User talk:Tamzin: Difference between revisions

I don't like the idea of getting pings over someone putting a box on my page that says I did nothing wrong while vaguely insinuating that I did, so I'm just parking these here instead.

This user is aware of the designation of the following topics as contentious topics: Armenia, Azerbaijan, or related conflicts the Arab–Israeli conflict abortion the English Wikipedia article titles policy and Manual of Style the Balkans or Eastern Europe articles about living or recently deceased people, and edits relating to the subject (living or recently deceased) of such biographical articles complementary and alternative medicine climate change discussions about infoboxes, and edits adding, deleting, collapsing, or removing verifiable information from infoboxes COVID-19, broadly construed Falun Gong governmental regulation of firearm ownership; the social, historical and political context of such regulation; and the people and organizations associated with these issues gender-related disputes or controversies or people associated with them genetically modified organisms, commercially produced agricultural chemicals and the companies that produce them, broadly construed the Horn of Africa (defined as including Ethiopia, Somalia, Eritrea, Djibouti, and adjoining areas if involved in related disputes) India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan post-1978 Iranian politics the topics of Kurds and Kurdistan, broadly construed pseudoscience and fringe science the intersection of race/ethnicity and human abilities and behaviour post-1992 politics of the United States and closely related people the Troubles They should not be given alerts for those areas.

{{ds/aware|ap|gg|a-i|blp|mos|tt|ipa}}

Update 18:24, 25 October 2021 (UTC): You know what, screw it. Keeping track of which to list is more trouble than it's worth, and I don't need any one-hit immunity. I'm aware of all of them. Even the weird ones like the Shakespeare authorship question or Waldorf education. If anything, I'm more likely to think something is a DS topic when it isn't, than vice versa.

• Please be civil. That's a policy here, but I reserve the right to enforce it more strictly on my talkpage than others may elsewhere.
• Please indent posts in an accessible manner.
• I am not a "sir". While I don't take offense to others calling me that honorific, we are all equals here on Wikipedia, and I would much prefer you just call me my name: Tamzin.
• Please do not post anything containing auto-playing media, including animated gifs.
• If writing in a language other than English, please provide an English translation if you are able to.
• Please do not invite the wrath of the evil eye. Apply {{User:Tamzin/kinehore}} liberally.

Thank you so much, Joshua Jonathan. It's funny, it started just as this weird feeling based on the RfD !votes... We get weird !vote patterns at RfD all the time, usually when a number of non-regulars wander in and don't understand how the forum actually works. The weird thing, though, was that they did seem to get the basic premise of RfD, but were still !voting for a conclusion that made no sense. But still I didn't have that high an index of suspicion, and also I was rather busy, and was this closed to dropping it. But instead, kind of on a whim, I asked Blablubbs to take a look. I was only suspicious about the four who'd !voted consecutively, and I was frankly surprised when Blablubbs turned up evidence tying not just all four of them, but Apollo too. I had no previous exposure to this topic area, and didn't know any of the players, so I really though I'd just be dealing with a few SPAs, not someone with 2,000 edits and PCR.

I think it was also Blablubbs who first suggested Moksha as part of it, as we looked at other players in the topic area. Then I found the comment from the Swami sock accusing them, and there went the next few hours of my life, digging through a history that grew more and more horrifying as the behavioral similarities mounted. I've really never seen something that elaborate fly under the radar, except reading early (pre-2010) ArbCom cases.

It's a shame we'll likely never know exactly how many people were behind these six accounts. My personal hypothesis is that it was six people who knew each other off-wiki, with one, perhaps Moksha, ghost-writing some talk-page comments for the others. (If true, that would mean they were done in by that one person's micromanagement, which is a funny thought.) But that's just my guess.

So thanks again for the barnstar. :) I kind of hope I never get this particular barnstar again, though, at least not for the same kind of thing. Mass gaslighting is a demoralizing thing to work against. I'm happy to go back to just dealing with vandals and spammers. -- Tamzin (she/they) | o toki tawa mi. 06:14, 25 June 2021 (UTC)[reply]

TIL I can win a goat just by being too lazy to write an SPI myself. ;) Guess I should have been careful what I wished for in the above section when I said I only wanted to deal with normal socks. -- Tamzin (she/they) | o toki tawa mi. 03:25, 26 June 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@EpicPupper: Oh, and, I forgot to say: You did great! -- Tamzin (she/they) | o toki tawa mi. 03:51, 26 June 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Again, thanks so much :) 🐶 EpicPupper ^{(he/him | talk, FAQ, contribs | please use {{ping}} on reply)} 03:54, 26 June 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@L235: Thank you—for this barnstar and for your own diligence. I was worried that someone would look at this and see it as too complicated, and as involving blocks that were too likely to cause drama, and just punt on it and leave the whole topic area still in disarray. As someone who's always favored making lots of small improvements over a small number of big ones, it's rare that I get the chance to look at something and say, "Here's a way that I really, noticeably, made the encyclopedia better through one single effort." Which I hope I'll be able to say here, depending on how the POV cleanup goes.

As I said to JJ above, I just hope that I don't run into another case like this for a while—both because I (perhaps naïvely) hope to never see anything so egregious, but also for the sake of my sanity, and the sake of whichever CU is crazy enough to take on that case. :) So again, thanks for all you've done here. -- Tamzin (she/they) | o toki tawa mi. 17:04, 27 June 2021 (UTC)[reply]

​​Thank you both. <3 While I don't think of myself as an incivil person, I'm not sure this is one I ever expected to get.

As someone who both likes to assume good faith and has a low tolerance for bigotry, I always see this kind of thing as a win-win: If the assumption of good faith was correct, then we avert more hurt feelings; and if it doesn't, then people can't plead ignorance the next time. I'm glad that this appears to have been the former. "Lord's work" is a compliment I'll happily (flatteredly) accept, be it meant proverbially or literally. -- Tamzin (she/they) | o toki tawa mi. 00:11, 30 June 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I see great minds think alike. I wasn't aware of the incident that led to the creation of your essay prior to today, and had only created mine in response to seeing "he/she" a lot around here. I must say you articulate it a lot better than I do, though! Patient Zero^talk 04:11, 1 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I'd just like to thank you as well for your well written essay. I hope this essay helps inform future editors and, in doing so, reduce the instances of misgendering. Isabelle ^🔔 02:45, 7 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@TheAafi: Well pink has always been my color, and I woke up at 2 PM yesterday and am trying to power through till like 6 PM today, so yes, I'll gladly accept. I hope it's strongly caffeinated. :) I enjoy seeing you around as well. sips. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (she/they) 11:44, 7 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@TheAafi: Update: I have drunk a medium Dunkin' "chai" in honor of this gift. I am guessing tastes nothing like the drink in the image, as Dunkin' beverages have a weird ability to all taste the same by the time you're done drinking them, no matter what you ordered. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (she/they) 16:51, 7 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I feel honoured imho. The chai (tea) I offered is salty in nature. 😌 ─ The Aafī on Mobile ^(talk) 16:54, 7 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Ah. This definitely was not salty. More sickly-sweet. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (she/they) 17:04, 7 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Despite my well-known affinity for Queen Esther (Esther 8:6 tattoo pic forthcoming on Commons once I've got the enby and agender colors touched up), I've never done much for Purim. Don't really know why that is, just how it's sorted out. But I'll never say no to something tasty! Chag sameach to you too, friend.

i/j/nb/s -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (she/they) 03:51, 18 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Just noticed the new one. It's an interesting one, and a matter I've thought about how to phrase. I suspect myself a lot of neurotypes odd in the general population are the default baseline on Wikipedia, but there's only so many ways you can say it without sounding like you're insulting someone (and I freely admit I can be less careful and more flippant with my word choice than you often are, certainly when I'm in the ANI peanut gallery). I've noticed there's an unfortunate correlation between editors who freely disclose neurodivergence and editors with significant competence issues, and I've wondered what consequences it has for the project as a whole in terms of interacting with people who are more clearly not working on neurotypical principles than our already high average -- though, of course, many disclosed neurodivergent editors are substantial and obvious assets. Vaticidalprophet 04:01, 4 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah, something I'd been thinking about for a while, and felt spurred to put into words after seeing an exchange on your talk page actually. As to correlations, there's a bias there, right? In terms of who wants/needs to disclose. If an editor quietly chugs along writing articles, doing gnomish work, etc., without ever getting into any conflict, then why would they want to disclose something that could subject them to ridicule or at least passive discrimination? (And there's editors who rack up 100k+ edits while barely touching anything metapedian.) Whereas some editors realistically have no choice: If they don't disclose, they may be treated as intentionally disruptive; whereas, if they do, they might at least "downgrade" that perception to CIR. Just like a person who is mild-to-moderately hard of hearing may be able to not disclose this fact in a workplace if they don't want, whereas a deaf person really has no choice in most contexts.

I'm active in a number of spaces online that are majority-neurodivergent. (I'll claim the label "neurodivergent" without comment on the label "autistic".) They all have to deal with the issue that, in such spaces, people are more likely to be sensitive, and also more likely to offend by accident. In the context of a collaborative project one can broaden this to a greater likelihood of people stepping on one another's toes. What strikes me is that these spaces' main advantage in contrast to Wikipedia is that they're honest with themselves about what's going on. Conduct decisions are made with the presumption that the participants' motives may not have been what you'd infer of a neurotypical person. Hence my new personal rule.

That said, it's not like there's easy answers here. Several years ago an openly autistic admin was desysopped for discussing violence against another editor in a way that was intended, by all accounts, to come off as mean but not as a true threat. It was an unambiguously desysoppable offense (although I'll admit I didn't take that view at the time). And yet, I think a lot of neurodivergent people can relate to making a joke that made perfect sense in their own head but came off very differently to their audience. (To be clear, I don't think that they raised autism as a defense, and I don't want to imply that their misconduct was "because autism", but at least the general circumstance is one that neurodivergent people tend to find ourselves in.) What's the solution there? I don't know. There's an overlap between statements that are reasonably insta-indeffable or desysoppable, and ones that a neurodivergent person can make without intending it to read that way. And if that's where we're starting from, how do we handle all the more minor cases?

So that's why I added this personal rule. Feel free to make any wording changes that preserve the meaning, if you think they'll make it less prone to misinterpretation, since it's just such a difficult thing to discuss, walking a tightrope between what could be perceived as being anti-accountability and what could be perceived as ableism. But regarding what you said about ANI: I think the best thing we can do about these topics is discuss them when there's no immediate reason to discuss them. If everyone's thinking about a specific editor when they discuss the topic, that will color their opinions.

P.S., not to come across as talking down to someone only a few years my junior, but a lesson I learned in my first wiki-life, reflected in the second paragraph in my userpage: The best thing you can do for your wiki-mental-health is avoid any page where the word "indef" gets thrown around. -- Tamzin (they/she) | o toki tawa mi. 05:08, 4 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]

To open in response to your last comment: well, a lot of people are scared of ANI, but I'm scared of political articles, and I'm sure I've seen you edit those. 😛 We all see different hotspots.

I'm definitely familiar with what you say about knowing it, or how different it is to be in an environment where people openly discuss that moderation and norms are shaped by neurodivergence, as opposed to the weirdly "everyone knows but no one knows" Wikipedia environment. I'm unsure if it's possible at all on Wikipedia to change the latter to the former, simply because we (in the societal sense) currently conceptualise neurodivergence as a product of diagnosis. Even for things like autism (and I concur, with hangups and caveats that are all frankly well outside the scope of what I aspire to discuss onwiki, with the "will claim neurodivergent, will pass without comment on autistic" identification here) where there's a relatively robust self-advocacy community, it's still in some ways reasonably and in some ways not treated as offensive to tag someone as autistic who hasn't been tagged as such in a medical context, and plenty of things I'd very much like to have robust self-advocacy communities outside of medicalization do not. There's an age factor here, in that a lot of the core editor (and especially content-writer) base is from age cohorts where a lot of what's diagnosed now wasn't, for better or worse.

As for Ironholds, well. I'm familiar from the "read about it after the fact" perspective with that case, for whatever that counts as familiarity. I don't think the behaviour I read was at all appropriate, and I think it's reasonable to expect an admin of any neurotype to know that. Simultaneously, the thing that really interests me about that case (using 'case' here in the broader sense rather than the ArbCom term of art) is the "seven RfAs" bit, and seven RfAs is characteristically autistic to me, for both good and ill. It shines through as both the way one can ascend past a lot of the mental limitations allistic people self-ascribe, and work tirelessly towards the pursuit of a goal, and simultaneously the way one can just not know when to quit.

To circle back around to ANI, I've been thinking about it because it actually did come up there lately, and in part due to a thread I'd created; the subject of that thread was...outed? as autistic by linking to a diff he'd written at a much smaller venue by a well-meaning party partway through, and he clearly wasn't happy at all about it. At the same time, in a different thread, another disclosed autistic editor suggested the reason a third party might have been acting in the problematic way that got him brought there was that he could be autistic, and the readers of that thread interpreted it as a personal attack on the subject. The discussion is worthwhile reading (and my comments in it reference a third, related case where an editor was clearly in severe distress over being a thread subject in a way that nearly went very poorly indeed, and where some of the reopening comments trying to address it were imo atrociously worded). Vaticidalprophet 05:31, 4 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah, it's actually those ANI threads—including a remark you made about how many/most editors at least have subclinical "symptoms" of autism (scare quotes mine)—that first got me thinking about this topic. Just because I never comment there doesn't mean I don't stay up to date on the latest drama. I agree that there's a cultural/generational issue here, and such things will always be a challenge for an international, intergenerational project. A norm like tone-tagging (beyond the common "/s") could do a world of good, but I think it'll be at least a decade till you could get a majority of editors on board with something like that. (Not like, making it mandatory by any means; just instilling it as a norm.)

The other day, in the course of saying something about Wikipedia, I explained to my partner what deletionism and inclusionism are, and she'd said something like, "I hate to tell you, but I think I'm an inclusionist." Today, shortly after sending my last message here, something suddenly hit me, and I said to her, "Wait, what makes you think I'm a deletionist?" To which she said, "Because you need everything to be just a certain way." I'm guessing you know the kind of "certain way" she meant.

And it occurred to me that you can pretty easily predict how drama-heavy a particular area of the wiki is going to be by just how strongly people need it to be a certain way. There's a reason I refuse to touch any edit that has anything to do with categories. There's a reason that the major topic area with the worst-written articles is, by far, math. And you can call the tendencies that beget this "neurodivergent", or just... "particular"... And those particularities carry over to administration too. Ironically, I would argue that the very resistance to change things in a more overtly neurodivergent-embracing direction is itself of tendencies that, in many cases, fall into what I'll again call "either neurodivergent or just very particular." ANI being a mess of massive walls of text is the way that Makes Sense, so that must never change, no matter how flawed it is. For Wikipedia to stop being hostile to newcomers, we'd have to restructure some things that are The Way They Should Be, so I guess it'll keep being hostile. And so on and so forth.

As to Ironholds, to be clear, I didn't mean to make it seem like a "wink wink nudge nudge" thing which case I was referring to; rather, I was trying to use it as a general example since, as I said, once you get into any one specific case that complicates the analysis. (Mx. Ironholds is, incidentally, a researcher and commentator on autism issues these days, though they're no longer active here. And yes, that's an off-wiki identity still linked on their userpage, before anyone says anything.)

Back to your point about the ANI threads: It'd be nice to have an essay as a companion to WP:CIR (maybe WP:Idiosyncratic editors) that discussed how best to handle competency issues in ENDOJVP editors but stopped short of saying "All of these editors are probably autistic." I know you followed the somewhat tragic tale of the now-3X'd SoyokoAnis (talk · contribs). I'm certainly not going to try to diagnose her with anything, but in the threads about her there was clearly a lot of dog-whistling and subtext, as there is basically anytime CIR comes up with an adult native English speaker, because, yeah, CIR is usually about language/culture, age, or neurodivergence. Perhaps it would be nice in such contexts to have a diplomatically-worded essay to point to that nutshells to: "Some editors interact with the world in very different ways than others. Maybe this is for neurological reasons, or maybe it's just how they are." and then... And then what? Then a conclusion drawn from that, but I'm not yet sure what that conclusion should be. (And not that in her particular case there would have been a different outcome necessarily; just that it allows for more honest discussion.) -- Tamzin (she/they) | o toki tawa mi. 06:50, 4 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Ah, Soyoko. I admit to less sympathy to her than you or Elli (who was my main point of contact with her saga), but that's not to say a lack of it. She didn't scan to me as adult (and, as someone who first edited as a young child, I suspect some of our current policies about not disclosing the ages of young editors might actually be counterproductive -- but that's another issue...), with the consequence I was mostly viewing her CIR issues through the lens of youth rather than neurodivergence, but I can't exactly say the latter was never a consideration. It did stand out to me that the RfA candidate she insisted on nominating was a disclosed autistic editor.

I know of two essays currently about specific neurodivergences. I can't pretend to like either of them. I'd happily MfD WP:AUTIST, where its every word strikes me as Making Things Worse, if I thought that proposal had a chance in hell (I've already spent my nominating-bad-essays-and-failing points for the month). There might be something useful in its bones, though; it apparently hit someone's sense of "this is me" enough for WP:OCD to be based on it. Vaticidalprophet 21:11, 4 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Ah yes, thanks for the ping to this interesting discussion (hope I'm not barging in too much).

Wikipedia is... an interesting environment, I guess, for neurodivergent people. Given, well, the way the site works, I think it's likely to attract them (what normal person spends their free time writing an encyclopedia for free?) Most people find the whole concept entirely foreign.

As for Soyoko, yeah, I think it's likely a combination of some type of neurodivergence and youth - neither of which are incompatible with Wikipedia, but if someone with them makes wrong assumptions about how the site works... it's not gonna be fun. Hell, looking at my first edits, I'm surprised I didn't get many warnings, given how terrible they were.

I dunno. This is kinda a ramble because I'm not sure exactly what I should say here? I guess, "be kind" has mostly worked for me - and is what, I think, worked for getting me on the right track. Elli (talk | contribs) 01:37, 5 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@Elli: I do think that Wikipedia's generally moving in the right direction on all of this. As I said to SoyokoAnis, I really doubt she would have been extended as much AGF back when I made this account (2012), which is one thing that made her situation extra frustrating. Then again, one still sees cases where if CIR issues aren't resolved after the first or second attempt at intervention, someone just hits the block button. I recently saw one of my least favorite things, a "Sock of someone or other" block. They're used as an excuse to say "We can label this intentional disruption rather than CIR because they're probably socking." Somewhere between begging the question and a thought-terminating cliché. But still, overall, progress, yeah. (Also thanks for dropping in to this chat. )

@Vaticidalprophet (but also still @Elli): I don't know if I'd agree with deleting WP:AUTIST, but I do think it misses the point. Partly because it's hard to describe the "honeypot" effect without resorting to stereotype. Partly because it's hard to describe autism itself without resorting to stereotype. But the essay manages to cut too much slack to neurodivergent editors while still not giving neurotypical editors particularly good advice about how to deal with us; and the advice it does give isn't very helpful when most neurodivergent editors are not open about it (if they even know themselves), and applying the label speculatively is, as you've said, a thorny issue.

So, seriously, if you (either of you) would be interested in working on an essay with me, I think there's room for improvement in the neurodivergence essay category. I'm interested in the idea of something that isn't explicitly about autism, but rather, without outright saying so, says "We're all at least kinda autistic here". I'm thinking of a title like WP:Needing things to be a certain way. In my mind, the essay would start out with something like, If you edit Wikipedia, that means you see a need for things to be a certain way. Quite likely, your first edit was noticing that something was incomplete or incorrect and fixing it. But why does it matter that the world know that the Third Amendment has been incorporated against the states in the Second Circuit but nowhere else? Why does it matter whether "Ljubljana" is spelled correctly in an article about baseball? Because things need to be right. All of us, to some extent, see things this way. And then go on to discuss how this applies to things like WP:CIR, WP:CIV, WP:TE, WP:POINT, and WP:RGW. And then give actual useful tips that can be applied to all editors, not just ones with autism userboxen. Stuff like:

• Accept that Wikipedians are more likely than most people to have strong opinions on "little things" like punctuation or reference style. To you, they might be small, but if those things are important to the way things need to be for someone, they can become very personal.
• Someone's view of how a conversation should work may not be the same as your view, or indeed, as the view of society at large. In particular, certain editors may value straightforwardness as a virtue significantly more than others, often based on a feeling that conversations are simply meant to work that way. This should not excuse incivility, but understanding this may help to reach constructive solutions in conflicts.
• It can be very hard for Wikipedians to let go of something they are passionate about, even when consensus is against them. If this leads to someone becoming disruptive on a topic, then even as you nudge their focus elsewhere you should be respectful of their passion. And whoever comes up with a way to gently keep editors from returning to these passion topics will have averted the indefblocks of countless mostly-constructive contributors.

Wouldn't be the whole list, just the first three things that come to mind. In neurodivergent terms these are "sameness"/general particularities, communication issues, and special interests, but framed generally it's just a lot of the stuff we see all the time on Wikipedia. -- Tamzin (they/she) | o toki tawa mi. 06:47, 7 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Arrgh... it's been a while since I thought about gendered words (e.g. pronouns, "man/woman", "waiter/waitress") that reflect the person's latest expressed gender self-identification as reported in the most recent reliable sources, even if it does not match what is most common in sources (ref) in relation to contemporary Japanese popular media personalities. English-language "reliable sources" focusing on Japanese popular culture tend to be sub-par (one of the sources initially cited in relation to Utada's gender identity proactively used singular they without any request from Utada to do as much, and also seemed to be conflating non-binary gender identity with same-sex sexual orientation...), and Japanese-language sources are extremely unlikely to make as big a deal out of it as English ones because of how the Japanese language works.

Japanese doesn't use pronouns anywhere nearly as much English, because content that is implied from context (as the referents of pronouns almost always are) is usually omitted: the Japanese for "I ate it" isn't "Watashi-wa sore-o tabeta" (literally "I it ate") but rather "Tabeta yo" ("Ate sentence-terminal-particle") and "I met her" isn't "Watashi-wa kanojo-ni atta" but rather "Atta yo"; "I ate it" or "She ate it" in Japanese would only specify the subject if it were in response to the question "Who ate it?", and even then "she" would necessitate a separate indication of who the girl/woman in question is, such as pointing, which is rude. (Needless to say, the Japanese version of Utada's website doesn't use any pronouns where the English version uses "she" and "her".) I actually recently found out that both the "Japanese words for he and she" that I learned in my beginner Japanese class were recent coinages based on English/French, the "word for he" being a redefined word classical Japanese pronoun that originally referred a person or thing that is far away from both the speaker and the listener, and the "word for she" being the same word, in the classical Japanese equivalent of the genitive case, with the noun "woman" attached after it. This kind of development would not be possible, needless to say, if personal pronouns were as entrenched in the actual Japanese language that people spoke every day as they are in English or French. I suspect this is why "pronouns" aren't really a thing on Japanese Twitter (etc.) like they are in America and Europe: it's my impression that a not-insignificant percentage of American pop-stars have their pronouns listed in their Twitter profile, and this percentage probably skyrockets when one only counts those pop-stars who have stated a gender identity other than cisgender male or female, but with Japanese pop-stars (even those who also hold American citizenship and live in Europe, and "occasionally tweet in English"), the former percentage is probably close to zero and the latter may be higher, but as far as I'm aware Utada is the most prominent case at the moment, and...

So yeah, it looks like the Utada case is going to be solved by a consensus of editors based on the fact that sources affiliated with the subject use a particular pronoun pattern, but if more Japanese (etc.) pop stars, voice actors/actresses, live action actors/actresses, video game producers, etc. with anglophone fan-bases and extensive coverage in English-language blogs and "reliable sources" that are little more reliable than blogs, start coming out as non-binary, gender-fluid, etc., a discussion might need to be had about how the MOS passage you quoted applies to such cases. A huge hullabaloo was made about a decade back about whether personal websites (or websites maintained by publicists) should take precedence over academic publications with regard to MOS:JAPAN#Modern names (with reference to whether long vowels should be marked), which I think kinda missed the point there (if we take URLs or copyright information on Japanese-language websites into account, we get people named "Sakaguchi Jun'ichirō" being identified as "Sakaguti Junitiro" just because the webmaster created the URL based primarily on how Japanese text is input on a keyboard).

But I suspect that, when it comes to gender identity, personal/official websites should definitely take precedence over third-party sources that often pass for "reliable" in pop culture articles, no matter how many such sources there are or how recent they are compared to what we assume to be the latest update on the personal/official website.

Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 02:27, 26 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]

BTW, I should thank you for your positive input on the Utada page! :D Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 02:27, 26 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@Hijiri88: I think we often run into a problem of overly generalizing Anglosphere gender norms to other cultures. What you're saying about Japanese language and culture is very interesting; I don't speak any Japanese, but I speak French, and even in that language relatively close to English, many English-centric assumptions prove false. The whole relationship between social gender and grammatical gender is different when applying any noun to yourself contains an implicit statement of your gender. (It's also, incidentally, the most frustrating part of transitioning when you don't speak the language often enough to form new habits. I've gotten weird looks once or twice for calling myself américain rather than américaine.) One can see a bit of that disconnect going on at Talk:Claude Cahun, where people are struggling with how to apply the subject's gender expression in French in the 1950s to an English-language article in 2021.

I'm not sure there's an easy solution to it, though, because this problem runs deeper than just Wikipedia. For instance, without taking a side on the issue of the term Latinx, I'll observe that a lot of the debate in the U.S. about it seems to come from people who are not familiar without how gender works in Spanish. A lot of English-speakers tend to expect our concept of "my pronouns are ______" to extend to languages where gender is more complex than just third-person pronouns and the occasional "son"/"daughter" situation. And that includes RS—many of which, as you allude to, barely even understand the concept of non-binary gender to begin with. So we get screwed over by the RS, and then by people who read them and then make good-faith changes based on their bad takes. The complicated pronoun situation I've been most involved in has been that of James Barry (surgeon). There's no language angle there, but nonetheless his article's been done a great disservice by the surfeit of articles in somewhat reliable sources saying "You'll never believe what this empowering lesbian, forced to crossdress, accomplished" or "You'll never believe what this pioneering trans man accomplished".

Which gets us to the awkward sourcing question: Generally, someone's gender identity is the sort of thing we'd want very high-quality sources for. At the same time, we don't want to misgender someone just because major RS have been slow to pick up on something. Ellar Coltrane started taking they/them pronouns long after leaving the spotlight, and for over a month our article on them sourced their pronouns to their Instagram bio, till they got a brief write-up in a newspaper we could use instead. Given how many long-dormant BLP stubs we have (another rant for another time), there are plausible scenarios where a self-published source or suboptimal-quality source could be our only reference on someone's pronouns for decades. Not to mention people who are only mentioned in passing in articles. I've been in the news a few times in my life, mostly when I was very young. In the past I've been mentioned in mainspace, although I currently am not; but if someone were to re-add a mention of me, to get my name and pronouns right they'd have to cite like... a blog post I wrote when I came out, I guess? That's not exactly ideal, and would be weird to see alongside a cite to a major RS, but it's preferable to just getting people's pronouns wrong.

At some point we're probably due for an RfC on when, if at all, it's acceptable to use they/them pronouns in cases of ambiguous gender. I don't really want to be the one to start that, though. :D Anyways, this is turning into a ramble, but thanks for dropping by and sharing your thoughts. (I designate this a talkpage-watcher-friendly thread, by the way; interested to know what others think.) -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (she/they) 05:43, 26 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Arrgh. Your James Barry example made me think of George Eliot and even more contemporary women writers who used male or "ambiguous" pseudonyms (or variations on their real names), such as D. C. Fontana. By the standards of some modern popular media, we should be calling them all transgender men or at least gender-fluid, except that we're lucky enough to have good documentation of the actual reasons for their hiding the fact that they were women. Ironically, the same is essentially true of a certain living author (who I won't name, but I think you can probably guess who she is), whose views on non-cisgender rights have turned out to be somewhat questionable. Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 10:37, 26 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@Hijiri88: This is as much me thinking aloud as anything else, but I'm going to ping you so I don't feel like I'm talking to myself. :) (Not to say a response is unwelcome, by any means, just that this may not really be written like a response to your own points, and you could be forgiven for not having much to say in response.) Oh I'll also ping BDD—with the same caveat—since he expressed some interest in this topic at Talk:Claude Cahun.

The way I see it, we have four categories of cases where pronouns aren't as simple as "just say what they want":

1. Unknown identity, where the person's story does not involve participating in any gender-segregated activities. It was surprisingly hard to find a good example of this (since for most historical figures we can infer gender based on segregation), but after looking around in Category:Unidentified people I did find Italian Unabomber as an example—someone we have no interviews with, no profile of, etc.
2. Known identity but unknown gender identity. For many articles we don't explicitly know someone's gender identity, but there's a general precedent that we take fem-presenting AFAB as presumptive evidence for she/her and masc-presenting AMAB as presumptive evidence for he/him. This is imperfect, but it's probably the least bad approach. Issues arise in three cases:
   1. Subject has indicated no gender presentation at all. E.g., picking another at random from that category, Neuroskeptic.
   2. Subject has presented in a way too inconsistent to draw any non-SYNTH inference from. E.g. my favorite example, Thomas(ine) Hall... I swear not just my favorite because Thomasine and Tamzin are variants of the same name.
   3. Subject's gender presentation differs from that associated with their gender assigned at birth, but they have made no statement regarding gender identity. There's tons of living people like this, but BLP forbids us from documenting it in most cases. It thus comes up more often with long-dead figures like James Barry.
3. Known identity, but ambiguous or inconsistent gender identity. Ruby Rose, Sophie Xeon, Vi Hart, and Alexis Arquette all come to mind, as does Utada Hikaru—in each case a different kind of ambiguity or inconsistency. (Often, as in the cases of Rose and Arquette, this may be someone who is genderfluid, and it may well be that they see no ambiguity or inconsistency but the sources reporting on them did.)
4. Known identity and gender identity, but it is unclear what pronouns should follow from that. Especially common in non-binary Westerners from before Stonewall who went on the record about their gender, like Claude Cahun or the Public Universal Friend.

In #1, #2.1, and #2.2, I think it's really author's preference (à l'EngVar) whether to do they/them or avoid pronouns. I think readers understand the concept of the gender-ambiguous they, given that it predates the singular-personal-pronoun they by several centuries. The important thing is not defaulting to he/him or she/her based on stereotypes. On #2.3, I've made clear my view at the Barry RfC that MOS:GENDERID should apply there the same as anywhere else: Binary presentation should be met with the corresponding binary pronouns unless there's clear evidence that the person did not identify with that gender (or, for more modern subjects, that they did not want those pronouns). On #3, I think we should default to not changing pronouns unless the subject requests it, because anything else would be presumptive, and shouldn't "compromise" on they/them. Avoiding pronouns sometimes might be the least bad option; sometimes we also just have to figure, if this person really cared that much, they'd probably reach out and ask us to change it. For deceased subjects like Xeon and Arquette, all there really is to do is follow the final statement, at least as best we can manage (bit complicated in both cases). And on #4, I dunno, I'm not opposed to they/them pronouns for someone who explicitly eschewed gendered pronouns in their lifetime like the Public Universal Friend. But they're almost the exception that defines the rule. The vast majority of people covered under #4 did refer to themselves with gendered pronouns, and I think we need to follow people's final wishes even when we suspect they might have preferred some modern option.

K, that was a lot. Respect to anyone who's read to the end of this. Responses welcome, but, as noted before, this was as much thinking aloud as anything else. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (she/they) 04:19, 27 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Wow, Tamzin, if this is what comes out when you think aloud then you should think aloud as often as you feel the urge to. (When I do it, it doesn't end up nearly as... coherent.) I think the categories you've laid out here and your explanations of how you think they should be handled make a lot of sense – this is definitely something I want to come back to and read more closely when I have more time. ezlev (user/tlk/ctrbs) 05:12, 27 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]

(edit conflict) I see your 2. and I immediately think of ancients of whom we know some details but nothing that makes their gender (or at least biological sex) clear. Hieda no Are and Junia (both long assumed male but now widely considered by specialists to be women who were misidentified as a result of linguistic ambiguity) are interesting cases, but there are others who don't even have names, such as "the X poet", where X is the name of some work of literature written, or likely written, anonymously. A number of authors of Japanese literary works are assumed, based on their content or style, to have been written by male authors (court nobles proficient in literary Chinese, Buddhist monks, etc.) or women (members of the literary salons serving this or that empress, or more often than not just Takasue's daughter), so I guess in English they can be referred to as "he" or "she" once these authorship theories have been elaborated upon. (Needless to say, this is quite unrelated to the distinction between biological sex and gender identity, which I believe was not widely recognized until recently. I'm pretty sure throughout most of human history biological sex was of interest for the purpose of carrying on family lineages and gender identity -- or, indeed, sexual orientation -- didn't enter into the equation.) As for 2.3, it'll be interesting to see, if Wikipedia lasts as long, how our little encyclopedia will deal with such cases once such subjects have passed on and BLP no longer applies. Probably have to have an RFC in each article. 😅

As for 3., I think that, as a general rule, the "traditional" pronouns/determiners may be best, unless and until they specifically state that they don't like it, since it can probably be safely assumed that in such cases no one will find this usage either awkward or hurtful. (There do seem to be people who, for their own reasons, think anyone with any of these gender identities "should" use specific pronouns, but I don't think they can be assumed to find it personally hurtful, I'm pretty sure such people are a negligible minority even within the LGBTQ+ rights community, and I suppose they will probably eventually be outright rejected by said community for advocating a position that runs completely counter to said community's goals, similar to those who believe anyone with a particular sexual orientation should disclose said orientation publicly to "create awareness", as though public awareness were anywhere near as important as the feelings of the individual[s] in question.)

4. strikes me as particularly ... well, outside my area of interest and expertise. Japanese poets before c.1880 referred to people as kore if they were "near" and kare if they were "far away", so the idea of pronoun preferences based on sex or gender would have been completely alien to them. Modern Japanese is a bit iffier since late 19th-century literati, in translating European literature (into what essentially amounted to a new, artificial literary language) took that word kore and used it to translate "this" (or "it"), kare to mean "he", "him", or "his" (Japanese uses postpositions to mark the subject, object, and possessive/genitive), and kano-onna (the genitive form of kare and the word for "woman", literally meaning "that woman") to mean "she", "her" or "hers". Since Japanese doesn't actually use pronouns very often, especially when speaking of people (it's quite rude... I think the same is true of English, at least because it implies you have not taken the effort to learn a person's name), this new Europeanized style was comfortably adopted into the standard Japanese written language, and consequently the spoken language, and now scarcely a century later Japanese gender-minorities are being told by non-Japanese-speaking netizens that they "should" use gender-neutral pronouns in English... "Ironic" might not be the word for it, but...

Anyway, kochira-koso sorry for the long rant! ;-)

Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 05:55, 27 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Hello! You probably don't know me, but I watch your talk page and saw this interesting discussion, so I thought I might share my thoughts if you don't mind :)

It seems to me that the hardest cases are the ones where the subjects are long deceased, and the issue is trying to translate their gender expression at the time they lived to how we might classify them today. The discussion goes something like, if this person were alive today, they might be considered a [something, e.g. trans man], so one the one hand that means we should refer to them with [e.g. he/him pronouns], but on the other hand, we shouldn't press terms upon them that they didn't use to refer to themself. Of the ones mentioned above, the ones that stand out to me are James Barry, Thomas(ine) Hall, and Claude Cahun. (The same problem applies to historical people whose sexual/romantic orientation was unclear, but it's easier to avoid making a statement one way or the other when you don't have to deal with pronouns.)

Modern people, on the other hand, tend to declare what their preferences are for pronouns, and the question is just how to interpret that. For example, Vi Hart indicated that they have no preference and do not care which pronouns they are called by, and Rebecca Sugar stated clearly that she uses both she/her and they/them. It seems like these kinds of cases ought to be more straightforward, though evidently nothing is straightforward. Aerin17 (t • c) 22:29, 27 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Shoot, I forgot one! (This is an addendum to my own rant, not a reply to Aerin17, whose post I appreciated but don't think requires a reply; indentation is to visually distinguish my own comments from Aerin's.) Sometimes an author will self-identify as "a man", or "a woman", or "the mother/daughter/wife of Such-and-such". (I won't pretend there isn't a gender disparity in the examples selected here; there is, but that's just because unfortunately most of the relevant examples are women whose identities are only known in connection to their male relatives.) So we know their gender (insofar as, with the ancients, we usually have no choice but to assume gender aligned with biological sex) but practically nothing else. Given that, as far as I am aware, none of the languages Japanese between around 800 CE and around 1400 CE could have been familiar with had gender-based third-person pronouns (Chinese, like Japanese, nowadays has a fairly arbitrary distinction in the written language between "he", "she" and "it", but this seems to be recent, and Sanskrit -- which some of the Japanese Buddhist clergy may have had some limited awareness of... -- ... might distinguish the three?), I don't know if any of them would care if they knew that centuries after their death people were talking about them in a language distantly related to Sanskrit and using strange pronouns that classified them by their gender, but I think such questions, regardless of how interesting they might be for some folks with unusual hobbies might be, are probably not all that important as far as we are concerned, since all of them are also very much dead. Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 13:54, 28 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]

• Thanks for the ping. I started writing a few comments, but ended up like a writer in a cartoon, constantly tossing drafts into the trash. I largely endorse your four-part division above. Surprisingly, I am more inclined to accept they/them for #4. It is possible, but unlikely IMO, that such people would reject they/them pronouns today. And ultimately, we have to make some assumptions about such people—the use of he/him and she/her very much included. --BDD (talk) 21:08, 30 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]