoliberalism, or The Far Right, or Trumpism, or Biden's America, or Terf Island. It's the fault of the TERFs or the Zionists or Antifa or the Chinese Communist Party. &#42;Dan T.* (talk) 12:39, 12 June 2024 (UTC)
 * I'm sure people have always done that. I think the Trumpism article is really All the things liberals hate about Trump and his politics. And like any political game, those "things" don't really need to stand up to much scrutiny. They just have to sound plausible to like minded readers. It's a easy game to play, at all levels of competence, hence the multitude of sources that article can cite. I do think some editors here want this to be All the things activists hate about TERFs and the hateful things TERFs believe which similarly doesn't need to stand up to any serious scrutiny beyond sounding plausible to like minded readers. And can encompass anyone who's ever been called a TERF on the internet and anything anyone has ever accused a TERF of believing. It's really not what Wikipedia is about. That's what blogs are for.
 * To use the environmentalism example. It would be like if our article on that subject told us environmentalists are people who glue themselves on motorways to protest about cars, who throw red paint at banks to protest about oil, who always walk or cycle everywhere, who wear only natural fibres and eat vegan. That environmentalists want to take your car away, make your home more expensive to heat, stop you going nice places on holiday and are in league with China to bring down the western economy. When you write about a subject, sourcing only to people from the outside who hate people on the inside, you nearly always get a very distorted view. That's what some people are pushing here because, in good faith, they think that view is The Right One. And just as it isn't Wikipedia's job to say who is right, whether you should be vegan or enjoy a steak, walk or take the car, it doesn't matter which belief about feminism (or any other belief) has the majority in scholarly journals for us to agree to write about it accurately. -- Colin°Talk 08:03, 13 June 2024 (UTC)
 * This is irrelevant WP:OR which misses the point. I'm not saying that Trumpism is the same as gender-critical feminism. I'm giving an example of an ideological movement, which is not exclusively focused on the hard sciences, and includes philosophical and social beliefs, whose article gives the most weight to academic sources, regardless of whether or not the movement's adherents agree with those sources.
 * People who subscribe to what is called Trumpism also write about, express, and argue for their own beliefs. We don't give undue weight to them just because they are doing so. PBZE (talk) 21:12, 16 June 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)
 * It's rather commonplace in many political camps for people to lump together everything they dislike in modern society and package it neatly as instances of whatever ideology they hate the most. It's all Cultural Marxism, or Late Capitalism, or Neoliberalism, or The Far Right, or Trumpism, or Biden's America, or Terf Island. It's the fault of the TERFs or the Zionists or Antifa or the Chinese Communist Party. &#42;Dan T.* (talk) 12:39, 12 June 2024 (UTC)
 * I'm sure people have always done that. I think the Trumpism article is really All the things liberals hate about Trump and his politics. And like any political game, those "things" don't really need to stand up to much scrutiny. They just have to sound plausible to like minded readers. It's a easy game to play, at all levels of competence, hence the multitude of sources that article can cite. I do think some editors here want this to be All the things activists hate about TERFs and the hateful things TERFs believe which similarly doesn't need to stand up to any serious scrutiny beyond sounding plausible to like minded readers. And can encompass anyone who's ever been called a TERF on the internet and anything anyone has ever accused a TERF of believing. It's really not what Wikipedia is about. That's what blogs are for.
 * To use the environmentalism example. It would be like if our article on that subject told us environmentalists are people who glue themselves on motorways to protest about cars, who throw red paint at banks to protest about oil, who always walk or cycle everywhere, who wear only natural fibres and eat vegan. That environmentalists want to take your car away, make your home more expensive to heat, stop you going nice places on holiday and are in league with China to bring down the western economy. When you write about a subject, sourcing only to people from the outside who hate people on the inside, you nearly always get a very distorted view. That's what some people are pushing here because, in good faith, they think that view is The Right One. And just as it isn't Wikipedia's job to say who is right, whether you should be vegan or enjoy a steak, walk or take the car, it doesn't matter which belief about feminism (or any other belief) has the majority in scholarly journals for us to agree to write about it accurately. -- Colin°Talk 08:03, 13 June 2024 (UTC)
 * This is irrelevant WP:OR which misses the point. I'm not saying that Trumpism is the same as gender-critical feminism. I'm giving an example of an ideological movement, which is not exclusively focused on the hard sciences, and includes philosophical and social beliefs, whose article gives the most weight to academic sources, regardless of whether or not the movement's adherents agree with those sources.
 * People who subscribe to what is called Trumpism also write about, express, and argue for their own beliefs. We don't give undue weight to them just because they are doing so. PBZE (talk) 21:12, 16 June 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)
 * 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)

Drastic changes to lede
@PBZE you have made drastic, non-consensus and WP:POV changes to the lede of a contentious topic article that are not an improvement, are badly written, and don't reflect what cited WP:RS say, please self-revert and bring it to talk. Void if removed (talk) 08:02, 23 June 2024 (UTC)


 * I looked over both versions. PBZE’s is just, terribly written. Void, yours removes longstanding consensus agreed upon information supported overwhelmingly by the article in favor of “Gender critical feminists simply believe that biological sex is what matters” which is incredibly reductive, POV, and not reflective of the article. Snokalok (talk) 11:32, 23 June 2024 (UTC)
 * It’d be like if the article on an anti-immigrant group just said “Protect Evropa is a movement that believes in the preservation of traditional European values and ideals.” Instead of “Protect Evropa is a group known for opposing allowing emigration to the EU for people of color, stating that it believes in the preservation of traditional European values and ideals”
 * Anyway, I’ve reverted that paragraph to the last version that everyone had consensus on. Snokalok (talk) 11:44, 23 June 2024 (UTC)
 * I agree with Snokalok. --Amanda A. Brant (talk) 13:46, 23 June 2024 (UTC)
 * I also agree with Snokalok. The current version of the lead is good, PBZE's version was very awkwardly worded, and Void's version unacceptably cut significant amounts of sourced content in ways that violated WP:NPOV. Loki (talk) 04:11, 24 June 2024 (UTC)
 * I understand why my choice to put the titles in the middle of the lead sentence instead of the beginning was not well-received. Other than that specific change, would it be alright to put back my other changes to the first paragraph? They include:
 * Removing the mention of the term "gender ideology" from the lead sentence. The term has only been widely used in TERF discourse for about a decade, but the lead sentence is supposed to have a historical perspective as well as a modern one. I instead put the term in another sentence with more context.
 * Merging the sentence "They reject the concept of transgender identities" into the first sentence, which already describes what the movement opposes.
 * Replacing "opposes the concept of" with just "opposes". The former is clunky, vague, and unnecessarily philosophical and abstract, while the latter is more direct, concise, and to the point. Gender-critical feminist ideology is not limited to opinions about concepts.
 * PBZE (talk) 08:42, 24 June 2024 (UTC)
 * The term "gender ideology" has been the central boogeyman concept of this movement for years, so it should be included in the first sentence. The first sentence or paragraph should serve as the most succinct summary of the article. For comparison, consider Donald Trump: the first sentence mentions that he served as president, and this point is expanded upon later in the lead. Similarly, while we discuss when and in what context "gender ideology" became a term in this movement later in the lead, it needs to be mentioned at the beginning due to its current importance in framing their actions as opposition to "gender ideology."
 * I'm ok with merging the sentence "They reject the concept of transgender identities" into the first sentence, and changing "opposes the concept of" to "opposes". --Amanda A. Brant (talk) 11:25, 24 June 2024 (UTC)
 * I’m not clear what is intended by any change to ‘opposes the concept of ‘ .Which wording is it proposed to change? It would be helpful if the whole proposed draft would be provided. Sweet6970 (talk) 12:23, 24 June 2024 (UTC)
 * The term "gender ideology" has been the central boogeyman concept of this movement for years
 * This is refuted by gender-critical feminist WP:RS, which a) acknowledge the use of the term by "anti-gender" actors and b) make explicit reference to more precise alternatives such as "gender identity ideology". Void if removed (talk) 12:21, 27 June 2024 (UTC)
 * Re: “Gender Ideology”
 * TERFism is a much more widespread and influential ideology than it was in the 70s. Back then it was the view of a few niche radfem communities. Now we have major political parties and governments all throughout the first world centering their entire platforms on its tenets. I’d argue that that gives recent ideas and points more weight on the subject. To invoke Godwin’s Law - no one cares about what Nazi ideology looked like in the 20s, they care about what it looked like in the 30s and 40s.
 * Re: “The concept of”
 * Saying they “oppose gender identities” implies they recognize they exist, they just think they shouldn’t. Terfism opposes the very recognition of gender identity as something that exists, thus “oppose the concept” is better. Snokalok (talk) 17:04, 24 June 2024 (UTC)
 * Re ‘gender ideology’: I don’t recognise your description of the political situation in the first world.
 * Re ‘the concept of’: unfortunately, I am still in the dark as to what exact changes you are proposing for the lead.
 * Sweet6970 (talk) 20:01, 24 June 2024 (UTC)
 * Oh I think the paragraph before this dispute was perfectly fine as it was, I’m arguing against changing it.
 * And Re: Gender Ideology, have you been reading the British news? Snokalok (talk) 23:36, 24 June 2024 (UTC)
 * Terf ideology is far more widespread and influential in the world now than historically, and thus it makes sense for the article on it to give more weight and pagespace to the modern day. Snokalok (talk) 23:40, 24 June 2024 (UTC)
 * ...which is a reaction to transgenderism being far more widespread and influential in the world. It's true that in the '70s the specific strain of radical feminism focusing on opposing transgenderism was a minor fringe movement, but that is because transgenderism itself was a minor fringe movement; the vast majority of the world went about its business without caring about the issue one way or the other. &#42;Dan T.* (talk) 17:06, 26 June 2024 (UTC)
 * Not a forum, this isn’t relevant to the lede. Snokalok (talk) 18:08, 26 June 2024 (UTC)

TERFs may not really represent the thoughts of most women?
There's a poll from the UK showing that the majority of women are actually more friendly to transwomen:

https://novaramedia.com/2021/06/08/terfs-dont-speak-for-women-but-dont-take-it-from-me-look-at-the-polls/

In other words, TERFs may not be representative of what most women think about transwomen.

Should we add this to the article? 2001:B011:4002:3D22:79E1:BE04:8FA0:A48D (talk) 02:57, 27 June 2024 (UTC)
 * Thank you for providing this source. However, the source is about general attitudes to transgender people in the UK, and does not mention gender-critical feminism, which is the subject of this article. So I do not think it can be used for any amendment to this article. Sweet6970 (talk) 11:27, 27 June 2024 (UTC)
 * We need to avoid original synthesis. We can't stitch together a connection from survey results showing different opinions from those of the GCs to a statement about the GC movement itself if the survey didn't ask about the GC movement. Surveys about opinions on trans people are on topic for other articles, although we would not want to place too much emphasis on any one survey. What we would need for inclusion here is for a Reliable Source to make the connection themselves explicitly. For example, if an RS were to say something like "The GC movement has struggled to gain broad support among women due to most not sharing the GCs' views about trans people" and were to then talk about some survey results then we would have something. DanielRigal (talk) 11:41, 27 June 2024 (UTC)

Globalize template
Do we really need the Globalize template? If there are examples of TERF ideology in non-western countries (I suspect they would be quite marginal), feel free to add it, but a huge globalize template seems unncessary. TERFism is mainly a thing in western countries (like radical feminism). --Amanda A. Brant (talk) 18:03, 29 June 2024 (UTC)


 * My impression is that most of the non-English speaking world frames their anti-trans stuff as either explicitly religious or as the Anti-gender movement, which is theoretically secular. It seems to be mostly an English speaking thing to conflate it with feminism. Of course, if there is more to say about other countries doing that then people are free to add it but only when it claims roots in feminism. The global article that the templater seems to be requesting already exists at Anti-gender movement, and we do already link to that at the very top of this article, so I'm not sure what more we can do to draw people's attention to it. --DanielRigal (talk) 18:26, 29 June 2024 (UTC)


 * Well, transphobia has become prominent in South Korean feminism, especially among the younger generation, with much of its rhetoric borrowed from TERFism in the US and UK. This article barely covered that at all until I added the bare minimum of information about it a day ago (and what I did add is a small fraction of what information is available in reliable sources, particularly non-English ones). There is also some interesting literature on TERFism in Japan (and other countries) that isn't included in this article at all.
 * As it stands I think this article is very Anglophone- and especially UK-centric.
 * I suspect that even the very title of this article showcases a regional bias. I doubt that the controversy over whether or not "TERF" is offensive is nearly as prominent outside of the UK and other Anglophone countries. PBZE (talk) 20:52, 29 June 2024 (UTC)
 * I believe the template is too distracting given the potential for improvement it suggests. Editors are free to add material on South Korea and other countries even without the template, but I don't really believe TERFism – i.e. a specific form of transphobia masquerading as radical "feminism" – is a global phenomenon. --Amanda A. Brant (talk) 16:24, 30 June 2024 (UTC)
 * I disagree with the idea that TERFism isn't global. I've found an abundance of sources describing TERFism outside of the Anglosphere. There are also some reliable sources that describe TERFism as a global movement:
 * "This special issue, then, proceeds from the assumption that trans-exclusionary and gender-critical feminisms are feminisms and thus demand careful historicization, analysis, and contextualization as a recent (but not in any way new) formation of feminism that has gained terrifying traction on a global scale over the last fifty or so years."
 * I see your point about the template being too distracting. As a compromise, I put an expand template in the "By country" section instead. PBZE (talk) 18:43, 1 July 2024 (UTC)
 * Yes, that's a much better solution. --Amanda A. Brant (talk) 21:49, 1 July 2024 (UTC)
 * We also can use this source to describe the support of a number of TERF groups in Russia for Russia's militaristic policies. Reprarina (talk) 02:38, 2 July 2024 (UTC)
 * As I understand it, it’s a strongly held belief in third world feminist movements. Like it’s not *the* issue, more than anything it’s kind of an irrelevant topic in the face of tackling FGM and forced marriage and such. But like, when it does come up, the widely held opinion is generally terf. Snokalok (talk) 05:18, 8 July 2024 (UTC)
 * Kind of busts the claim that such views are "fringe". &#42;Dan T.* (talk) 18:51, 8 July 2024 (UTC)
 * "Fringe" is not synonymous with "unpopular". It means lacking the support of reliable sources. Snokalok's understanding of popular opinion in non-Western countries, to the extent that it is accurate, may be relevant in determining the notability of this topic in non-Western contexts, but it is not relevant in calculating due weight. For the record, little to none of the non-Western scholarship I've come across so far supports views associated with TERFism. PBZE (talk) 19:57, 8 July 2024 (UTC)
 * Little to none of scholarship supports the views associated with any "insert social/political group here". Editors are throwing the WP:FRINGE link around in the wrong article and in a misunderstanding about a guideline focused on science and other evidence-based beliefs (did man land on the moon?). What people think about LGBTQ topics or what people think their God is or what people think is the best way to fund healthcare or how best to persuade people towards net-zero and so on are not topics subject to that guideline. Citing that guideline here is wikilawyering. I don't really care, for the purpose of writing this article, if GCF is a UK thing any more than that the Baptist Union of Scotland is a Scottish thing ignored and dismissed by the world of academic theology. We are here to document their beliefs and, when notable, the beliefs of others towards them. We are not here, folks, to debate who is right. -- 07:48, 10 July 2024 (UTC) Colin°Talk 07:48, 10 July 2024 (UTC)
 * Citing that guideline here is wikilawyering.
 * Not really. The reason it keeps getting cited on this talk page is to discuss issues regarding this article's current or hypothetical content being compliant with WP:NPOV and WP:DUEWEIGHT. A dispute about Wikipedia's most fundamental content policies is hardly wikilawyering. If anything, objecting that WP:FRINGE is a guideline focused on science and other evidence-based beliefs is wikilawyering, because regardless of the precise meaning of a particular Wikipedia jargon, the policy that's of most relevance in these discussions, WP:NPOV, applies to all topics covered on Wikipedia, not just the hard or empirical sciences. On Wikipedia, everything is evidence-based, the evidence being reliable sources. PBZE (talk) 06:47, 11 July 2024 (UTC)
 * I'm happy if people want to cite core policies. But WP:FRINGE gets cited in order to eliminate sources written by people who share GCF beliefs, by editors who have repeatedly compared GCF to white supremacists. Which doesn't bear comparison with reality, which is far far closer to my analogy of being in a small church that very few people, globally, belong to. There are lots of people in such small churches with beliefs that would upset many editors here. If you want to discuss whether GCF has weight within other feminism articles, the number of followers and the impact of their writing among scholarly journals is important. But if you are here to write an encyclopaedic article on GCF, it really really is not. The issue is WP:NOTHERE and WP:NOTFORUM and abusing this page. -- Colin°Talk 07:14, 11 July 2024 (UTC)
 * @Colin Excuse me for potentially butting in & potentially missing something, but may I ask how this refutes @PBZE's point?
 * My reading of your statement is that GC feminists are comparable to members of a small church, rather then to white supremacists, however:
 * Though yes, some church goers may hold beliefs that others find unsavory, I would think that, if anything, that would reinforce the idea that the idea is fringe.
 * While in isolation, people have the right to believe what they want, that doesn't mean all beliefs are socially equal. If someone's fringe beliefs include belittling or excluding others for their identity, especially if they purport to be backed by science, then yes, their claims will & should be under heavier scrutiny.
 * Apologies again if I'm missing something basic here, but I had been reading your statement several times & was still seemingly lost, so I just felt the need to ask for a clarification. Butterscotch Beluga (talk) 22:18, 12 July 2024 (UTC)
 * Is it the point of this article to argue GCF is held equally to other forms of feminism or other beliefs about society in general? I would say no, not any more than it is for our article on a Scottish denomination to argue that the Baptist Union of Scotland has worked out "how to do church" better than any other church or "how to support local community" better than any other social organisation. They exist, they have followers, and as an encyclopaedia it is our job to accurately describe them and their beliefs.
 * Would you expect authors of the Baptist Union of Scotland article to insist that we cannot and must not cite any sources written by said Scottish baptists, citing WP:FRINGE to argue that their actual beliefs as written about by actual Scottish baptists are so globally negligible, that instead we must write about them by citing American neoliberals or some other more popular group? Or that only atheist sources are permissible?
 * PBZE argues that '"Fringe" is not synonymous with "unpopular". It means lacking the support of reliable sources.' This completely misunderstands the point of this article (unless one considers the point of this article is to have a talk page where activists can rant on about how much they hate GCFs) and what reliable means. What are said sources meant to be "reliable" about? This is key. I would argue all that matters is that the source is reliable about GCF history, who their adherents are, and what they believe and have claimed and so on. And we would write about these things as things GCF believe and have claimed, not as things Wikipedia believe is Right or we think are valid arguments or are widely held. We require our "reliable sources" to have a reputation for "a reputation for fact-checking and accuracy". We don't judge sources on whether the beliefs of the writer are Correct, according to editors here.
 * Beliefs like the ones described in this article are not subject to fact checking or evidence. They aren't at all like flat earth or perpetual motion machine or nanobots inside covid vaccines or whatever. While some people view such things in black and white and right and wrong terms, as though they are laws of physics, that's not really how our social beliefs actually work.
 * In terms of WP:DUE for example, our article on woman writes about trans women as a subset of women who have "a female gender identity that does not align with their male sex assignment at birth". A GCF would argue that those paragraphs don't even belong in the woman article but instead in the man article. But our various policies on this do not give that idea sufficient weight in those articles to even be worth mentioning. In contrast, in this article we have a whole section and several paragraphs explaining that the biological sex definition of woman as "adult human female" is the one held by GCF, and that definition has no place for people born with a willy. We don't say that definition is right (and nor do we say it is wrong). That is now WP:DUE works and how WP:NPOV works. -- Colin°Talk 09:28, 13 July 2024 (UTC)
 * So, with recent additions there is now a paragraph on Russia, and three on South Korea.
 * Not one of these relies on sources which use the phrase "gender critical". The Russian section presents in wikivoice the opinion of one non-notable researcher.
 * This page continues to be a WP:COATRACK for tenuous additions, with no attempt to describe a coherent ideological framework for the interested reader.
 * Neither of these sections are WP:DUE, but belong, at best, in Feminist views on transgender topics. Void if removed (talk) 16:41, 16 July 2024 (UTC)
 * One of the sources ([//doi.org/10.22492/issn.2186-5892.2023.67]) mentions several prominent British gender-critical activists such as Maya Forstater and J.K. Rowling. At least three of them ([//doi.org/10.22492/issn.2186-5892.2023.67][//doi.org/10.25024/kj.2021.61.4.75][//doi.org/10.3224%2Ffeminapolitica.v32i1.08]), when discussing "TERFs", cite sources which themselves use the phrase "gender critical" and which are used in this article. The sources obviously use "TERF" as a synonym of "gender-critical feminism", and shouldn't be disqualified just because they use the most common term in academia instead of the other term. TERF movements in Russia and South Korea are different, but not disconnected, from "gender-critical feminism" in the UK.
 * You're conflating our notability policies with our sourcing policies. Sources don't have to be notable, they have to be reliable. I agree that the sourcing in the Russia section is lacking, which makes sense, because the section was created today. It's a problem solved by adding more sources and coverage, thereby reducing our Anglophone bias.
 * We aren't obligated to "describe a coherent ideological framework" throughout the article. We only need to do so where the sources do. If sources don't describe gender-critical feminism as having "a coherent ideological framework", then neither should we when we use those sources. We need to describe gender-critical feminism as the sources do. PBZE (talk) 20:59, 16 July 2024 (UTC)
 * Void isn't conflating notability with sourcing. They are saying that if our source is merely a person's opinion, and needs stated as such, then who's opinion it is matters and how prestigious the publication matters. I found the Korean sources hard to read and it wasn't at all clear just how many TERFs they were claiming exist in S Korea. Much of the article had to mention other countries. The Russian source is very clearly an opinion piece published in a "forum" section and I have no idea why it warrants a whole section/paragraph and rambling comments about the war in Ukraine. So there are people in Russia that support the war against Ukraine. Well, there's a surprise. Oh and some of them are TERFs. Let's write something about how TERFs support Russia in the war against Ukraine then. This is terrible logic.
 * WP:WEIGHT is determined by reliable sources. Opinion pieces don't actually count as a reliable source other than for the author's own opinion, which then needs to be somewhat notable (I'm not referring to our notability policy). I think at present, I would agree with Void that these sections are the result of someone spending too much time one evening on Google, trying to find something bad about a topic they hate. Yes it is hard to get an international outlook, but that doesn't mean the quality on those areas should be at scraping the barrel levels. -- Colin°Talk 22:20, 16 July 2024 (UTC)
 * Russian TERFs also inform Russian law enforcement agencies about those people with male documents who do not join the army. (in Russian). Yes, real followers of the canonical old feminism, the suffragism (more precisely, the right wing of suffragism), with white feathers and racism. Reprarina (talk) 08:24, 17 July 2024 (UTC)
 * A source of unknown veracity, constructed largely from anonymous Russian social media posts, because its not like Russia is known for the spread of full-spectrum disinformation on social media. Hardly compelling. Void if removed (talk) 08:45, 17 July 2024 (UTC)
 * I do not suggest using this source in the article. Reprarina (talk) 09:08, 17 July 2024 (UTC)
 * Well then sounds like WP:NOTFORUM. This section in our article isn't at an encyclopaedic level. Wikipedia is just retweeting opinion pieces by people who hate the same things we hate. That's not how the article should be written. I suggest these pieces have no weight for inclusion of random opinions. -- Colin°Talk 09:57, 17 July 2024 (UTC)
 * Those are not opinion pieces. They merely have opinions, which does not disqualify them from being reliable sources.
 * The statements in wikivoice were statements of fact published in reputable, peer-reviewed journals. One source is indeed listed in a "forum" section, which, in the context of that journal, means "off topic", not "Internet forum" or "opinion". PBZE (talk) 09:14, 18 July 2024 (UTC)
 * If sources don't describe gender-critical feminism as having "a coherent ideological framework"
 * Sources do describe a coherent ideological framework, which this article obfuscates, relying as it does on a wide range of incoherent and contradictory critical sources, instead of neutrally appraising the subject. What's there is a total mess. Putting more international mess on top of a mess isn't helping.
 * Gender-critical feminist sources are very consistent about what they believe. Critics, however - as I've shown many times here - are all over the map. Critics seem to believe they are right wing and far right and racist and white supremacist and biological essentialist, both for thinking that sex and gender are the same and for thinking that sex and gender are different.
 * This is all a result of the twin failings of a) wrongly dismissing genuinely high quality sources by the subject of this article as WP:FRINGE and downplaying or ignoring them, in favour of b) relying heavily on hyperbolic and opinionated opposing academic sources to conflate the insult "TERF" with "gender-critical feminism" and thus bring in even more incredibly tenuous sources and specious allegations. Frankly, this article goes to such lengths to avoid being "gender-critical feminist" WP:ADVOCACY it has gone the other way. Void if removed (talk) 08:24, 17 July 2024 (UTC)
 * Agree and I don't think this helps our readers understand what GCF is. If people want to read rants about hateful TERFs are, there's a whole internet. -- Colin°Talk 09:58, 17 July 2024 (UTC)
 * Well, the problem is that those academic sources that harshly criticize TERFs are the ones who most accurately describe their actions and views... Reprarina (talk) 12:06, 17 July 2024 (UTC)
 * It may be that the actions and views they describe are correct, but I don't know and we don't have any way to check. I don't think for a moment these "academic" sources have any journalistic fact checking capability to go interview the accused and check they really said or did what is claimed. It's just a Daily Mail opinion column printed on nicer paper and with some fancy words. Don't know how this meets "reputation for fact checking and accuracy" vs "a place for random feminists to post things" that is only a RS for what that particular feminist thinks. But the thing they seem to get wrong, repeatedly, is grouping any anti-trans female into the TERF bucket which editors here then group into the GCF bucket. I don't think that works or is helpful to any side. And then recently we get silliness of adding in "pro Russian invasion of Ukraine" as a GCF belief. Perhaps some GCFs hang their toilet paper the wrong way round, and we should mention that too. Colin°Talk 13:07, 17 July 2024 (UTC)
 * I've removed the latest two opinions on Russia and Korea. We need more than just an opinion piece in each case to establish there is anything worth including on Wikipedia. Random people don't magically become notable and worth citing just because you like what they say. WEIGHT for a paragraph of text really needs multiple sources when as non-obvious as this. Also the guff about supporting the Ukraine war is just plain embarrassing. Colin°Talk 18:57, 17 July 2024 (UTC)
 * Don't confuse facts and opinions. The fact that the Womenation group supported the invasion of Ukraine is a fact noted in the academic literature and therefore significant for Wikipedia. More significant than the facts reported by the conservative British press. Russia and Korea should remain in the article, albeit with little cited sources, because the article is about a global phenomenon and should not focus on the UK. Reprarina (talk) 06:32, 18 July 2024 (UTC)
 * These assertions directly contradict WP:SCHOLARSHIP, part of the reliable sources guideline which is backed by longstanding, community-wide consensus.
 * Anyways, I've added those sections back, because they were just created, cite reliable sources (which are not opinion pieces), and have potential to be expanded with more reliable sources. The United States section, which has existed for far longer, has fewer sources. PBZE (talk) 09:24, 18 July 2024 (UTC)
 * Wrt Reprarina, I'll take your word for it about the fact that a group of people in Russia (or at least some members of that group) supported the invasion of Ukraine. But given that Reactions to the Russian invasion of Ukraine says 74% of Russians support this war, my question is why on earth is that support worth singling out this group about? I assume one could make the case that Russian football players support the war in Ukraine. Russian chefs. Russian maths teachers. Are you going to go to our articles on teaching maths in secondary schools and add the "global" information that in Russia the maths teachers support the war in Ukraine. The war in Ukraine is nothing to do with Gender Critical Feminism. This is madness.
 * Of course is the audience for this "academic" paper is people who want another reason to hate TERFs. It so so so awful that I don't really know why you think it helps your case. Anyone sensible reading that will facepalm and think well if that's the level of "throwing random shit at a subject I hate" that's gone into this page, why read any of the rest of it. If you fill this article with "100 reasons TERFs are awful people" and in fact only 4 or 5 are really important, then all those other 95 reasons you found by Google will only weakens things. People will see 95 pathetic reasons and forget there might be a few really important ones.
 * Wrt PBZE, you haven't demonstrated WP:WEIGHT, which is core policy, so ask you please to self revert until you have established a weight of sources (plural) think these matters worth reporting, or consider the author themselves so weighty on the issue of Russian/Korean TERFs that every utterance is worth repeating here. That your sources are reliable for their author's opinions is merely a necessary and very insufficient condition for including them.
 * That the issue really is a global phenomenon seems to be regularly disputed on this page by people saying its is a British fringe movement. So which is it? Would you stick "global phenomenon" in the lead? We all would like articles to have global considerations but it is a common failing in many topics and the lack of good sources in many countries is not a reason to exempt the issue from our core policies. We don't fill our articles with random musings about Russian and Korean TERFs just to fill this aim. That aim is very very secondary to our core policies. Colin°Talk 13:49, 18 July 2024 (UTC)
 * But given that Reactions to the Russian invasion of Ukraine says 74% of Russians support this war, my question is why on earth is that support worth singling out this group about? Because Russian TERFs supported the invasion unlike Russian intersectional feminists who found the anti-war organization Feminist Anti-War Resistance. Reprarina (talk) 14:13, 18 July 2024 (UTC)
 * And by "TERFs" what you mean is the radical feminist website Womenation, which this opinionated source calls "TERFs" and "SWERFs". These are not coherent ideologies, this is simply using derogatory epithets.
 * Per this source:
 * Or this source:
 * And according to this they are no longer in operation:
 * And the website is now a landing page.
 * And the quote is on an anonymous social media account.
 * So what this is is a non-notable author sounding off about a defunct radical feminist group blog which has an anti-pornography stance the author disagrees with, based on an anonymous russian social media account.
 * This is not WP:DUE for an article on "gender-critical feminism", and I wholly support the removal of this content. Void if removed (talk) 14:53, 18 July 2024 (UTC)
 * It's your opinion. And I think that this is a normal academic author, writing in the same vein as highly cited authors. And I will stand in this position. It is better to exclude those sources that contradict highly cited academic sources. Reprarina (talk) 15:09, 18 July 2024 (UTC)
 * Yes, I'm aware that Holly Lawford Smith et al. have attempted to articulate a coherent ideological framework for gender-critical feminism in their writings. We do, in fact, describe their writings in this article. The point is that when other sources don't mention their writings, or criticize them, we aren't obligated to contort our coverage to fit within those writings. Hence, we aren't obligated to "describe a coherent ideological framework" throughout this article, except for where the relevant sources do, and with due weight.
 * These "critics" make up a vast majority of the academic scholarship covering this topic, and therefore must be given the corresponding due weight. Your personal opinions aren't policy-based objections.
 * Please enlighten us as to which reliable sources by the subject of this article aren't currently being used in this article, in such a quantity that they should shift the balance of perspectives that this article currently has under WP:DUE.
 * If you truly believe this article needs so much rewriting from the ground up, I kindly suggest that you create a draft in your userspace, where it's not disruptive to remove or replace large amounts of sourced material. Then you can try to get consensus here that your version is an improvement. PBZE (talk) 19:52, 17 July 2024 (UTC)
 * These "critics" make up a vast majority of the academic scholarship covering this topic
 * No, they make up a big chunk of the academic scholarship of different topics (trans studies, gender studies), which are inherently antagonistic to this one. Due for criticism, but not for defining the subject. The first five citations backing up the opening sentence are like this, and there's no justification for it when better sources exist. The way the lede is structured and cited is like citing Jordan Peterson on Marxism and having the first sentence of the lede be something like "Marxism is a failed ideology that wrongly believed the proletariat was good and the bourgeoisie was evil". Void if removed (talk) 11:15, 18 July 2024 (UTC)
 * I agree that DUE needs here to be nuanced into what sources are good and reliable for defining GCF and what sources are good and reliable for expressing the wider opinions of it/them within feminism and more generally still. -- Colin°Talk 13:51, 18 July 2024 (UTC)
 * These "different topics" you mention happen to be incredibly varied, including not only trans studies and gender studies, but also (from the article's reference list) [//doi.org/10.1080/07491409.2023.2193545 women's studies], [//doi.org/10.1177/2158244020927029 philosophy], [//doi.org/10.1177/0038026120934713 sociology], [//doi.org/10.1080/07491409.2023.2193545 communications studies], [//doi.org/10.1007/s10612-021-09590-0 criminology], [//doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4419750 law], [//doi.org/10.25024/kj.2021.61.4.75 Korean studies], etc., and various intersections of these fields.
 * Nowhere does the WP:NPOV policy say that a group of reliable sources collectively hold a lesser weight if they belong to the same "topic". This is a ridiculously high standard, especially because gender studies itself is an incredibly broad, interdisciplinary field. I kindly ask you to not smear such a wide range of academic scholarship.
 * If we were to apply this standard consistently, the sources by gender-critical feminists would all occupy one very niche, non-reputable "field", if one can even call it that.
 * Nowhere does the WP:NPOV policy say that different sets of sources, just because they are opposed to each other, must be given equal weight. It explicitly rejects this argument in WP:BALANCE.
 * The sources need to be equal in prominence. Again, please enlighten us as to which reliable sources by the subject of this article aren't currently being used in this article, in such a quantity that they should shift the balance of perspectives that this article currently has under WP:DUE. PBZE (talk) 20:40, 18 July 2024 (UTC)
 * Please enlighten us as to which reliable sources by the subject of this article aren't currently being used in this article, in such a quantity that they should shift the balance of perspectives that this article currently has under WP:DUE.
 * If you truly believe this article needs so much rewriting from the ground up, I kindly suggest that you create a draft in your userspace, where it's not disruptive to remove or replace large amounts of sourced material. Then you can try to get consensus here that your version is an improvement. PBZE (talk) 19:52, 17 July 2024 (UTC)
 * These "critics" make up a vast majority of the academic scholarship covering this topic
 * No, they make up a big chunk of the academic scholarship of different topics (trans studies, gender studies), which are inherently antagonistic to this one. Due for criticism, but not for defining the subject. The first five citations backing up the opening sentence are like this, and there's no justification for it when better sources exist. The way the lede is structured and cited is like citing Jordan Peterson on Marxism and having the first sentence of the lede be something like "Marxism is a failed ideology that wrongly believed the proletariat was good and the bourgeoisie was evil". Void if removed (talk) 11:15, 18 July 2024 (UTC)
 * I agree that DUE needs here to be nuanced into what sources are good and reliable for defining GCF and what sources are good and reliable for expressing the wider opinions of it/them within feminism and more generally still. -- Colin°Talk 13:51, 18 July 2024 (UTC)
 * These "different topics" you mention happen to be incredibly varied, including not only trans studies and gender studies, but also (from the article's reference list) [//doi.org/10.1080/07491409.2023.2193545 women's studies], [//doi.org/10.1177/2158244020927029 philosophy], [//doi.org/10.1177/0038026120934713 sociology], [//doi.org/10.1080/07491409.2023.2193545 communications studies], [//doi.org/10.1007/s10612-021-09590-0 criminology], [//doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4419750 law], [//doi.org/10.25024/kj.2021.61.4.75 Korean studies], etc., and various intersections of these fields.
 * Nowhere does the WP:NPOV policy say that a group of reliable sources collectively hold a lesser weight if they belong to the same "topic". This is a ridiculously high standard, especially because gender studies itself is an incredibly broad, interdisciplinary field. I kindly ask you to not smear such a wide range of academic scholarship.
 * If we were to apply this standard consistently, the sources by gender-critical feminists would all occupy one very niche, non-reputable "field", if one can even call it that.
 * Nowhere does the WP:NPOV policy say that different sets of sources, just because they are opposed to each other, must be given equal weight. It explicitly rejects this argument in WP:BALANCE.
 * The sources need to be equal in prominence. Again, please enlighten us as to which reliable sources by the subject of this article aren't currently being used in this article, in such a quantity that they should shift the balance of perspectives that this article currently has under WP:DUE. PBZE (talk) 20:40, 18 July 2024 (UTC)
 * Nowhere does the WP:NPOV policy say that different sets of sources, just because they are opposed to each other, must be given equal weight. It explicitly rejects this argument in WP:BALANCE.
 * The sources need to be equal in prominence. Again, please enlighten us as to which reliable sources by the subject of this article aren't currently being used in this article, in such a quantity that they should shift the balance of perspectives that this article currently has under WP:DUE. PBZE (talk) 20:40, 18 July 2024 (UTC)
 * The sources need to be equal in prominence. Again, please enlighten us as to which reliable sources by the subject of this article aren't currently being used in this article, in such a quantity that they should shift the balance of perspectives that this article currently has under WP:DUE. PBZE (talk) 20:40, 18 July 2024 (UTC)

I support Colin’s edit of 18:49 17 July 2024, which deletes material which is obviously UNDUE. Sweet6970 (talk) 14:22, 18 July 2024 (UTC)

Favaro - Let us be free from 'academentia'
A recent publication from Laura Favaro - currently mentioned in this page for taking UCL to a tribunal over the cancellation of her research - writing about that cancelled research: https://revpubli.unileon.es/ojs/index.php/cuestionesdegenero/article/view/8259/6813

Not sure how much of this might be usable, but its another source for the "gender-critical feminists say sex and gender are distinct, Butler says they are the same" narrative, and that the dispute from their POV is about the shift in academia to gender studies as a focus, and away from sex-based feminist analysis.

Opposing camps here both claim to be "real feminists", and that the "other side" aren't feminists. Void if removed (talk) 16:36, 12 July 2024 (UTC)


 * This is a paper that uncritically cites that particular BBC article and an article from spiked for evidence. It also uncritically uses the term trans identifying males, and believes that queer theory will lead to encouragement of pedophillia. I think the only thing we can use this for is to cite how far Favaro is in the fringe. LunaHasArrived (talk) 09:20, 13 July 2024 (UTC)
 * Yeah, how dare she use terminology that reflects her beliefs instead of yours, and choose to listen to sources you dislike? That proves she's fringe! &#42;Dan T.* (talk) 21:42, 15 July 2024 (UTC)
 * How does your comment aim to improve the article page?
 * I'd also say that these sources aren't simply ones I dislike but widely criticised sources (one has its own Wikipedia page because it was that notably bad). LunaHasArrived (talk) 22:56, 15 July 2024 (UTC)
 * "We're being pressured into sex by some trans women" The article page in question for clarity sakes. LunaHasArrived (talk) 22:59, 15 July 2024 (UTC)
 * Are you saying this source might be useful for some kind of history or development of GCF beliefs? It may be if you think they are an accurate and fair description of how they came about and aren't just a primary source for the author's own wild ideas. Would any of that history/development be disputed by other GCF or other feminists? I think if the author is relying on poor sources for certain arguments, as Luna points out, we can't regard them as reliable on those areas and it does raise questions about their reliability more generally.
 * Luna, that the author believes the wrong things or uses the wrong language isn't relevant wrt whether they are a reliable source on what GCF believe or how GCF came about. Nor can we actually use an author's own writings to "to cite how far Favaro is in the fringe". We need secondary sources for that. -- Colin°Talk 09:41, 13 July 2024 (UTC)
 * Yes your right, we can't use this to show that Favaro is fringe on the actual wiki page. I also agree that due to the nature of the source that without other sources agreeing we probably shouldn't use anything from here. Honestly void where would you actually want to use this source in the article and what would you want to cite it for. LunaHasArrived (talk) 09:52, 13 July 2024 (UTC)
 * Not especially, it isn't an authoritative source - I just note in passing that it is just more corroboration for the perspective laid out in "Sex and Gender" and "Gender Critical Feminism" and others that GCFs consider themselves feminists of a fairly classical sort, adhering to a pretty bog-standard sex-based class analysis (sex is material and gender is socially constructed), and that they consider themselves in conflict with a largely post-90s shift away from women's studies in academia to gender studies, typified by Butler (sex and gender are the same socially constructed continuum).
 * However we have a section on academic freedom that mentions Favaro, and her (cancelled) research consisted of interviews with academics across all sides, so there's some potentially useful tidbits referenced here. Eg.
 * I wonder if its worth adding a sentence or two to that section based on this, expanding on that particular aspect. Void if removed (talk) 15:21, 13 July 2024 (UTC)
 * I think your phrasing "that they consider themselves" is key and helps avoid problems with having to decide who's version of events wrt history and shifts is correct.
 * I'm not sure what tidbits you want to extract here. We already, as you say, have two paragraphs on Favaro and her research interviewing academics and her being cancelled. I don't think WEIGHT would allow us to select her own cherry picked quotes from her own research. While you say they interviewed all sides, these are all quotes that conveniently align with the case she wants to make. Nobody is quoted about how relieved they are that so-and-so left, or that they roll their eyes every time someone blames the academic "Thought Police" while reading Telegraph articles about how some Tory MP wants to ban gender ideology from schools, etc. It seems, like so many things on all sides of this war, to be research designed to be eagerly quoted and credulously repeated by one side, and mocked as hopelessly biased and written with All The Wrong Words by the other side. Would be better to have more independent secondary sources on this, and alas if such are lacking then there is a limit to what we can say. -- Colin°Talk 10:16, 14 July 2024 (UTC)
 * All fair points. TBH, I'm mostly disappointed that we likely won't get any quantitive research out of this now. Void if removed (talk) 16:19, 14 July 2024 (UTC)
 * A footnote there (footnote 25 on p. 668) gives some commentary on the term "TERF", which has been under much debate in this talk page:
 * &#42;Dan T.* (talk) 21:39, 15 July 2024 (UTC)
 * We have a separate page on TERF (acronym). If you believe this adds anything whatsoever, do so there. LunaHasArrived (talk) 22:50, 15 July 2024 (UTC)
 * We have a separate page on TERF (acronym). If you believe this adds anything whatsoever, do so there. LunaHasArrived (talk) 22:50, 15 July 2024 (UTC)