Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Gayphobia

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was Move to Discrimination against gay men. Consensus seems to be to merge or move to Discrimination against gay men. But that has been a redirect to Outline of LGBT topics#Anti-LGBT topics since 2014. I interpret this as consensus to keep the article at issue here and move it to Discrimination against gay men, overwriting the redirect. I'm actually not sure that this is what most here had in mind, but if not, editors are free to treat this AfD as "no consensus" and start a new AfD. Sandstein 19:26, 13 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Gayphobia[edit]

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The conversion of this redirect to an article is being disputed and has been reverted several times this week. It has been cited as a content fork (from homophobia?) although there appears to be zero content related to this term anywhere in Wikipedia. Until today, the word didn't exist in any place except this redirect. Now it is in two templates but not apparently wikilinked from anywhere else, so I have my doubts how notable it really is. Certainly the word exists and has been in use in some circles for a decade or so. Lithopsian (talk) 15:50, 5 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Keep per WP:GNG. The term is well-defined within both the fields of queer theory and LGBT history. It has received significant coverage in reliable secondary sources, including academic monographs, federal-level government documents, and LGBT-related terminology guides. The umbrella term homophobia in an academic sense includes lesbophobia, gayphobia, biphobia, and transphobia, as well as acephobia and other -phobias related to LGBT-identity. The creation of an article (using the litany of well-sourced materials currently available) on gayphobia is no more of a WP:CFORK than articles on these other topics. Louisianajones1978 (talk) 16:13, 5 March 2021 (UTC) Changed vote. See below.[reply]
Keep WP:WINARS. I think the fact that both this term and the actual material phenomenon of specifically anti-gay male violence have been studied in peer-reviewed academic journals and books is more important than the fact that it's not featured in other Wikipedia articles. Jpesch95 (talk) 16:33, 5 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Discrimination-related deletion discussions. Shellwood (talk) 16:42, 5 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Sexuality and gender-related deletion discussions. Shellwood (talk) 16:42, 5 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]

~~Keep~~ Move (per discussion below to Discrimination against gay men). When I redirected the page to Homophobia this was poorly sourced (including mostly dictionary definitions and a source to an employers EDI statement!). The sourcing is still not great and I'm concerned about potential WP:SYNTH violations, as many sources refer back to the Homophobia term. Clearly a person who is gay is not necessarily a man, and this remains a synonym of Homophobia (and is stated as such at wiktionary). But any confusion there can be addressed by the hatnote. On balance I no longer believe this to be a WP:CFORK. Polyamorph (talk) 21:07, 5 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Delete. This is a WP:CFORK of Homophobia. What little most of the sources say on 'gayphobia' is not significant coverage of gayphobia as a distinct topic rather than a mere definition of a neologism. See WP:NOTDICT and WP:NEO. This is a WP:PRIMARY study, not a secondary source. Anyone who asserts this is an encyclopedic separate topic is welcome to post WP:THREE. Crossroads ^-talk- 05:26, 6 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]

1. "There is very clearly a difference in mechanisms between gayphobia and lesbophobia, and this translates into different types of aggression. Where the collective imagination over-sexualizes gay men and exerts strong verbal and physical violence against boys and men who are not considered sufficiently masculine / heterosexual; for women, on the other hand, the assertion of their lesbian identity will be further disqualified, minimized, reduced to a fad, or even sexualized as a prelude to heterosexuality." Pride march: 'Lesbians are not necessarily found in the speeches of many LGBT associations'

2. "Gayphobia is a form of homophobia that specifically affects men. Although it is primarily aimed at gay and bisexual men, it can also affect heterosexual men who are perceived as homosexual. Gay men may be targets of physical aggression or devalued by stereotypes linked to feminisation and hypersexualisation." 2020-2023 National Action Plan to Promote Equal Rights and Combat Anti-LGBT+ Hatred and Discrimination

3. "However, parallel to this semantic broadening, there has been an inverse movement of lexical differentiation operating at the heart of the concept of homophobia. Because of the specificity of attitudes towards lesbianism, the term lesbophobia has been introduced into theoretic discourses, a term which brings to light particular mechanisms that the generic concept of homophobia tends to overshadow. With one stroke, this distinction justifies the term gayphobia, since much homophobic discourse, in reality, pertains only to male homosexuality. Similarly, the concept of biphobia has also been proposed in order to highlight the singular situation of bisexuals, often stigmatized by both heterosexual and homosexual communities. Moreover, we need to take into consideration the very different issues linked to transsexual, transvestite, and transgender persons, which brings to mind the notion of transphobia." The Dictionary of Homophobia: A Global History of Gay & Lesbian Experience Louisianajones1978 (talk) 13:33, 6 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Delete this POV shit. It's a WP:NEO violation. RandoBanks (talk) 10:32, 6 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Reading some of the policy pages, this term isn't even in the sources. Page is a big WP:Synthesis clusterfuck. Our Homophobia page is enough. RandoBanks (talk) 10:37, 6 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Note — RandoBanks (talk • contribs) has made few or no other edits outside this topic. Polyamorph (talk) 13:00, 6 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Yep, and readers can also look at my contributions and see that I came to this page after rolling back this goof up. I'm not here because of some underhanded scheme, like Polyamorph is implying.— Preceding unsigned comment added by RandoBanks (talk • contribs)

Ok, so just to be clear. Your claim is that a term which has been in circulation for over a decade, used in federal documents from both the U.S. and French federal governments, described in peer-reviewed academic studies, defined at a semantic level by queer theorists and gender historians, and used colloquially in journalistic pieces... is a neologism? WP:NEO points clearly to WP:PSTS, which tells us: "Wikipedia articles should be based on reliable, published secondary sources and, to a lesser extent, on tertiary sources and primary sources." This article has a combination of all three. I think it's a good idea to address any potential issues regarding WP:SYNTH, but at its core, this article is an overdue companion to the other LGBT-related phobias included under the umbrella of homophobia. Louisianajones1978 (talk) 14:38, 6 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]

It's a WP:NEO violation, and we wouldn't need it even if it wasn't one. — Preceding unsigned comment added by RandoBanks (talk • contribs)

Delete or Merge to Discrimination against gay men (per discussion below) – this is a vogue word of French origin (coined by fr:Daniel Welzer-Lang, afaict) that achieved some usage in English, mostly in translated works, but never really caught on. In google ngrams, the term does not register at all. (Compare with ngram results for some other rare terms.) In books, of the top 10 most relevant results for the term, only 3 unique results actually contain the term (1. Kirst-Ashman (2013), 2. Tin (2008)-a French article by Guillaume Huyez, quoting five footnotes, all French; and 3. "Out" mag (Jun 2005)-a quotation by Anne Roiphe). It's telling that result #6 is there because it's another "Out" volume that indexes the same Roiphe quotation as #3. (The fact that Google books includes two magazine results in the top ten, is a very strong indicator that results in actual books are almost non-existent.) Result #7 is a false positive—it does indeed contain the word, but as one of the "wrong answers" in a multiple-choice quiz question about "prejudice towards homosexuality". Three results in books is an incredibly low bar, and you can find all sorts of dreck that have three results in books but don't deserve their own article at Wikipedia; pussy phobia (4 results), fagphobia (5), and so on. It's a little harder to pick out the exact count of academic articles that use the term, but looking at the top 10 results in Scholar, there seem to be less than ten results with the term, because normally you wouldn't get three "citation" results in the top ten, unless the term was practically non-existent. In the seven results that are articles containing the term, I see Italian journals or with Italian authors (two), Indonesian (two), leaving three English; #2 is by co-author D Welzer-Lang (French, the coiner), #3 is by C Fraïssé (French?), and one possibly original English article (TF Reed, 1989; 1 citation to it). This is underwhelming, as evidence for the term. On the web, the top ten results for the query gayphobia -wikipedia shows mostly definition pages and Wikipedia mirrors; result #10 (indiegogo) is about Uganda. However search aficionados will know that the "20,100" hit count listed on search page one is a relevance tally that doesn't mean the pages actually contain the term; to see the actual number of pages containing it, page forward to result page #10 and you will see that there are actually about 94 pages on the web with this term. That is an incredibly small number for the internet; most misspellings have more than that (homopobia has 163). The internet is a big place, it's not hard to find a few dozen examples of your favorite word, no matter what it is. Plus, in the academic world, it's a crowded, publish-or-perish field; you can't blame somebody for trying a neologism to see if it catches on. Usually they don't, and this one clearly did not. Wikipedia is not an indiscriminate collection of everything findable on the internet; that said, if this word starts to gather legitimate references in scholarly articles (in English), or in books (in English), or on the web in reliable, non-SPS sources, then it could be considered for inclusion. But it falls far short of that standard in 2021. Mathglot (talk) 19:48, 6 March 2021 (UTC) updated by Mathglot (talk) 17:28, 9 March 2021 (UTC) per discussion below[reply]

Comment: WP:NEO says instead of using a neologism, it's "preferable to use a title that is a descriptive phrase in plain English if possible, even if this makes for a somewhat long or awkward title." Seems like the original point of this article was to describe homophobic discrimination against gay men, analogous to lesbophobia for lesbians. Probably most people could agree the topic is notable (something like a third of the countries in the world which bar homosexuality singularly ban male homosexuality 1). Maybe best course of action is to WP:MOVE what is salvageable from this article to "Homophobic discrimination against gay men" or something like that, with Gayphobia as a redirect to that page? Garcia1865 (talk) 21:59, 6 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]

That's a sensible suggestion.Polyamorph (talk) 22:17, 6 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]

No objection here, either. Or just shorten to "Discrimination against gay men", as the homophobic might be redundant in that context. To the extent that the gay- prefix of gayphobia is supposed to indicate men only, then another alternative might be "Antigay sentiment", unless in that form it might be ambiguous whether it was supposed to include women or not, and just seem like a synonym for homophobia. (Then again, not sure why that same objection does not apply just as well to the term gayphobia; or maybe it does?) An advantage of that term, is that it already seems to be used quite a bit (see search results in web, books, academia). Another advantage might be, that there are quite a few articles already entitled "Anti-FOO sentiment"; usually with a country or ethnic FOO, but I think it's the same general idea. See also, List of anti-cultural, anti-national, and anti-ethnic terms, although that list doesn't include gender/orientation terms. Mathglot (talk) 22:43, 6 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@Mathglot: Anti-gay sentiment visually looks great and, you're right, it does provide a neat uniformity with other "Anti-FOO sentiment" articles, but to be honest, I'm concerned its general usage broadly does seem to refer to anti-LGBT sentiment. To your first point, I do agree that "Discrimination against gay men" is less redundant than "Homophobic discrimination against gay men." Garcia1865 (talk) 23:07, 6 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Garcia1865, yes, I'm concerned about it too, for the same reason you identify. It's ironic, because the gayphobia term should be subject to the exact same objection; maybe it isn't, though, because sometimes language works in funny ways. But we shouldn't forget that English Wikipedia attracts lots of foreign visitors, and even if our native competence in English might suggest that Antigay sentiment is ambiguous while some other "gay-something" is men only, we can't expect ESL speakers to figure out such subtleties. Whatever term we come up with, it should be something that is clear to someone who speaks some English but is not necessarily perfectly fluent in it. Mathglot (talk) 00:05, 7 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Mathglot, completely agree. It’s additionally hard because gay in Spanish and French already refer exclusively to gay men, whereas in English gay refers to both men and women, so I feel the title should either have the word "man" or "male" if the term gay is also used. We could go along the lines of "Hostile prejudice" with something like “Gay male prejudice”? It’s not quite as punchy as a term like gayphobia but not as clunky as “Discrimination against gay men.” Garcia1865 (talk) 01:43, 7 March 2021 (UTC) Perhaps not, maybe "Discrimination against gay men" makes the most sense.[reply]

Merge: Well, if there are no other suggestions for an alternative title, this article should be merged with the current redirect page "Discrimination against gay men." Gayphobia, per the wiktionary definition, should be set as a redirect to this new page. Garcia1865 (talk) 16:19, 8 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Merge/Move: to Discrimination against gay men. Louisianajones1978 (talk) 14:07, 9 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Merge this FORK to an appropriate target. Bearian (talk) 18:42, 10 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.