Talk:bigenital surgery

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Latest comment: 1 year ago by ExcarnateSojourner in topic RFD discussion: March–April 2023
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Real?[edit]

Is this an actual medical procedure or at least a hypothetical-sometime-in-the-near-future-with-advances-in-medicine kind of procedure? Two out of three of the cites are, to put it mildly and succinctly, not reliable sources of factual information. If this is only a proposed procedure, or a made-up attack helicopter-type meme, the definition should frame it as such. WordyAndNerdy (talk) 03:47, 6 March 2023 (UTC)Reply

RFV discussion: November 2022–March 2023[edit]

The following information has failed Wiktionary's verification process (permalink).

Failure to be verified means that insufficient eligible citations of this usage have been found, and the entry therefore does not meet Wiktionary inclusion criteria at the present time. We have archived here the disputed information, the verification discussion, and any documentation gathered so far, pending further evidence.
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As of writing, this phrase has 35 hits on Google, although if you go to the second page the number changes to 16 (apparently the remaining results are omitted due to being duplicates). One use is in Vice, which counts toward attestation per the recent poll. (The article also uses the phrase "bigenital procedures", as well as the misspelling "bigential".) Two uses on Twitter, and a few more on reddit and tumblr. If we're being very generous about online sourcing, then this could pass, but we've failed terms with many, many more online hits (as one random example, amogus). It seems that this term has picked up steam lately, although there's a reddit comment from a few years ago that used it too, so maybe we'll see this make its way into magazines, books, and journals. 98.170.164.88 09:28, 18 November 2022 (UTC)Reply

 cited, looks like a hot word. Ioaxxere (talk) 01:33, 23 February 2023 (UTC)Reply

RFV Passed. Ioaxxere (talk) 04:43, 3 March 2023 (UTC)Reply

WordyAndNerdy retagged/reopened this, and I second that. For one thing, we need to figure out the definition. It's currently defined as a real thing, but two of the cites are unreliable websites for whom this is something of a boogeyman (rather than a real procedure), like chemtrails, where the definition conveys who uses the term by ending ", according to certain conspiracy theories." Does this procedure exist? What proportion of references to it are neutrally theorizing or reporting on it vs scaremongering, and how can that best be reflected in the label or definition? - -sche (discuss) 06:22, 6 March 2023 (UTC)Reply
I opened an RfD nomination for bigenital surgery on account of there being no Google Books, Google Scholar, Internet Archive, or Issuu hits for the phrase, and only minimal and low-quality general Google hits. My hasty assessment based on the Vice article and the Nonbinary Wiki is that there are a small number of trans folk who've undergone specialized GCS where they retain part of their "factory-default" genitals. For AFAB people, this mostly seems to mean metoidioplasty without vulvectomy or scrotoplasty, and for AMAB people it seems to mostly mean vaginoplasty with orchiectomy but not penectomy. The Vice article makes it clear such procedures are uncommon and not universally supported within the trans community. I think we should be cautious not to bake binarism into entries concerning non-binary identities and expressions. At the same time, I think we should be doubly cautious to avoid propagating trans-antagonistic hoaxes, however unintentionally, in a climate where they are being uncritically reported by the media. I'm skeptical of this term's validity given it has almost no hits on Google and was created by the banned editor User:Correctiontape1. WordyAndNerdy (talk) 08:52, 6 March 2023 (UTC)Reply
I don't see the problem with documenting a hoax as long as the definition makes it clear that it's a hoax. Compare vitamin B17. Binarystep (talk) 21:50, 6 March 2023 (UTC)Reply
Please review CFI... The latter two sources do not pass CFI, you know this already. Reopening RFV. I've been warning the rest of y'all. AG202 (talk) 15:14, 6 March 2023 (UTC)Reply
FYI this is the equivalent of linking to white supremacist websites for quotes (and the latter one is a straight up fake news website). And there's no Usenet excuse this time, as these sources blatantly do not pass CFI. AG202 (talk) 15:17, 6 March 2023 (UTC)Reply

Yeah, I agree with what's been said here. I put the term into Google and found three "news sites" reporting on this and added them uncritically. In the future I'll be more careful. Since only the VICE quotation is "durable" this clearly fails. Ioaxxere (talk) 18:10, 6 March 2023 (UTC)Reply

Yeah, I was about to say, and will still say for the record: I believe that the quotations of the other two sites were supplied in good-faith believing that they were real news sites and were using the term; not everyone has background knowledge of the reputations of every site or time to evaluate them in-depth, and I don't think we do or should ask people to read through the entirety of every book they pull a quote from, or e.g. spot-check and fact-check articles from every seeming news source to see if they're hoaxers, even if this might be an ideal best practice, since we're all volunteers with limited time and the main thing (sufficient in many cases) is determining whether the work uses a certain word to refer to a certain thing. So while there were serious problems with this closure, they've now been addressed, and I think much of what's happened here could be viewed as the process (of multiple volunteers collaborating) working: one person makes what they judge is the right decision in a number of cases (closing multiple RFVs), and other people chime in to modify the decision if they know or see something the first editor didn't in some of those cases. (While there are things Ioaxxere and I have different ideas about, I guess I'm just not as rankled by the concept of one editor closing a bunch of RFVs as some people clearly are, since they can always be reopened like this, even after archiving if serious flaws or new evidence comes to light. But since people clearly are rankled by it, and things like this do happen, it does seem reasonable for Ioaxxere to slow down, and ideally for the rest of us to step up and help cite or judge / close more RFVs.) - -sche (discuss) 21:34, 6 March 2023 (UTC)Reply
I generally agree with this, though tbh I was able to see that the news websites were problematic by just clicking on the link in the quotes themselves which pointed to Wikipedia (or I googled them, I don’t remember exactly). I hadn’t heard of them before but it took like 15 seconds max to see that they were a problem. I absolutely did not have background knowledge or read them in depth, and I think that we can expect people to do the bare minimum when it comes to these types of things which I think Ioaxxere has agreed to anyways. AG202 (talk) 02:52, 7 March 2023 (UTC)Reply
Yes, I don't think a quick background check on a news source is equivalent to reading through an entire book for context and the like, it's something I do as a matter of course when I add citations from a news source I'm unfamiliar with—at minimum to make sure it's an admissible citation—and also something I would expect other editors to do when adding and checking citations for purposes of attestation. I agee this was in good faith but it's something to bear in mind for the future. —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 03:14, 7 March 2023 (UTC)Reply


RFD discussion: March–April 2023[edit]

The following discussion has been moved from Wiktionary:Requests for deletion (permalink).

This discussion is no longer live and is left here as an archive. Please do not modify this conversation, but feel free to discuss its conclusions.


The Vice article is solid but the other two provided citations (The Post Millennial & Natural News) are not reliable sources of factual information. The phrase "bigenital surgery" gets zero hits on Google Scholar, Google Books, or the Internet Archive. It gets a grand total of 10 hits on Google. One is the Vice article and two are from the most rancid anti-trans hate site in existence. It returns only three hits on Reddit. "Non-binary bottom surgery" does seem to be something a limited group of people have sought (as documented by the Vice article) but there is very little to suggest this phrase has any meaningful currency anywhere. WordyAndNerdy (talk) 06:13, 6 March 2023 (UTC)Reply

Shouldn't this be on RFV? Binarystep (talk) 06:47, 6 March 2023 (UTC)Reply
It's already been through RfV. But two out of three citations providedd are completely insufficient for supporting the existence of this term and its given definition. Additionally, it is unlikely that sufficient alternative citations can be found, given this gets no hits on Google Scholar, Google Books, or the Internet Archive, and almost non-existent hits on Reddit. If this were a legitimate medical term for a procedure or class of procedures it would have hits on Scholar. WordyAndNerdy (talk) 06:59, 6 March 2023 (UTC)Reply
As an aside bigenital seems attesable from Google Books. WordyAndNerdy (talk) 07:16, 6 March 2023 (UTC)Reply
The RFV should not have passed. I've reopened it and commented there. This is exactly the type of behavior I've been warning about, but unfortunately I do not have the time to go through every entry that's been created. I would've commented earlier had I seen it in realtime. AG202 (talk) 15:19, 6 March 2023 (UTC)Reply