Talk:Sexuality

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Contents 1 redirect 2 Transsexuality 3 Suggestion 3.1 Facets of Sexuality

[edit] redirect

In my opinion it is absolutely ridiculous to have this redirect to human sexuality. Have we decided that animal sexuality is a completely irrelevant subject? --Daniel C. Boyer 16:33, 3 Aug 2004 (UTC)

This page got vandalized, revert.

However, I would say that there are several more links intended for Human sexuality than Animal sexuality. Mynameisnotpj (talk) 05:08, 17 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Transsexuality

Removed link to Transsexuality. Despite word ending, transsexuality is a gender identity and NOT a sexuality (note its absence from the article on Sexual Orientation). The "sex" in "transsexual" refers to gender, not sexual attraction; its closest related sexuality/sexual philia is autogynephilia, which is not the same thing at all. Surprised that this appears to have gone unnoticed for so long. Thysien 16:18, 29 October 2006 (UTC)

I've re-added in See also section with context. If it was added once its value and inclusion seems worthy of a short explanation and mnany probably need to learn the distinction. Benjiboi 10:09, 1 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Suggestion

There is a clear need to discuss, so let me start it by offering this version [1] as a base point because it contains lines that everyone agrees are needed. I suggest that extra lines are entered only when consensus is reached here. Abtract (talk) 10:11, 28 April 2008 (UTC)

Fair enough... let me start with the easy one:

Plant sexuality, sexual reproduction systems found across the plant kingdom

We know that the user got to the page because they typed in "sexuality". We are almost certain that in the vast majority of cases, they mean human sexuality (whatever that entails), but we do have articles discussing sexuality of animals and plants, and the reader could be looking for those.

By the way, all respect to PamD, but I think linking the Animal sexuality (even though it is a redirect) is better, because of the general line of thinking of MOSDAB when it says "a redirect term will sometimes be preferred to a direct link, if the redirect term contains the disambiguation title and the redirect target does not" (even though that quote is referring to piping).--Marcinjeske (talk) 10:52, 28 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Facets of Sexuality

• Sexual orientation, classification of sexual attraction
• Gender identity of a sexual being, as in transexuality
• Sexual identity based on sexual characteristics of an organism
  • Intersexuality, having biological characteristics of both sexes

—from the article

Yeah, so then there is the confusing trifecta of sexuality describing an orientation, or a psychological gender, or a biological gender. Yes, although less common than in the human sexuality sense, all three can be referred to as sexuality. Some usage examples:

• Orientation - "He prefers to keep his sexuality private. He did not like to discuss his homosexuality."
• Identity - "She asserted her sexuality by refusing to wear a dress. She was discovering her transexuality.[2]"
• Biology - "The sexuality of the specimen was ambiguous. It was intersexual."

I can't help that these are discussed in separate articles, or that we don't know which one the reader is thinking of... now, we could get off easy by saying that they are all covered by human sexuality, but the truth is that:

• they are barely touched on in that article: "Gender identity is a person's own sense of identification as female, male, both, neither, or somewhere in between." and the article does not discuss the biological characteristics of sexuality at all.
• they are not human specific... yes, it feels silly to talk about a sheep's gender identity (and even more so for a plant), but at least for animals orientation and gender identity do matter - the concepts are discussed in Wikipedia and 'sexuality' is used in that context. And sexual characteristics-related sexuality matters for all organisms which use sexual reproduction.

Now, I agree that that my attempts at entries for these three concepts are subprime... I tried to buffer that by including the reference to specific types of the "sexualities" to provide concrete examples to guide the reader to the correct one - but it does endanger the disambiguation quality of the page. So, are we in disagreement on whether these three concepts should be disambed here, or is the wording the more troubling aspect? (oh, and don't forget to say hi over at Talk:Nostradamus).--Marcinjeske (talk) 11:23, 28 April 2008 (UTC)

If you don't mind me saying so, there is a danger here of confusing disambiguation wuth dissertation. The purpose of this dab page is to help readers find the article they want, having first typed in "Sexuality". If we could limit ourselves to that, we might advance faster. I can see how plant sexuality works in just the same way as animal and human, and I have added it accordingly but the others seem more about concepts than disambiguating; I just didn't get your reasoning. Abtract (talk) 12:15, 28 April 2008 (UTC)

The Wikitionary entry suggests that "Sexuality" has a load of different meanings for different potential readers ... but we've got a link to the Portal where all is included (one hopes). I have no strong views about all this (beyond trying to make sure that the reader gets to what they want to find, as Abtract says) (and I can't remember what led me to this page in the first place). Doing a WP search on "sexuality" suggests that it might be appropriate to also include links to Child sexuality, Adolescent sexuality, Transsexual sexuality and a few more, as being subdivisions of the main topic. PamD (talk) 12:35, 28 April 2008 (UTC)

I definitely agree that the goal of the disambiguation page is direct readers who having first typed in "Sexuality", are looking for one of the many articles on sexuality. (The portal link does help in this respect.)

• On the one extreme, we could just have the Portal:sexuality and be done with it... I feed confident that they could eventually find everything they need, although technically speaking, it is the Human sexuality portal.
• On the other extreme, we could link to every article including the word sexuality or even related to sexuality and be done with it. Wouldn't that be a fun list.

I think we all agree that both extremes are ridiculous. when I look at a dab page, I try to ensure that for every reasonable encyclopedic use of that title, there is a fairly obvious choice in the list. If you view the target articles as trees, you can see that most of the topics people are looking for are related to human sexuality (that's why I moved it to the top of the list).

• The vast majority of sexuality-seeking readers will have humans on their mind, and the reader is aware that if they want to know about adolescent sexuality, they mean humans. So all the articles relating solely to human sexuality can be represented on the dab with one link. So while the dab page used to have a whole list of human sexuality topics, I think they were removed for a good reason. (Yeah, the male and female sub-links are still there... I did not feel bold enough to remove them... as for some reason previous editors treated them special.)
• Some seekers will mean the sexuality of non-humans. (note to self: must resist creating an article for extraterrestrial sexuality)
• Then there are several concepts often called "sexuality" which are not exclusive to one type of sexual being, and have distinct article covering them (in the sense that there is no obvious parent-child relationship between gender identity, sexual orientation, and Sexual_dimorphism/Sex (found this to possible be a better article to start on... though it does not link to intersexuality).

I realize that the disambiguation is unclear when the article we point to does not include "sexuality" in the title. Essentially, we are combining what should be a disambiguation and a redirect into one step. The three topics are referred to as sexuality in common usage in sources.

• Sexuality (gender) - please see Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality as an example of usage.
• Sexuality (orientation) - please see WebMD article on Sexuality: Sexual Orientation as an example of usage.
• Sexuality (biology) - please see this NIH article for use of biological sense, such as that sexuality “goes beyond the components of sex and represents the continuously variable suite of traits that emerge during the organism's lifetime" or Evidence for Sexuality in the Opportunistic Fungal Pathogen (Kingdom Fungi, I believe).

Sexual Orientation is an enduring emotional, romantic, sexual or affectional attraction to another person. It is easily distinguished from other components of sexuality including biological sex, gender identity (the psychological sense of being male or female) and the social gender role (adherence to cultural norms for feminine and masculine behavior).

Is this any help at all.... or am I still not grasping the nature of your concern? --Marcinjeske (talk) 22:12, 28 April 2008 (UTC)

My main concern is that this dab page doesn't become a copy of List of human sexuality topics and that it conforms with mos:dab. Your thoughts about Sexuality (gender), Sexuality (orientation) and Sexuality (biology) was a good one ... why don't you create pages for redirects to the articles that you think should be included but whose titles don't sound as though they should be? I have done the obvious one to show you what I mean. :) Abtract (talk) 22:50, 28 April 2008 (UTC)

Hmmmm.. how did those redlinks slip in there... :) - great, I will redirects... I changed biological to biology because that is the overwhelmingly more common dab phrase used for other articles. I am going to start with the redirect to plain Sex, since I can't quite nail down where it best belongs:

• Sex-determination system - "in some arthropods, sex is determined by infection, as when Bacteria of the genus Wolbachia alter their sexuality" (ain't it cool!)
• Sexual dimorphism - which just focuses on male/female diffeences
• Sex covers the foundations of what sexuality means in a biological sense, and has a good section on Sex#Sex_determination.

So any other DAB pages where I can complicate things? :) --Marcinjeske (talk) 23:23, 28 April 2008 (UTC)

Looks fine - I don't usually like seeing redirects from dab pages, but in this fraught case they seem useful. PamD (talk) 07:00, 29 April 2008 (UTC)

---

At the danger of leaving well enough alone... would there be a strong objection to either of the following:

• Moving the three redirect entries (Sexuality (biology), Sexuality (gender), Sexuality (orientation)) up out of human sexuality. As I said above... they are not exclusive to humans... particularly the biology one, and probably the orientation one... gender is the one that is most questionable.. but even there we have a tiny bit of discussion on gender research done on animals. So I don't want to have the dab page imply that these are solely related to humans.
• The other thing is the choice of removing the descriptive text. The previous phrases may have been unnecessarily extensive, but the bare links leave something to be desired. Per WP:MOSDAB#Individual entries:

Entries should nearly always be sentence fragments. Even when the entry forms a complete sentence, ....
The description associated with a link should be kept to a minimum, just sufficient to allow the reader to find the correct link.

I realize that nowhere does the style guide explicitly recommend descriptive text, but it assumes and implies descriptive text over and over. In this case, given the wordage we expended talking about this stuff, I would hope brief descriptions to help a reader understand which link they want would be in order. --Marcinjeske (talk) 00:27, 1 May 2008 (UTC)

Maybe the best way is to avoid second levels altogether as I have done now. If you feel descriptive words are helpful in dabbing then go for it but don't put them in just for info. Abtract (talk) 00:35, 1 May 2008 (UTC)