User:SMcCandlish/TG-NB

I'm very sorry – of course – that what I wrote in a crappy humor essay was seen as hurtful to anyone. I should have been more sensitive to the possibility that it would be, in ways counter to the intent of the material. Allowing it to be reused in Signpost was a very bad idea, though other editors should not be blamed for what I wrote.

Newimpartial smartly summarized [1] that,

per CIVIL, we are responsible for what we actually say, not simply for what we intend. In fact, as a best practice, we ought to imagine what the impact of our remarks would be on a highly sensitive person whom we love, who is temperamentally unable to let go of an issue, rather than placing the burden on our interlocutors to "just get over" the unintended consequences of our own utterances.

This is very well said, and speaks directly to how I erred.

However, individuals who are still falsely stating that I am, or the material is, "transphobic" need to stop smear-campaigning and trying to reignite strife about a matter the community has already settled and moved on from.

Since it looks like I'll be attacked with socio-politically motivated distortions of my positions on transgender, non-binary, and genderqueer (hereafter TG/NB/GQ) people until the end of time, I should probably spell out my actual views on TG/NB/GQ matters relevant to Wikipedia, and collect diffs that demonstrate them in application (and how consistent they've been for years). It gets tiresome to correct and refute false claims about this stuff manually, over and over again.

It will also probably be useful to lay out the entire history of the underlying community debate and the essay behind it, in FAQ form. I'm not going to do that as a "diff farm", since a lot of people probably don't want their usernames dragged back into this (and the community does not want the Signpost page prominently made visible).

My actual positions on transgender/nonbinary/genderqueer matters

Note: New RfCs are held about the finer points of these questions all the time; if this list needs updating, let me know. Last substantively edited: 07:50, 3 December 2020 (UTC).

My views on this are the views of the Wikipedia editing community consensus, as on any style matter. Even if I disagreed with any of the principles below in my private, off-site life (and I do not), I would not bring that preference onto Wikipedia as something to "lobby" about, must less just "impose until I win or get banned". I'm a staunch opponent of abuse of Wikipedia as a soapbox for any reason.

• Transgender, non-binary, genderqueer, and other labels do not translate into lack of individual identity, socio-political viewpoints, or preferences. One size does not fit all. Avoid making blind assumptions about encyclopedia subjects instead of doing actual source research, and avoid making assumptions about TG/NB/GQ Wikipedia editors, too. That includes even presuming they agree with your desire to label them with specific terms like transgender.
  • For an example of this problem in action, see Talk:Transsexual#Requested move 23 November 2020[2] [which may later archive to Talk:Transsexual/Archive 9 or Talk:Transsexual/Archive 10] in which various busybodies are – in the midst of a discussion about WP:NOUN – trying their best to deny that transsexual[ity] is even a valid term any longer, and should just merge to transgender, despite unequivocal sourcing that many people specifically identify as transsexual, and that both they and much of the academic literature draw a distinction, either versus or with the TS category as a more specific subset of the TG one. This kind of "WP must reflect my personal dogma or else" agitation is not okay.
• Do not use "deadnames" that pre-date the period of the subject's notability (or, at all, those of non-notable people mentioned in articles), nor use them in contexts in which they are not chronologically appropriate. A very widely reported birth name of a trans celebrity is already part of their notabilty-sphere data. (Notability isn't determined by editorial fiat, but by non-trivial coverage in multiple, independent, reliable sources.) A notable trans subject's "dead" birth name that someone somewhere managed to dig up, but which is barely ever mentioned in reliable-source coverage, is not encyclopedic material, especially if the subject is still living.
• Wikipedia does not misgender people. Doing things like rewriting a transman's article to use "she" because you feel people born biologically female should be referred to this way despite their gender identity, is disruptive. If you keep doing it after an initial warning, you can be sure that you will be blocked.
• Wikipedia should use the real-English pronouns the subject prefers. We accept self-published material from the subject as reliable sourcing for this.
• Singular-they is a now-standard approach to gender-neutral writing. While it has existed since Early Modern English, it is only in the 21st century that major style guides have finally stopped excoriating it, and mainstream publications frequently started using it. Since the late 2010s, the general Wikipedia consensus is that it is both permissible, and should be used when helpful.
  • It is useful: a) for persons who prefer that as their pronoun; b) as a generic gender-neutral singular pronoun (e.g. where gender of the person is just unknown); c) for nonbinary/genderqueer subjects for whom a preference cannot be found in reliable sources; and d) as a real-English substitute for neologistic pronoun replacements in the idiolect of subjects who use one of those.
  • However, it is often better to write around any need for a pronoun in a particular sentence, when possible, to avoid overuse of singular-they or unclear uses of it.
• When the above do not work for a particular sentence, the usual practice is to repeat the subject's surname. Excessive use of this can make the prose a bit tedious, so applying multiple strategies in the same article is common.
• Good writing is never casually confusing, especially just to make an extraneous, grandstanding point. For a dissonant construction like "He gave birth to his first child in ...", do not engage in cyclical philosophical arguments about this; just rewrite around the problem ("His first child was born in ..."). Everyone here has better things to do, and Wikipedia is not a social networking site for "the sport of debate" or building up friends lists of like-minded culture-warriors.
• Wikipedia does not rewrite history. For example, if it's a list of Olympic men's-event medalists, use something like "Caitlyn (then Bruce) Jenner").
• Wikipedia does not use idiosyncratic, neologistic pronoun substitions (zie, hirm, etc.) in Wikipedia's own voice. It's perfectly fine (and often encyclopedically necessary) for WP to note in a bio that a subject uses such a term or set of terms in their own life and writing. But thereafter, we return to one of the strategies mentioned above for writing around the problem in encyclopedic prose.
  • Wikipedia is not a soapbox for advocacy of any kind, as a matter of clear policy. This includes language-reform activism, which in turn includes PoV pushing to try to force a Wikipedia article to use a subject's invented neo-pronoun.
• Wikipedia does not go along with absurd, cynical claims and PR stunts just because they involve pronouns.
  • As an example, actor/singer Keiynan Lonsdale once stated his "preferred pronoun" is tree, in an interview in which he also claimed his sexual preference and gender identity varies on a daily basis according to mood, and other implausible nonsense. Even his own public-relations people have ignored this (which appears to be blatant exploitation of TG/NB/GQ concerns to get attention); they continue to refer to him as he, as have the media. Wikipedia is under no obligation to even mention this at our article on this person (unless multiple, independent, reliable sources provide significant coverage of it – which if it happens will probably be negative coverage for generating controversy by offending actual TG/NB/GQ people), much less refer to him as tree when we write about him. (See [3].)
• On language usage matters, Wikipedia is written following its own internal WP:Manual of Style (MoS), and reflects real-world usage norms in formal English writing. MoS is based on the leading style guides for academic book publishing (not journalism, not entertainment, not marketing, not particular academic journals, etc.). These are primarily Chicago Manual of Style, New Hart's Rules, Fowler's Dictionary of Modern English, and Garner's Modern English, plus Scientific Style and Format (on some more geeky points). MoS also has a few rules that are due to technical reasons. MoS is written and maintained by editorial consensus, not "rulebook thumping" about anyone's personally preferred off-site publications.
  • Until real-world usage of the majority of reputable publishers (and the above-mentioned style guides they depend on) reflects a nascent usage change, Wikipedia will not use it either. This is not a position or an opinion, it's just a statement of fact about how WP operates. This is why WP was comparatively slow to accept singular-they. There is no anti-trans conspiracy in this; WP just slowly adopts changes that reflect reality, rather than the project trying to defy or change it.

Quotes and diffs demonstrating them in action

I just now started this, and am not going to work on it intensively, just add pertinent quotes and diffs here as I run into them while doing other things.

[T]his has been a matter of fairly frequent discussion over the last couple of years here, on various talk pages (including Talk:Rose McGowan and Talk:The Matrix Revolutions, among many others): The transgendered and non-binary are not some hive mind. They're individuals with highly variable preferences. We have a serious problem with language reform activists (most of them not TG but self-styled "allies", and often criticized by actual TG people as terrible allies) constantly making one-size-fits-all assumptions and demanding that WP editors write the neologistic way the activistic like. We are finally getting pretty close to acceptance of singular they, and I think that's about as far as it'll go. We do need strategies for referring to non-binary subjects, and those for whom current gender identity isn't well-sourced. But it's not going to be with pseudo-pronouns like e and s(h)e.
 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  18:20, 28 February 2019 (UTC)

WP shouldn't "ignore" trans/non-binary people with [personally invented, not-real-English] neo-pronouns (or ignore their neo-pronouns, rather), if reliable sources tell us what that preference is with sufficient frequency about that individual that we're certain it's worth mentioning as a sourced fact in the article about them. We simply shouldn't use those terms in Wikipedia's own voice. ... The reason to not do so is essentially the same as the reason to not append or prepend religious honorific stylings, spell Kesha as "Ke$ha" to mimic her marketing, render Sony as "SONY" to match their logo design, or do any similar things: It's a WP:NPOV and WP:NOT problem, and thus also against the WP:MOS provisions derived from those policies, e.g. MOS:TM, MOS:DOCTCAPS, MOS:BIO, etc. ... [H]aving a blanket approach to all of these matters is sensible and will continue and isn't an evil. ... There are about 1.5 billion English speakers; they cannot all be satisfied about anything, ever.
 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  20:46, 2 March 2019 (UTC)

Some related life experience

I was born in the late '60s. I have been around the block. Even in a small and conservative town in the early 1980s, I had a transsexual friend, Mykal, known as "Miss Mykal" in drag performances. (And, yes, transsexual; the term transgender had virtually no currency in that era outside of ivory-tower journals, and Mykal would have rejected it.) I've known from my early teens (in an era when pretty much no one wanted talk about it) that such people exist, and take their sexual and gender identity for real, are not just roleplaying, and approach all the questions and issues about such matters individually. Mykal was "assigned male at birth", as Michael, but by this period (around age 20) had changed to a gender-indeterminate name spelling, worked as a quite convincing drag performer (and didn't use the term "drag queen", though wasn't angry about the term), had mostly various LGBTQ+ friends of all sorts (well, usually "GLBT" back then), and did not identify as gay male, despite being often labelled that way even by gay and lesbian friends (though they at least respected the she/her preference in direct address). She did not take stated offense at he/him, just made gentle corrections.

Mykal moved to San Francisco in the mid-1980s, to get higher-profile work and to seek hormone therapy and sex-reassignment surgery (and to, she hoped, get away from the risks of being herself in a small-town environment, safe at last in the "LGBTQ+ mecca"). During Fleet Week, she was murdered by drunk military "gay-bashers", her first year in town. I'm damned well aware of the seriousness of the hatred that can be turned against LGBTQ+ people, and toward trans individuals especially. I do not need anyone on this site to presume to "wokesplain" any of it to me, much less assume I'm ignorant about it, or callously uncaring.

I've spent much of my adult life in the San Francisco Bay Area. It's virtually impossible to do so without absorbing the Zeitgeist about LGBTQ+ matters (including how actually complex they are, despite attempts by "allies" to oversimplify them).

During a stint away from this region, I was captaining an amateur pool team, in the VNEA. In the US, pool-playing leans toward a male-, cis-, and hetero-chauvinist social scene – not out of malice, but simply demographics. It is improving, but only incrementally. One of my players was a transwoman. Our team did really well at the regional level, and we earned a spot at the VNEA International Championships in 'Vegas that year (2009, I think; I went to such events in more than one year). Poring over the various rules and regs, there was no answer anywhere to the burning question of whether my transwoman teammate would (in the singles events) be permitted to play in the women's division. I wrote repeatedly to the VNEA national office about this, and never received an official response. I was eventually told, very off-the-record, by one of the event organizers that it was basically going to come down to whoever was working the registration booth that shift, and if we didn't get the result we wanted, try again. It was clear that the organization was going to avoid putting anything in writing about this question for as long as possible, because they wanted neither negative press attention for being trans-hostile, nor internal drama among their player membership which was dominated by Midwestern and Southern rural-to-suburban conservatives. To this day, I don't know whether this has ever been resolved formally, though I would hope so (and in favor of an answer of yes, since pool is not a discipline in which biological sex makes any difference).

So, I also don't need any presumptuous b.s. from anyone on Pickyweedia here, falsely claiming I'm some kind of enemy to trans people or a blockader of their progress. That's insulting and frankly stupid: If you don't actually know anything about someone's real-world life, don't assume you do. "When you assume, you make an ass out of both u and me." My not agreeing with a linguistic activism point of dogma, from one faction of advocacy busybodies, mostly "allies" not actual trans people, claiming to represent (but badly over-generalizing about) one form of trans within the English-language segment of LGBTQ+ concerns, well ... it just doesn't make me "anti-trans", sorry. It makes me wisely resistant to an overly narrow and unreasonable form of PoV pushing about language-reform agendas that don't belong on this site (no matter what their topic is). Take that stuff to Facebook, and writing op-eds for Salon, and so on. This is not CrusadeForYourCausePedia.

FAQ on the essay behind all the disputation

"I saw someone on Wikipedia (or a WP criticism site) claim you're transphobic. Why?"

I drafted a half-baked humor essay that inadvertently offended some trans/nonbinary/genderqueer people (and others who do not identify as such but who are sensitive to issues surrounding that aggregate group). The piece was quite poor, and though it was not at all an attack on TG/NB/GQ people, I definitely should have expected it would be taken as offensive by some, for the simple reason that it used a pronoun as a framing device.

Part of how this happened is that I'm very difficult to offend. In all aspects of my life, if someone makes a joke about people who do/are/come from/are into/have a background in/are fans of/etc. X, where X is something that applies to me, I generally will not take offense at it, unless there's evidence that they meant it maliciously in general (bigotry), or knew it pertained to me and meant it as a barb (personal attack). I just don't get riled. I am not a thought-policer by nature, and my anthropology background makes me very socio-culturally relativist. Something like this happened just the other day [in 2020-11]; I thought it was amusing rather than offensive. Then it occurred to me: This can make it challenging to be fully alert to the possibility of others' offense at something I might say. It's not an empathy failure, but more of an empathy tangent; my "feels" are not running quite parallel to average (and are not very absolutist).

"What was the point of that essay?"

The intent of the piece was to use very exaggeratory humor to illustrate why Wikipedia is written in everyday, mainstream English, following what the vast majority of reliable sources are doing with regard to a particular topic, and does not bow to trivial marketing or aggrandizement demands made for commercial, political, religious, organizational, subcultural, classist, or even simply egotistical reasons. Well, not in "Wikipedia's own voice". It addresses PoV-pushers trying to get Wikipedia to use fake words, strange epithets, over-stylization of monickers, and other non-encyclopedic monkeying with the language to push one agenda or another.

A Wikipedia article will proper note in passing, as a primary-sourced fact, that the singer-songwriter Kesha, for example, likes to spell her name "Ke$ha". But Wikipedia does not otherwise spell her name that way – not because we don't like her, but because very few independent, reliable sources do so, and because this quirk is not a central part of her identity or her public persona. Similarly, we don't write "macy^🟊s" or "SONY". Usually-unreasonable "style demands" run the gamut from capitalization quirks (the most common type), running words together, and symbol substitutions, to more unusual things like non-standard grammar, line-height changes, colorization, and so on. When an exception in "weird orthography" is made on Wikipedia for a particular topic (iPhone, DaimlerChrysler, Mötley Crüe, Deadmau5, k.d. lang), it's because a sufficiently large super-majority of sources spell it that way. I.e., most readers will expect it spelled that way.

Confusion about this stuff leads to surprisingly common, bitter, time-wasting disputes between editors, which basically always turn out with the same answers, but which recur nonetheless. An essay on the topic seemed like a good idea. Maybe one would be. But it sure as hell wasn't that essay.

"But I heard it attacks gender-neutral pronouns, and it advocates misgendering."

It does neither, at all. To the extent it is critical of anything pertaining to TG/NB/GQ issues in any way, it would simply reject the unreasonable expectation that Wikipedia use neologistic, idiolect pronoun replacements (e, zie/zir, s(h)e, hirm, etc.), in Wikipedia's own voice (i.e., beyond reporting the sourced fact that a certain person uses zie/zir). The essay didn't come up with this; it's simply how Wikipedia is written. The essay reflects (albeit rather confusingly) the reality of consensus on that point. (See also isolated cases of celebrities making absurdist pseudo-pronoun claims as public-relations stunts, e.g. here; that kind of exploitative "look at me!" nonsense is well within the essay's intended scope of criticism.)

It was not critical in any way of using any actual English-language pronoun, in the way preferred by our biographical article's subject (as reported in reliable sources, which is this kind of case can include self-published primary sources, e.g., a celebrity's blog or Twitter feed). It does not support at all the idea of referring to transwomen as "he", etc. It was simply about someone demanding unusual capitalization and grammar for aggrandizement reasons.

It was not against use of singular-they as a generic gender-neutral pronoun. Wikipedia, like other modern publishers, does this frequently, both when a subject prefers it, when we're uncertain, or when we need to use a pronoun but the subject typically uses an neo-pronoun in their own private life.

It was not mocking transgender people who do use neo-pronouns. What people do in their own lives is up to them, just fine, and something we'll document about them if they are notable and we have an article on them. Wikipedia not using neo-pronouns in "Wiki-voice" doesn't mean we're disrespecting anyone. Wikipedia is simply written in mainstream and rather globalized English for a broad audience. WP doesn't ever "lead the way" on style matters, we just do what mainstream, academic-register sources usually do (aside from variances we need for some internal technical reason). This is why WP was rather slow to adopt singular-they; we didn't do it until it was ubiquitous in mainstream media, and recommended in major off-site style guides.

"So, what went wrong?"

The first screwup: This was trivial in a sense, but could and should have been the end. Conceptually, the essay was just crap. It simply wasn't funny, or focused, or clear enough in its intent to even be interpreted as intended. It was a Stephen Colbert-style alter-ego thing, in which a fictionalized version of me was making all kinds of absurd demands. The general format of it could have made the point in a few lines, but it went on for dozens, obsessively. And it veered off-topic to unrelated stuff, like mocking dangerous cults, making pop-culture references, poking good-natured fun at particular rock stars, criticizing people who make legal threats and editors who try to mis-cite policies, and a dozen other things. And it was a bit mean-spirited; it's difficult to write a humor piece that exaggerates and mocks any tedious style foible without also seeming to personally mock the individuals advocating those styles. It was just a total failure. Then it got worse.

"Is this where the attack on transgender people comes in?"

No and yes. There is no attack on transgender people. There's definitely a clumsy insensitivity to them though. But, yes, this is where offense starts happening. The second, and main, screwup was deciding that the major theme throughout would be pronoun-based, though in a way totally different from TG/NB/GQ use: My alter-ego demanded to be referred to as It, with a capital I. As anyone familiar with gender issues knows, TG/NB/GQ people never do this (well, maybe there's a lone exception out there?). Rather, transphobes use it toward them as a slur. By turning this inside-out and positing a nut (the character pretends to be an alien space-god) who must be called It, this seemed surely clear enough that it wasn't about TG/NB/GQ people, and couldn't be.

Wow, was I ever wrong, actual intent notwithstanding. To some readers, it seemed that it "must" be intentionally mocking an actual NB/GQ character! That this space-cult leader considered "Itself" above all categorization (which seemed an easy way to introduce some jokes and points, about exceptionalism / special pleading that Wikipedia does not entertain in our content), it simply fed back into the problem, because ... that would mean beyond gender (agender, genderqueer), too, right? Or at least pretending to be, which to some might be worse.

While TG/NB/GQ people do not "wholly own" the entire subject of pronouns, there really is no other group for whom it is a sensitive topic (and for which they are sometimes verbally attacked or worse). There really is no way to turn this into humor that will not backfire, that will not "punch downward". That wasn't entirely clear to me at the time, though I had my misgivings. Various rewriting tweaks, including after the drama detailed below, didn't seem to get around this potential issue (because, I now understand better, there really is no way around it). And even with those tweaks it had a few other wording choices that could be seen as reinforcing an LGBTQ+ connection, despite there being no intent for there to be one.

I quickly realized the essay was junk (having multiple failures, not just this one) and pretty much forgot about it. It sat there in my userspace gathering dust. But I did list it on my essays page, because "it was there". Thus some people did find it, though very few. Of those who did, a few thought it was funny, a few thought it was offensive, and most just thought it was pointless. It's even possible that some who thought it was funny did so not because they got the actual intent of it but because they had anti-trans leanings, and thought the piece spoke to their viewpoint.

"And then it got worse, right?"

Lots. Screw up no. three, much later, but with dreadful fallout: One of the few people who ever noticed the page was a Signpost humor editor, looking for pre-existing humor essays to re-use in our internal e-newspaper. She proposed using it (probably because it was short, in total word-length). I remembered my misgivings that it might be misinterpreted. But the editor got what the actual intent of the piece was (somehow) and didn't think it would be misread. So, "Yeah, sure", I thought (or more like reacted rather than thought); I okayed it. I will regret that forever. So will she (more so, as you'll see).

In retrospect, there was a really remarkable coincidence: besides the humor editor, the main Signpost editor (in the publishing sense) at that time, and another editor there, too, also "got" the actual intent of the piece, and also didn't think it had much real potential to offend anyone. So, Signpost ran it, and rather prominently. For no clear reason, the main Signpost editor put the humor editor's name on it as well as mine (and in fact made mine secondary, as if I'd just done some minor tweaking on it, when I was in fact the author of the entire thing).

The negative reaction to its publication was immediate. It's not necessary to pore over it in great detail. The gist is:

• Multiple readers complained to WMF.
• A request was filed at WP:MFD to delete the Signpost article. Input was all over the map, from calls for indefinite blocks, to grandstanding about censorship. The discussion leaned toward inappropriateness of the material in a not-quite-official but still important and rather public-facing Wikipedia publication.
• Another request was filed at MfD to delete the original user-space essay. Responses there were also of all sorts, though the exact policy and community issues were a little different. The discussion tended more to focus on the actual meaning of the material, and the authorial judgment in writing it.
• Lots and lots of argument ensued about those requests.
• Various on-wiki calls for punishment were made, including at WP:ANI. These sometimes over-focused on the Signpost's volunteer editorial staff rather than on me, the primary author.
• Harassment of myself and at least the humor editor began off-site, including both at other WMF projects, and even some "try to get them fired from their real-life jobs" cancel-culture activity.

"What were the results? I mean the actual facts about them, not spin."

The resolutions and effects were mostly rather predictable:

• WMF, for the first time ever, refused to mention the Signpost's issue release in its announcements list on Meta.
  • This was not because they "deemed it transphobic" as some have falsely claimed, but simply because a sufficient number of complaints had been received from the community that WMF wasn't comfortable promoting that Signpost issue.
• WMF, ANI, and ArbCom took no action against me, any of the signpost editors, or anyone else, on any side of the dispute (including those who had violated various behavioral policies in the course of expressing their displeasure).
  • The entire episode was basically treated as the community flipping out briefly, but internally resolving it all before any administrative (in the broad sense) action was needed.
• MfD concluded to blank-out the Signpost article, but not delete it, much less revision-delete it. That version remains recoverable, by anyone, from page history, but cannot be viewed any other way. So, it has been removed, for most intents and purposes, from the Signpost back-issues archive.
  • Claims that it was "determined to be transphobic" or "ruled an attack piece" or "deleted as a policy violation" are false. It was determined that, because it fairly easily could be interpreted as offensive to TG/NB/GQ people, it was inappropriate for the "Wikipedia:" namespace and especially for Signpost, which serves as the community's internal newsletter. Signpost probably has a significant number of non-internal readers among the general public, such as journalists checking in for "what's happening" at the English-language Wikipedia, so "bringing the project into disrepute" was a serious and legitimate consideration.
  • It was not outright deleted for various reasons, including WP:Deletion policy nit-picks, a clear actual consensus against deletion, and the fact that the controversy was significant, with input from a large number of editors and debates of some potential future consequence (they would be rendered rather meaningless if the content behind the dispute had totally disappeared even for experienced editors who know how to use page history).
• MfD concluded with no action against the user-space essay.
  • This does not constitute a finding that the essay couldn't be taken as trans-offensive, much less that it was good. But it is a finding that the piece is not outright transphobic or otherwise an attack/hate piece, otherwise a violation of policy, or for any other reason subject to deletion, under the permissive standards for the user namespace.
  • Some suggestions for improvement of the material were made in the course of both MfDs, especially this one, and I integrated them into the user-space copy, but they really did not help much. It was "putting lipstick on a pig". The essay remains a failure, and no one should cite it as useful.
• There is no conflict between the two MfD decisions.
  • Both make it clear that piece was a bad idea which could easily be offensive to TG/NB/GQ people. Neither determined it to be "transphobic". The differences in the results are due to different rules for different namespaces, and strong community feeling about what should or should not be in its own internal newspaper.
• Hounding attempts at other WMF projects (e.g. to get involved persons "fired" from various volunteer roles) failed.
  • As with WMF's decision not to promote the availability of that issue of Signpost, WMF did not in fact find that anyone involved was a transphobe, had done anything transphobic, or violated any policy or the terms of use (ToU). It is not WMF's job to "cancel" people who have momentary lapses of socio-linguistic judgment.
  • Contrary to a few individuals' speculations, I have not received any kind of warning from WMF over this, nor has anyone else to my knowledge.
• The then-head editor of Signpost, as well as the deputy-head, and the humor editor, were left with little choice but to resign those roles. The community in the aggregate were at least as unhappy with the decision to run this in Signpost as they were with the actual content.
  • Signpost has been under new volunteer management since then, and is now much more editorially sensitive to whether any of its content is likely to offend.
  • Several editors' punitive calls to ban me or some of the other parties from ever (or for a long time) writing for Signpost did not gain any traction.
• The Signpost humor editor, because of the prominence of her name on the piece (someone else's decision, and despite having little to do with the content), received far more negative attention than was warranted (it all should have been directed my way, in my opinion).
• Attempts by one particularly incensed user to "go after" various of the involved editors in their real lives, like get them fired, were unfortunately partially successful.
  • The humor editor ended up having to resign from a position at a university, and I believe there has been worse fallout since then (though I have not pried about the matter).
  • These cancel-culture activities had no effect on me personally (my professional clients are not public knowledge, due to NDAs, so it is effectively impossible to write to or call my employers and try to get me fired).
  • The instigator of the off-site harassment was someone who has spent 8 of their last 10 years at Wikipedia subject to site- and topic-bans for personal attacks, PoV pushing, canvassing, and other disruption related to "human sexuality and gender, broadly construed", and is now subject to another indefinite T-ban (and a new block, as of 2020-11, for renewed attacks relating to this). They're subject to other restrictions at other WMF sites as well, and are on notice that a resumption of off-site harassment will result in a WMF Trust & Safety investigation request. The current restrictions are probably sufficient, though, and nothing (that I know of) is "in the works" to ban this editor completely.
• The community itself has generally moved past all this.
  • Editors understand that the piece was not a transphobic rant, simply bad humor and insufficiently sensitive to TG/NB/GQ concerns.
  • The project and even Signpost have not actually been brought into disrepute, despite off-site "meatpuppetry" canvassing at various TG/NB/GQ and LGBT+ Web forums.
  • All the involved editors, on any side of this old disputation, are focused on other, more productive things. (Well, with the apparent exception of the topic-banned party mentioned above.)
  • The community continues to internally wrestle with various questions relating to how we write about TG/NB/GQ subjects, and what internal rules we need regarding TG/NB/GQ editors (e.g. to handle transphobic editors pointedly refusing to use their preferred pronouns, etc.). These questions were not posed or solved by this essay or debate over it, but it seems likely that the size and heat of that debate has increased awareness of and intensity of feeling about these matters (which could have good and bad consequences, like more RfCs to answer the questions, but more heat than light during them).
• For my part, if anyone even cares, I have obviously become more sensitive to such matters in how I write.
  • My views on actual TG/NB/GQ and broader LGBTQ+ issues have not changed at all, since they were never "transphobic", "homophobic", or anything like that. (See top of this page for a summary of them.) I'm one of the main shepherds of MOS:GENDERID, MOS:DEADNAME, and the rest of our WP:Manual of Style, at which people too frequently want to make inappropriately trans-insensitive changes.
  • It is rare for an entire week to go by without at least one person verbally attacking me about this essay. This is a scarlet letter that will likely never go away, only fade a bit. I can live with that, and learn from it, and it isn't enough to sour me on continuing to volunteer at Wikipedia.
  • I am of course deeply regretful that it ever caused any sense of hurt to anyone. The fact that isn't not transphobic doesn't magically mean it can't be trans-offensive, and it obviously was the latter. I'll have to live with that indefinitely.

"Where is it? I want to see how bad it really is."

While you can dig up the Signpost version in page history if you really, really want to, please do not link to that version. The community consensus to blank it out was strong, and undertaken for solid rationales, which have not changed. The community does not want this available even as old back-issue archive material. Continually associating Signpost with that content is not helpful, because our e-news has been under all-new management since then, by editors who should not be subjected to guilt by association for decisions they had nothing to do with.

• The user-space copy is here.

I could have it speedily deleted by just slapping a {{db-user}} template on it, and did strongly consider doing so after the MfDs were over. In the end, I did not for several reasons: It provides a way to look at the material without tying it to Signpost forever and ever. The dispute about this material was significant, and would be rendered effectively meaningless if no one could easily see what it was about. And it serves as a useful cautionary tale: this is what not to do on Wikipedia.

If your purpose in looking for the above link is to go generate some new drama about it, please see the last sentences on this page first.

"Doesn't this just make you a worthless turd anyway?"

I would say "no", given that transgender and nonbinary people themselves can easily get attacked by their peers and supposed allies for using terms or phrases some of them are offended by, especially in these days of "cancel culture". Same goes for anyone using art to criticize transphobia or trans exploitation, if they don't do it in exactly the way that pleases certain people looking for offense where ever they can find it.

Case study 1

Please read the article "I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter"; this is the one about the short story, not the transphobic joke. Summary: Isabell Fall, a transwoman, wrote the story to "take away some of the power of that very hurtful meme" by subverting it. (The story is a near-future sci-fi piece about a cis-female military chopper pilot neurologically reprogrammed to identify as not just with her AI-enhanced helicopter, to be supposedly a better solider. If you like anthropological and psychological sci-fi that posits new frames of mind and relation, you'll probably find it a good read.) The story was examined carefully by, and revised in response to, pre-press trans sensitivity reviewers. Nevertheless, its publication resulted in the author, the publication, its editor, and even the concept of art for art's sake being subjected to a firehose of attack. This resulted in the publication retracting the story, at the author's request, "for her own personal safety and health". It also sparked discussion among arts critics and writers' organizations about increasing knee-jerk attempts to suppress art and thought.

In the end, this not only harmed a trans, minority author palpably, it also backfired for the trans-rights movement, due to both the Streisand effect and by turning more arts and media people toward suspicion of trans advocacy's motives, as being perhaps more censorious than liberating, more about indoctrination than tolerance.

Case study 2

This is also worth a look. Summary: Cyberpunk 2077 is a dystopian videogame that, like Blade Runner and most other works in the genre, is peppered with social criticism in the form of fictional advertising taken to a future extreme. The game features a soft-drink advert poster showing a very feminine except well-hung genderqueer figure and the tagline "Mix It Up". The art's designer specifically intended it as a critique of commercialized exploitation: "... this model is used – their beautiful body is used – for corporate reasons. They are displayed there just as a thing, and that's the terrible part of it." Nevertheless, game reviewer Stacey Henley responds: "While a cutting critique of queer commodification might have been part of the idea's nucleus, the outcome is a commodification itself, objectifying trans people as creatures of deviance, defined by their genitals and suitable only for sexualization or rejection." This attitude amounts to a declaration that using art to satirize simply is not possible if it happens to touch LGBT+ subject matter. (Henley's tagline is "Self appointed queen of the SJWs" [4], described by Washington Post as a "trans activist" [5].) She also declares the art part of "a history of transphobic incidents" and "pervasive, toxic attitudes that have long swirled around Cyberpunk 2077". But the examples provided are not of transphobia, but rather of wordplay and marketing that are simply going to seem trans-insenstitive to some (plus some guilt by association because Elon Musk's twitter account and that of the game company, CD Projekt Red (CDPR), have traded banter).

And it gets worse, so much worse ....

Henley is so sure of her own interpretation she goes on to verbally attack a cosplayer [a cis-female] for dressing as the character in the image, declaring: "If you're thinking perhaps the model was well-meaning, attempting to create a trans-positive cosplay, trying to further highlight queer commodification CDPR spoke of originally, or just a misguided ally who got it wrong this time around, I have bad (yet predictable) news for you." (The "evidence"? That the cosplayer disclaimed politicized intent, and once also made a balanced and true observation that other people than trans are subject to harassment and violence.) This smear-jobbing all seems familiar, doesn't it? What next? Is the writer (or social-media readers who follow her) going to attack professional drag performers (who very often are actually trans) for stereotyping and dehumanizing people of the supposedly opposite sex? Attack teens for dressing as other androgynous characters when that's the only way some of them are yet comfortable approaching their own gender identity? Attack manufacturers of strap-ons, and attack cis-women, including lesbians, who like them? At what point does this kind of "I know how you should approach sexuality and gender in your own life and mind better than you do yourself" in loco parentis nonsense end? As with the short-story example above, this stuff has real potential to backfire, to harm actual TG/NB/GQ people who do not fit the one-size-fits-all "culture wars" mold some activist wants to stuff them into. The writer then goes on about how the game should permit players to create trans characters and what a sea change this would be – thereby revealing a shocking ignorance of actual gamer culture for someone supposedly a specialist writer. Skyrim, the most community-modded game in history, and many others like the Fallout franchise, have been positively overflowing with player-made genderqueer characters for more than a decade. It's especially ironic that Henley's review is titled "It sucks that Cyberpunk 2077’s edgelord marketing worked so well", when it's those very "edgelord" gamers who are building these characters (no mean feat given the coding mechanics involved in hacking a game that was only engineered for a strict pair of exaggeratedly sexually dimorphic male and female 3D assets). Weirdly still, Henley later concedes in the same article that Cyberpunk 2077 character creator "doesn't tie gender to genitalia". (Then finds a way to continue gender-crit'ing the game anyway: "if you want to be referred to as a woman, you need to select the voice actor with a typically feminine voice". Oh, the horror. Modders will find a work around for that probably within the first month, given what Skryim modders have done with dialogue in that game.) Oh, and: "no one knows how well any of these controversial themes will be tackled in Cyberpunk 2077 itself". I.e., Henley has not even played demo and beta versions of the game, and published this "review of nothing but some marketing and online chatter" on 4 December 2020, only a couple of day days before professional reviewers got advanced copies and published actual reviews. Why?. The writer complains that CDPR's marketing "can ... form unbreakable bonds with a game they haven't even played yet." I think that's called projection; it's just that the bond here is a negative one Henley's formed, based on assumptions about content. It's strongly reminiscent of far-right religious groups' pre-release boycotts of The Last Temptation of Christ and many other films, without ever actually watching them, just based on hearsay and biased inference.

I half-predict that material from this ranty pseudo-review will actually find its way into Wikipedia's own article on the game, despite the obvious WP:UNDUE problems that would involve.

Some of CDPR's marketing and game-art decisions can reasonably be considered "mistakes", from several angles. But the implication that they're transphobic malice is way more than a stretch. That sure sounds familiar, too.

Back to the WP context

Everyone makes mistakes, including those of sensitivity judgment. A central Wikipedia behavioral, administrative, and wiki-cultural tenet is that we do not dwell forever on past transgressions, or make the bad-faith assumptions that our peers had the worst intentions, do not learn from their mistakes, or must be enemies of the project if they sometimes don't perfectly adhere to one's own sense of norms or decorum. Culture-warring activists misusing WP as aplatform for personal defamation are a toxin.

"Aren't you just making excuses and covering your ass?"

Quite the opposite. This page compressed to a sentence is: I regret that what I wrote was hurtful to anyone; I should have been more sensitive to the likelihood that it would be; running it in Signpost was a very bad idea; and other editors should not be blamed for what I wrote (though the individuals falsely stating that I am, or the material is, "transphobic" need to stop that).

I'm not coming from a "sorry"-because-I-got-caught position. I'm genuinely sorry that some people were offended by the piece. I'm not sorry that my failure to do so has led to and will continue to lead to (honest, accurate) criticism in my direction. It's okay that my ass cannot be covered. We learn from our mistakes not our successes.

Importantly, what I have written in this page in late 2020 is consistent with what I wrote during the community conflagration about the Signpost piece when it was new, in early 2019. E.g:

... I have not denied any responsibility for what I wrote. I've already revised my userspace copy to remove various "trigger terms". I've consistently (on all these pages, and at ANI) denied that [the Signpost humor editor] had anything to do with the actual content – it's 100% me. I've conceded that inclusion in the Signpost was probably bad idea. And I've stated flat-out that I'm well aware that anything that addresses or even comes close to TG/NB people and pronouns is inevitably going to piss off some subset of people.
 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 16:16, 2 March 2019

The only difference between that statement and what I've said here almost two years later is that "probably" has become "definitely". [The rest of that long post is a mixture of observations about social discourse patterns that surround many issues of this nature; and some perhaps over-stressy defense against a variety of completely false personal attacks that were being shotgunned at me in the MfDs.]

Even if the material I wrote had been great (which it obviously was not), allowing it to run in Signpost despite the likelihood of some taking offense was the most serious of my screwups in this chain of events. That aspect is clearer to me now than it was when the debate fires were still burning (and contained a large amount of "anti-censorship" stance-taking, not just "this is trans-offensive" complaint; there was a lot of WP:DRAMA from both extremes).

"This isn't over! I still want to see you drawn and quartered!"

Please just move on, like everyone else. We don't need any more productive editors getting mired in blocks and bans over misusing Wikipedia as a battleground. Remember that you are here to work on an encyclopedia, and so am I.

See also

• WP:Apology – what this page is, other than the parts that are necessarily record-correcting
• WP:Assume good faith – We need more of that.
• WP:Be excellent to one another – I was not excellent; attacking me forever isn't, either.
• WP:CRYRACIST – The entire principle here applies to all false accusations of an -ist or -phobe nature.
• WP:Don't be a fanatic – Going after people indefinitely for perceived transgressions is not productive.
• WP:Don't be a WikiBigot – something I am not, no matter how many times this aspersion is cast
• WP:Don't be inconsiderate – advice I clearly failed to heed
• WP:Don't come down like a ton of bricks – self-explanatory
• WP:Don't drink the consensus Kool-Aid – Just because some of your wikifriends said I'm a transphobe doesn't make it so.
• WP:Don't fight fire with fire – self-explanatory
• WP:Failure – my humor essay in one word
• WP:Forgive and forget – We need more of this.
• WP:Griefing – Again, going after people indefinitely for perceived transgressions is not productive.
• WP:How to lose – Hopefully the main thrust of this page is a good example, even if bits of it are necessarily warding.
• WP:Maintaining a friendly space – something my humor essay did not do
• WP:Most ideas are bad – some more so than others
• WP:Passive aggression – My humor essay arguably qualified as this, even as to its actual subjects.
• WP:Read before commenting – would've obviated much drama and false accusations about this essay
• WP:Sham consensus – Again, just because some of your wikifriends said I'm a transphobe doesn't make it so.