Talk:Gender-affirming hormone therapy

Wiki Education assignment: Information Literacy and Scholarly Discourse

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 3 June 2024 and 24 July 2024. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Jaylak33 (article contribs). Peer reviewers: Dayxna7.

— Assignment last updated by Leslie.dicharry (talk) 22:21, 23 June 2024 (UTC)

Requested move 15 July 2024

• Transgender hormone therapy → Hormone replacement therapy (transgender)
• Hormone replacement therapy → Hormone replacement therapy (menopausal)

– It has become clear that the current article at Hormone replacement therapy for menopausal application does not qualify as a clear WP:PRIMARYTOPIC after reviewing of page navigation flows for Hormone replacement therapy, Hormone therapy and Transgender hormone therapy. An outsizedly large amount of traffic that currently navigates straight from Hormone replacement therapy to Transgender hormone therapy, since HRT is also referred to for it (as outlined in the lead of the article), or to the current disambiguating article Hormone therapy, which combined account for 30% of the navigation from the current HRT article. So I propose that Hormone replacement therapy doesn't have a clear primary topic and as such we should rename the two articles to both use "Hormone replacement therapy" (or HRT in short) as their WP:COMMONNAME with the specific application in parenthesis. And then turn the current "Hormone replacement therapy" into a simple disambiguation page, or redirect it to Hormone therapy (which kind of already acts as a disambiguation page, as also shown from the traffic of the hat note). Raladic (talk) 20:21, 15 July 2024 (UTC)

I note you've listed this shortly after I pointed out here that your rewording on that article didn't match the source or the WP:COMMONNAME.

A quick google shows that the clear primary topic of "Hormone Replacement Therapy" is menopause. Everything in the top 20 results is menopause.

Eg:

https://www.nhs.uk/medicines/hormone-replacement-therapy-hrt/

https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/treatments/15245-hormone-therapy-for-menopause-symptoms

https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/menopause/treatment/

The first that does mention for transition is this, which this says:

Hormone replacement therapy (HRT) is a treatment doctors may recommend for managing menopause symptoms such as hot flashes and night sweats. It helps balance estrogen and progesterone levels. However, HRT may not be safe for everyone. Also known as menopausal hormone therapy, HRT can help relieve sweating, hot flashes, and other symptoms of menopause. It can also reduce the risk of osteoporosis.

Further down, under other uses of sex hormones it says:

A doctor may also prescribe different types and combinations of sex hormones for: birth control, low blood testosterone levels, a transition from the sex assigned at birth, prostate cancer

This is a passing mention. Nobody calls birth control HRT.

Your renaming is unnecessary and not supported by sources. That some people incorrectly call gender affirming hormones "HRT" does not make it the primary topic, when menopause is something that affects half the species. Void if removed (talk) 21:23, 15 July 2024 (UTC)

There is nothing incorrect, when people use the term HRT for transgender application and there is plenty of reference to it, both in medical and popular use.

We have policies on Wikipedia on article titling, and as I outlined above, Primary Topic is one such policy and deals with the question of what do users come to for Wikipedia when they are looking for something. Based on that and the nav flows, it has become clear that a large amount of users are expecting to land on Transgender hormone therapy when they were searching for Hormone replacement therapy or HRT.

"a quick google search..." is not a policy based factor in determining whether a topic at a current article title is a WP:PRIMARYTOPIC or if there is too much ambiguity, then we instead turn it into disambiguating terms for all applicable terms that go by the same name, such is the case here, since even currently the Transgender hormone therapy article is already also clearly having HRT as one of the 3 primary terms that it is referred to. Our primary topic policy has two very clearly defined points and in this case in particular, the current article is failing WP:PT1 as 30% of the traffic is going straight from the current article to where they actually wanted to navigate to as I outlined above.

Language evolves and Wikipedia as an encyclopedia is trying to name articles based on policies, which are informed by what users most likely are searching for, which is why we have countless articles with (disambiguations) when multiple articles use the same common term as the most common shared search term. Raladic (talk) 21:36, 15 July 2024 (UTC)

I've now checked the WPATH SOC8 - they use "hormone replacement therapy" when referring to replacing endogenous hormones for someone who has eg. undergone a gonadectomy.

Everywhere else they stick to eg. gender-affirming hormones. This rename is going to introduce significant confusion.

Also - not sure how you're getting "30% of the traffic is going straight from the current article to where they actually wanted to navigate to as I outlined above."

From my reading of those page flows the vast majority of people looking for HRT end up on the HRT page and that's it, because that's the page they were looking for. Meanwhile some 13% of the traffic for Transgender hormone therapy comes via Hormone replacement therapy. WP:PRIMARYTOPIC seems pretty clear from those.

The point of the google was you're answering a WP:COMMONNAME question too. HRT overwhelmingly refers to menopause, while for this subject "gender-affirming hormones" or "gender-affirming hormone therapy" are more common names and, if anything, that's what this page should be renamed to. Void if removed (talk) 21:46, 15 July 2024 (UTC)

Agree with @Void if removed. These are two different and very distinct indications with different effects and different side-effects and harms for entirely different cohorts. A woman looking for information on HRT (which I suspect would be by far the majority) would not expect - and could be extremely confused by - an article that also talked HRT being prescribed for transgender patients. Keep them separate. Zeno27 (talk) 22:35, 15 July 2024 (UTC)

I agree with Void and Zeno27 – I oppose the suggested moves. Sweet6970 (talk) 22:48, 15 July 2024 (UTC)

Oppose – just to make this clear. Sweet6970 (talk) 13:47, 16 July 2024 (UTC)

• Support-ish: I do support something like this, but I'd suggest instead changing hormone replacement therapy into a broad-concept article, and moving the article for menopausal HRT to menopausal hormone therapy. Loki (talk) 01:06, 16 July 2024 (UTC)
• Strong Oppose: For the above stated reasons. WPATH make a clear distinction between GAHT and HRT, and the present article fails to make this clear. HRT arguably shouldn't even be in the lede, as usage of these two distinct treatments as synonyms is an obvious misnomer, per the best available MEDRS. And the supplied evidence doesn't demonstrate any WP:PRIMARYTOPIC confusion, but simply demonstrates that the overwhelming majority of people looking for "hormone replacement therapy" end up on the right page, ie relating to menopause, a subject of relevance to vastly more readers. Void if removed (talk) 10:36, 16 July 2024 (UTC)

Support, HRT is still the terminology most often used, and it’ll be more recognizable to a lay reader. Snokalok (talk) 17:59, 16 July 2024 (UTC)

Oppose - Hormone replacement therapy gets double the pageviews of Transgender hormone therapy. A significant minority of users ending up at Hormone replacement therapy erroneously is a problem that I believe should be solved with the redirect HRT (transgender), as this is likely due to Transgender hormone therapy not showing up when "HRT" is typed into the search bar. Flounder fillet (talk) 18:32, 16 July 2024 (UTC)

HRT/GAH in WPATH SOC8

@Raladic I ask you to self-revert this: https://en.wikipedia.org/enwiki/w/index.php?title=Transgender_hormone_therapy&diff=1234735329&oldid=1234734920

The current section misrepresents the source, and your edit comment is not responsive to mine. The section in question says:

The WPATH Standards of Care, most recently published in 2022, outlines a series of guidelines which should be met before a patient should be allowed transgender hormone replacement therapy

But then goes on to list the criteria for what SOC8 describes as "gender-affirming hormone therapy". This is a misrepresentation of the source because at no point are what's described here criteria for "hormone replacement therapy" which, in SOC8, is something completely different. Despite your edit comment, the terms are not at all synonymous in SOC8.

By a rough count, SOC8 says "gender-affirming hormones" or some variation thereof 4-5 times as much as "hormone replacement therapy", and the two are not used interchangably, but to refer to different things.

All of the latter that I can see are referencing gonadectomies, eunuchs etc. The use case described is, eg. in the case of a male who has had a gonadectomy, to replace the body's endogenous testosterone. Void if removed (talk) 22:16, 15 July 2024 (UTC)

At present, the article says "hormone replacement" in five places:

• The lede (not directly sourced, but lede follows body)
• WPATH SOC (misrepresents the source wording, where what is referenced is gender-affirming hormone therapy)
• Accessibility (three times - two unsourced, one where the source actually says "cross-gender hormones")

I have now corrected the WPATH reference and accessibility reference to use the actual wording from the sources, and expanded the explanation under the WPATH section. Wrongly paraphrasing MEDRS like this is confusing, and conflates different treatments. Void if removed (talk) 10:47, 16 July 2024 (UTC)