Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style

MOS:IDENTITY RFC: Should the text "When there is no dispute..." be deleted, kept or changed?

This RFC concerns the following bold text from MOS:IDENTITY:

Disputes over how to refer to a person or group are addressed by policies such as Verifiability, Neutral point of view, and Article titles where the term appears in the title of an article. When there is no dispute, the term most commonly used for a person will be the one that person uses for himself or herself, and the most common terms for a group will be those that the group most commonly uses for itself. Wikipedia should use them too. (For example, see the article Jew, which demonstrates that most Jews prefer that term to "Jewish person".)

Should this text be

1. Deleted
2. Kept
3. Changed. And if so, how should it be changed?

Survey

• Delete GabrielF (talk) 02:48, 6 September 2013 (UTC)
• Change or delete – I'd like to see specific proposals for how to make it meaningful, or remove it. Dicklyon (talk) 04:21, 6 September 2013 (UTC)
• Delete - There's a reason the wording is so weak/vague and can only be weak/vague - per GabrielF below, MOS is not the place to address complex or controversial issues such as identity. MOS is about style, formatting, presentation, the superficial stuff. Not questions that get to the core of who a person is, what they are, what they stand for, how to respectfully refer to them, or what their "real" name is. Also, the statement is a tautology. "When there is no dispute," we've already settled on the name and don't need any further guidance. The only people who will care to read MOS are the people who are involved in disputes and seek clarity - which this guideline does not provide. CaseyPenk (talk) 04:49, 6 September 2013 (UTC)
• Delete I think it is confusing and serves no real purpose. - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 04:48, 6 September 2013 (UTC)
• change or delete The preponderance of the sources should determine which name to use (which should be in the guideline)Two kinds of pork (talk) 04:48, 6 September 2013 (UTC)
• Delete the last sentence, since the claim is false on at least two counts. (The term "Jewish person" does not even appear in the article Jew, nor is it possible for an encyclopedia article to "demonstrate" a claim; demonstrating an assertion in the social sciences is something that is done by primary sources, not by encyclopedias.) Then reword the rest: I suggest changing "when there is no dispute" (which makes it a tautology) to "In simple cases" or "Typically". In other words, the remaining text is an accurate description of how terms are usually chosen (e.g, why residents of the United States are called "Americans" on Wikipedia) in the absence of any challenge. — Lawrence King ^(talk) 05:09, 6 September 2013 (UTC)
• delete it adds nothing, is confusing, and conflicts with commonname. We should point people to the numerous naming conventions besides wp:at as well.--Obi-Wan Kenobi (talk) 06:08, 6 September 2013 (UTC)
• Keep or change. The wording may not be perfect, but it is very important that Wikipedia contains guidance about how to deal with people's identity, and there is in my mind no better place for guidance about how to style articles than the manual of style. Removing the highlighted text is not the way to improve Wikipedia's coverage of sensitive issues - rather it would make things worse as the recent Chelsea Manning RFC shows we need firmer guidance not weaker. Thryduulf (talk) 08:48, 6 September 2013 (UTC)
• Delete as conflicting with WP:COMMONNAME. GregJackP Boomer! 10:13, 6 September 2013 (UTC)
• Delete As being in obvious conflict with WP:COMMONNAME. We can't afford to have any ambiguity whatsoever in issues like these. §FreeRangeFrog^croak 16:56, 6 September 2013 (UTC)
• Delete I gave my detailed comments the last time this was proposed, but in short, the history of how this wording was created shows that it was designed to be informational, not instructive, and since it is unclear it is better to delete it. 99.192.87.226 (talk) 23:59, 6 September 2013 (UTC) (=99.192....)
• Delete Well-intentioned, but unclear, liable to be misinterpreted/misapplied, and encroaching on content issues that are best handled through our policies and guidelines rather than the style manual. Abecedare (talk) 00:18, 7 September 2013 (UTC)
• Delete as unclear and superseded by WP:COMMONNAME. Edge3 (talk) 01:43, 7 September 2013 (UTC)
• Keep or change to "The term most commonly used for a person will be the one that person uses for himself or herself, and the most common terms for a group will be those that the group most commonly uses for itself. Wikipedia should use them too. (For example, see the article Jew, which demonstrates that most Jews prefer that term to 'Jewish person.')" Removing "When there is no dispute" makes the statement true. The term most commonly used is what it is regardless of whether Wikipedians are fighting about it or not. Darkfrog24 (talk) 03:39, 7 September 2013 (UTC)
  • What happens if "the term most commonly used for a person" by reliable sources is not the term that person prefers? In that case your text would appear to be stating that the less common term actually counts as being more common just because the article subject prefers it. That completely redefines the words "most common" to mean something that they do not mean. GabrielF (talk) 05:27, 7 September 2013 (UTC)
• Delete The language is too loose. Someone knows if they are or aren't male/female and their personal characteristics. The 'dispute' refers to disputes here, in editing, not with the person themselves. Make this as clear so we avoid as many future Chelsea/Bradley Manning problems as possible. KrakatoaKatie 03:54, 7 September 2013 (UTC)
• Keep and change Remove the "When there is no dispute" qualification. There is no conflict with WP:COMMONNAME as WP:COMMONNAME is only for article titles whilst MOS:IDENTITY is for style issues in the article body. There may be conflicts between the subject of the article and other reliable sources, but as a source about themselves, a person trumps other sources, in as much as other sources become either out-of-date or are less reliable. Once a reliable secondary or tertiary source says that the primary source (the subject which changed their name) says as much, that's it. No other primary source can even say otherwise: we should follow the Anglo-American common law (think California, home of the WMF, and your TOS choice of law provisions you agreed to) principles which has traditionally allowed name changes by a person "at will" (a common law right especially protected in California), and not follow European practice where one must beg their landlord (aka the King in Council, or in this case the US president) for permission to do so. IOW, that person is the only reliable primary source on the issue. The "him" versus "her" debate I think flows from the same logic, but is unfortunately unclear; this however is not relevant to the text under discussion. Int21h (talk) 10:16, 7 September 2013 (UTC)

You seem to be looking at this through the prism of the Bradley Manning case. Does your analysis also apply to historical persons and to groups, as the current text does now? For instance, Christopher Columbus did not go by that name - it is a later anglicization. Many historical persons are known in English by anglicized names. Does this policy mean that we have to change them, even if the names are unfamiliar and confusing to readers? What about groups? How do we determine what an ethnic group, the majority of whose members do not speak English, prefer to be called in English? If there is a source that says "group X should be called Y" how do we know that that source represents the wishes of the group as a whole and not of a vocal minority that might have a particular political agenda? GabrielF (talk) 19:49, 8 September 2013 (UTC)

I will ponder this more. I am concerned about conflicts between a majority of secondary sources and the subject as a primary source. This policy would give an enormous to a single primary source, and I'm wondering how the edge cases will work. I am not worried about historical issues or transliteration issues, though, or source reliability issues (which this does not effect.) Int21h (talk) 12:07, 14 September 2013 (UTC)

• Keep. As has been pointed out, this doesn't contradict WP:COMMONNAME because that only applies to article titles. As for the rest, it may be that "if there is no dispute" is poor wording, but if that clause is changed, there still needs to be a limiting clause. We can't just pick the subject's preferred name all the time.

Even for Manning, there can be disputes about exactly the scope of the subject's self-identification. It's clear that Manning wishes to be called Chelsea now, but it's not so clear that Manning wishes to be called Chelsea in reference to events that happened before she announced a name change (and likewise for pronouns). But the biggest case I can think of is not Manning, but the case where group A claims to be part of group B, and identifies accordingly, but anyone else who identifies with group B thinks that A is a bunch of posers. Under these circumstances, A's self-identification impinges on someone else's self-identification and therefore should not be uncritically accepted. Ken Arromdee (talk) 22:54, 7 September 2013 (UTC)

• Keep. In looking for guidance on the Chelsea Manning dispute I looked through the edit history and talk history for Chaz Bono, which had a similar history of covering someone who was famous first, and came out as trans later. I saw this wording was very helpful there. Helpful enough that it's been adopted for Template:MOS-TM and Template:MOS-TW, used by 130 pages according to the transclusion counter. I'd hate for one heated case to scupper a proven-useful guideline. Metadox (talk) 04:57, 8 September 2013 (UTC)

You are mistaken. Template:MOS-TM does not use any of the language that is proposed for deletion. Template:MOS-TW does not use any of the language that is proposed for deletion. The talk history of Chaz Bono does not use any of the language that is proposed for deletion. They all talk about other parts of MOS:IDENTITY, just not this part of it. 99.192.50.55 (talk) 12:54, 8 September 2013 (UTC) (=99.192....)

You're right, I misread/misremembered. I've retracted my entry until I can recruit more sleep or coffee. Thanks for the correction. Metadox (talk) 00:46, 9 September 2013 (UTC)

• Keep (but probably improve) per Thryduulf. -sche (talk) 05:22, 8 September 2013 (UTC)
• Delete bolded text and reword the remainder. Identity, like anything else on WP, should always be determined by WP:V, RS, NPOV etc. It shouldn't have to wait for a dispute, and it shouldn't be determined by non-policy-based criteria such as self-identification. Disputes should be resolved by consensus, and this should be stated in the guideline. Please see my detailed argument in the section below. Scolaire (talk) 19:50, 8 September 2013 (UTC)
• Keep except perhaps for minor changes to make clearer per Thryduulf. Neljack (talk) 00:30, 10 September 2013 (UTC)
• Strong Keep. For trans people, and others, use of self-identified names and pronouns is a matter of basic respect. --Daira Hopwood ⚥ (talk) 00:39, 14 September 2013 (UTC)
• Delete Delete "Wikipedia should use them too. (For example, see the article Jew, which demonstrates that most Jews prefer that term to "Jewish person".)" The article does not demonstrate that, as far as I can see, regarding "Jewish person," so that part is nonsensical. "Wikipedia should use them too." is unnecessarily redundant. I think the Christopher Columbus example demonstrates that the name for the subject is not always the one the subject uses. As such, the text under discussion here is clearly not correct. (Also per GabrielF) OSborn ^arf_contribs. 00:53, 14 September 2013 (UTC)
• Keep. Honor the subject's identity. See also Gypsy vs. Romani People. Startswithj (talk) 15:26, 14 September 2013 (UTC)
• Delete. It's unclear, unhelpful ("When there is no dispute" there is by definition no need for guidance.) and I don't think that the Manual of Style is the right place to be guiding decisions on what names to use in individual cases. I certainly don't think that the term that a person or group prefers is universally going to be the best choice. --Jeude54cartes (talk) 14:28, 16 September 2013 (UTC)
• Keep in spirit and reword As others have noted, Christopher Columbus is a counter-example, and the current example is unclear. I suggest keeping the intent – putting significant but not exclusive weight on self-identity – and rewording the bold text as When these policies provide no clear guidance, considerable weight should be given to how the person or group self-identifies. Thus "Christopher Columbus" rather than "Cristoforo Colombo" or similar, due to the Anglicised name being far more common in modern usage and there being no clear indication of the name Columbus used himself, while "Jews" is used instead of "Jewish people" as there is verifiable evidence that this is the group's preferred term. —me_and 21:19, 16 September 2013 (UTC)
• Keep anbd improve where necessary. This proposal was worded very awkwardly so my true wishes can't be stated with such narrow options Pass a Method talk 07:50, 17 September 2013 (UTC)
• Keep, per Startswithj and Thryduulf. theonesean 01:12, 18 September 2013 (UTC)

Discussion

The current text is so poorly worded as to be meaningless. The trouble with this text comes when there is a conflict between how a person or group is most commonly addressed in reliable sources and how that person or group prefers to address itself. If you ignore the phrase "When there is no dispute...", the policy makes a very strong statement that we must use the term that the person or group prefers. However, the phrase "When there is no dispute" renders everything that follows meaningless. If there is no dispute, why consult the manual of style? The entire purpose of a manual of style is to provide some guidance when there are multiple plausible choices. The policy, as written, does not actually tell us what to do if there is a dispute. It is very easy for someone who (purposefully or not) ignores the phrase "When there is no dispute" to come away thinking that the policy is saying something that it is not actually saying.

This is not a hypothetical problem. The lack of clarity has led to different editors interpreting this policy in radically different ways. In the recent Manning dispute an editor said of MOS:IDENTITY: "Some people have argued that this doesn’t apply because there is a dispute over whether to use Chelsea or Bradley. But I think it is clear in context that the reference to a “dispute” does not mean a dispute on Wikipedia; rather it means a dispute regarding what is subsequently referred to in the sentence – “the term ... [a] person uses for himself or herself...”[1] If the wording of a policy is so unclear that editors can take radically different views on what the policy refers to, then the policy is not providing clear guidance and needs to be fixed. This is one example of the practical impact of the lack of clarity of this policy. Many other examples exist.

It is possible to modify this text so that it makes a strong statement that we should prefer the article subject's self-identification. However, I do not believe that the MOS is the place to do this. For one thing, this would put the policy at odds with WP:COMMONNAME. Additionally, the MOS is an inappropriate forum for this discussion. Traditionally, the MOS handles issues of style and presentation whereas other policies, such as those referenced in the first sentence, handle the deeper content issues. The MOS is weaker than those policies - it is considered a "guideline" while BLP is considered formal policy. GabrielF (talk) 02:45, 6 September 2013 (UTC)

Yes, no no no no. Yes, the phrase "When there is no dispute..." is confusing. It should be removed. What's left would possibly conflict with other sources that refer to him as Bradley Manning; these sources are trumped by a particularly reliable source: Manning. Once a secondary or tertiary source confirms what the primary source of note uses, all other sources should be deemed to be out-of-date. Deeming sources to be overridden by other sources is commonplace, particularly if one source is newer and reflects changed conditions. I actually don't think that poses much of a problem for current policy. WP:COMMONNAME is plain irrelevant; it only concerns article titles, whereas MOS:IDENTITY concerns content. (The Manning proposal even touched on this.) The MOS should reflect consensus, and I think consensus should reflect my opinion, which I think most editors also hold: it is up to Manning. This is reflected in Anglo-American cultural values which are themselves a reflection of long running legal practice in the common law that allows for people to "call themselves whatever they wish". The European practice is practically unknown to us, and it actually makes me quite angry when I hear a consular officer tell someone that they may not get a visa or whatever unless their driver's license says whats on their "life certificate" (yeah, Europe, what can I say. pfft.), which reflects how difficult and uncommon it is. Even the states where court decrees are required, they are to be granted by default. (European practice, on the hand, is to require a reason for doing so as I understand.) As such, Manning becomes the most reliable primary source on the matter. Int21h (talk) 10:21, 7 September 2013 (UTC)

I have a question, before I comment, because I'm a little puzzled on something. What does this section, "When there is no dispute, the term most commonly used for a person will be the one that person uses for himself or herself, and the most common terms for a group will be those that the group most commonly uses for itself." actually add to the policy?Cam94509 (talk) 02:34, 6 September 2013 (UTC)

Before anyone corrects me, I know, I know, "guideline", not "policy". Cam94509 (talk) 02:37, 6 September 2013 (UTC)

Some of us are finding that it adds precisely nothing; that it's a tautology. CaseyPenk (talk) 04:53, 6 September 2013 (UTC)

It makes sense in terms of, for example, Jews preferring that term to Jewish people or Israelites, as some people may refer to that group or individuals in that group. However, if there is no dispute then it's likely the case that the correct terminology is being used already... However, for cases where there is a dispute (in the sources, not between our editors), we need some guideline or policy to reflect the prevailing opinion of editors. - Floydian ^τ _¢ 05:02, 6 September 2013 (UTC)

• The sentence: "Wikipedia should use them too." should also be removed as it's redundant. - Floydian ^τ _¢ 03:36, 6 September 2013 (UTC)

Yes. That sentence got added after the rest of the text proposed for deletion was written. I believe it was added by someone who read the rest, saw that it was merely informational, not instructive, and so thought it would help to add the instruction. But it is redundant to say it and the rest, as others have noted, in confusing and not meant to instruct anyway. 99.192.87.226 (talk) 00:03, 7 September 2013 (UTC) (=99.192....)

• As currently written, does the MOS apply only to BLPs? How would it be applied to dead/historical figures (eg, Rajeesh/Osho, Byron/Noel,...)? In such cases would only the last self-chosen name count, or should we look at what reliable sources use? I agree that the current version is a hash and better off deleted, or recrafted more-narrowly. Abecedare (talk) 03:57, 6 September 2013 (UTC)
  • The existing text clearly applies to more than just BLPs since it references groups. I see nothing in the text that suggests it would not apply to historical figures. GabrielF (talk) 04:45, 6 September 2013 (UTC)

As someone who has been involved with the Manual of Style/Ireland-related articles, I can tell you that self-identification as a principle does not work. It has proved unworkable to such an extent that it was taken out of IMOS altogether, having been there for years as a criterion for a person's Irish-language name, and having also been used informally as a criterion for a person's nationality. The simple reason is that it is extremely rare to find reliable sources that say unambiguously what a subject's personal preference is. There was a particularly lame dispute recently at Talk:Michael Gambon where one participant actually claimed that a 2010 interview where Gambon said he didn't "feel" Irish trumped a 2004 interview where he said "I am Irish"! The case of Chelsea Manning is relatively unique, in that the subject's personal preference made banner headlines. The only similar case I can think of off-hand is Muhammad Ali, and we call him Muhammad Ali because that is how he has been referred to by every sports writer for the past forty-odd years, not because he "self-identifies" as Ali. "Jew" is also a bad example, because even if that statement is correct, it is not a principle that is universally applied. Quakers are called Quakers, although they call themselves "Friends", and Hispanics are called Hispanics regardless of whether, as a group, they have ever expressed a preference. To say that "the term most commonly used for a person will be the one that person uses for himself or herself, and the most common terms for a group will be those that the group most commonly uses for itself", therefore, is simply untrue. This is not to rule self-identification out altogether, by the way. Where RS, NPOV and other policies do not point to a single answer, identity will be decided by discussion and consensus, and self-identification is a perfectly valid argument in a discussion. It just doesn't belong in a MOS. Scolaire (talk) 20:35, 8 September 2013 (UTC)

?OK, question: what do we do when there are multiple names for a subject, like with Octavian? Would that not be a similar situation? Int21h (talk) 01:00, 9 September 2013 (UTC)

My answer would be, discuss it on the article talk page. It's an article-specific question, not a question of style. This page is only for giving general guidelines. Scolaire (talk) 08:08, 9 September 2013 (UTC)

As an addendum to my !!vote, I would prefer that there be an accordance between the MOS and COMMONNAME/ARTICLETITLE. Situations like what's currently at Bradley Manning, where the article title and the name used for the subject in the article are not the same, seem very strange. I'm not aware of any reason (or argument for) the article body would differ from the article titling. We have separate policies for these, but internal procedural matters should not be overtly visible to users like this. A simple fix would be to adopt the article title as the name to be used for the subject. (Obviously, this will not be favored by those who are currently opposing the use of Bradley in the current scenario. However, I think a consensus could form around this at a later date.) OSborn ^arf_contribs. 01:02, 14 September 2013 (UTC)

RfC on pronouns throughout life

It would appear that the jury is still out on the topic of pronouns from before a person's announcement (for example, referring to Private Manning as either "she" or "he" when Manning was young). Discussions on this topic have been mixed in with other discussions, so I propose a dedicated discussion. I propose a survey on the retention or removal of the sentence on this topic.

Regarding the following sentence from MOS:IDENTITY:

This applies in references to any phase of that person's life.

What do you think should happen to this sentence?

• Keep
• Delete
• Change (please specify how)

Proposed by CaseyPenk, who will not !vote on this matter but reserves the right to comment. CaseyPenk (talk) 18:47, 9 September 2013 (UTC)

Survey on pronouns throughout life

• Keep. Trans women are women. Thinking of trans women whose bodies haven't yet been fixed with surgery as men uses the point of view that people whose anatomy and identity do not match are people with the right anatomy and the wrong identity, a point of view people who understand transgenderism don't use. How easy is it to understand this statement:

Christine Jorgensen is a woman; this statement is true throughout her life; she merely had the wrong body before it got fixed with surgery. Georgia guy (talk) 18:51, 9 September 2013 (UTC)

It's not easy to understand. For one thing when you say transwomen, it isn't immediately clear whether you mean men who became women or women who became men. Saying they are women all their life doesn't make sense, then they wouldn't be a trans-woman. Christine Jorgensen was born male. She was uncomfortable with that gender so she changed it with surgery.Walterego (talk) 08:49, 10 September 2013 (UTC)

The terms "transman" and "transwoman" are standard and unambiguous, feel free to look them up in a popular online encyclopaedia. If you need further help to remember them then read the "trans" part as "transitioned to". Christine Jorgenson is a female who was born with a male body, her gender has not changed. Thryduulf (talk) 09:16, 10 September 2013 (UTC)

• delete Is is arguably more neutral to portray events as others viewed them, and not solely through the lens of an individuals' lived experience. For example, if there was a soldier in an all-male unit, it wouldnt' make sense to portray this soldier as "female" even if he had gender identity disorder during his time in service, because everyone around them treated them as if they were male. Rather it would make more sense to being the use of the female pronoun at the point that person comes out as transgender and begins transitioning (Note: I'm not saying we should require surgery, etc, but rather just the public announcement or obvious actions taken (such as a name change) that suggest you are embracing a different gender). This is in line with NGLJA guidelines. --Obi-Wan Kenobi (talk) 19:32, 9 September 2013 (UTC)

  Comment. You appear to be thinking that transsexualism is a mental disorder per the word "disorder" in your post. Georgia guy (talk) 19:48, 9 September 2013 (UTC)

I am not sure on OWK's reasoning, but we do have a page on gender identity disorder and we use the term "gender identity disorder" through the article on Manning. CaseyPenk (talk) 19:51, 9 September 2013 (UTC)

If someone is so disturbed by their assigned gender that they end up transitioning, then they would qualify for a diagnosis of GID. I know some people find GID offensive but that's what it is called - gender dysphoria is another term but it's more broad, and there are people with gender dysphoria who never transition. I'm not passing any judgement on what "disorder" means, as I'm not a clinical psychologist, so take it up with those guys not me.--Obi-Wan Kenobi (talk) 20:00, 9 September 2013 (UTC)

No. It's not called GID. It's Gender Dysphoria, at least in the United states, as of DSM V. We only use the outdated GID because that's what everyone calls it... That said, referring to is as GID is reasonable, I suppose, given that's what everyone calls it. Cam94509 (talk) 19:19, 11 September 2013 (UTC)

• Delete for the reasons I stated in the discussion section below. I also concur with OWK's point four paragraphs above, that it is "more neutral to portray events as others viewed them, and not solely through the lens of an individuals' lived experience." - Gothicfilm (talk) 19:44, 9 September 2013 (UTC)
• Delete. It is confusing and deceptive to describe someone who doesn't consider themselves female, and that no one considers female, as female, just because twenty later they will suddenly realize they should be such. Gender identity is more complex than something eternally unchanging - for some people it absolutely does change over time, and we shouldn't be pretending that it doesn't. --GRuban (talk) 20:41, 9 September 2013 (UTC)

• User:Cam94509 made an insightful comment about this recently. Basically, the push to "use the pronouns a person's contemporaries used at each stage of their life" misunderstands not just what it means to be trans, but also what pronouns (and names) are for. As Cam put it, pronouns and names are "used to refer to a person or thing, not used to describe them. In so far as they do any describing, they are used to describe that person in their current state, even if you are discussing them in past. You would, for instance, say 'Mrs. Smith did X as a child', even if she was Miss Carpenter at that time in her life." Many editors find this intuitive about names, perhaps because they have experience with people changing names: they may have had the chance to see how confusing it is to say "Miss Carpenter got an award from the mayor for her work. A year later, Mrs. Smith got a letter of thanks from the prime minister." (Huh? Are you discussing two people, or one?) Some editors find it less intuitive about pronouns, perhaps because they have less experience with people 'changing' genders. They may not have had a chance to see how much it confuses people to tell a story about a woman and switch to "he" midway through: "Mrs. Smith has always been patriotic. Miss Carpenter wrote her thesis on Trafalgar. In primary school, he told his classmates that his favourite holiday was 5 November." (Huh? How many people are you talking about??) Complicating matters, many transgender people say (and medical science, looking at brain structures, etc, increasingly supports) that they have always been the gender they now identify with, and that rather than 'changing' gender, they have simply come to accept and reveal their gender. Keep the line, I think. -sche (talk) 20:59, 9 September 2013 (UTC)

This makes sense; and indeed, when speaking to a TG person directly, I would probably use the current pronouns the whole way back - and I don't doubt the science that says (in some cases) that they have not really changed genders, they are just revealing their "true" gender that has always been there (there are also edge cases, I note, like people who prefer the pronouns "they" or "hir" or even self-created ones, or who don't identity as either male or female)

However, when writing an encyclopedic, neutral article, we have to take other things into consideration. You can already see that the guideline exhorts us to rewrite things to handle oddities like "He gave birth to a child" - so it's already explicitly acknowledged that use of the current pronouns complicates description of the past - but here we have a case of a soldier who is about to be incarcerated in an all-male prison and who has always been treated like a man - and the retroactive changing of pronouns, while it may misrepresent Manning's internal state as of some moment in time X, is indisputably a more accurate and neutral representation of how that person was viewed by the world when the events being described were happening. To take an extreme example, a reader may come across something like "She walked naked into the boys shower room and was mercilessly teased by the others" where the use of the female pronoun completely screws up the story - and then we're exhorted to not "avoid" pronouns either.

I see your point, that lines like "David Bowie was born in X" when David Bowie didn't even exist at the time, but when talking of the past, if you say "Bowie was born in 1965" - you're not imagining rock-star David Bowie, but Bowie as-he-was-as-a-little-boy. In the same way, when you use a pronoun to describe something in the past, that also invokes the PAST personage, not the current one, at least in my head. The pronouns bring to mind instantly a gender (and the whole package of gender roles that that entails) in a way that Mrs. Smith vs. Miss Carpenter doesn't. I think the best way would be to carefully draft two articles - say of Manning - and then do a survey of readers (a/b test) and try to understand what users find confusing, and is a pronoun switch ultimately worse or better than a consistent use of a pronoun. Ultimately, our goal is to prevent readable, good articles for our readers, that follow sources in a neutral fashion.--Obi-Wan Kenobi (talk) 21:30, 9 September 2013 (UTC)

"insightful" perhaps, but incorrect. When we write about Muhammad Ali, when we talk about his bouts before he changed his name, we call him Clay. When we write about Hillary Clinton, when we talk about her early life, we call her Hillary Rodham. So "You would, for instance, say 'Mrs. Smith did X as a child'," is strictly incorrect. We would not and do not write that.--GRuban (talk) 21:39, 9 September 2013 (UTC)

This gets at an important distinction: retrospective vs. retroactive changes. Muhammad Ali was already both famous and notable under the name Cassius Clay, and we don't retroactively replace Clay with Ali for his earlier bouts. David Bowie was completely unknown and non-notable as a child, and when we talk about his early life we're looking retrospectively at the biography of the person who would become famous as David Bowie. In that case it is completely natural to use the name Bowie throughout. Similarly, I think the rule under discussion here is fairly uncontroversial for retrospective use, when we're writing about someone who became notable later under a different name and identity. The difficulty is when a change would apply retroactively, replacing an earlier identity that was already well-known. It's hard to justify a blanket rule in this case, and many of the counterexamples that keep coming up (Muhammad Ali and Cat Stevens) are exactly in this category. --Amble (talk) 00:32, 10 September 2013 (UTC)

• delete/change It is a violation of WP:V and WP:BLP to make this a blanket policy/guideline. Just because SOME trans people feel that way their entire life, does not mean that ALL trans people feel that way their entire life, and we should not be making such statements on their behalf. In cases where people have made clear statements saying the have felt they have been gender X their entire life, then we should consider it. In cases where they have not made such statements, we should only switch genders for actions after their transition/announcement. Further, in historical actions that were clearly gender controlled (childbirth, membership in gender restricted groups, etc) we should use their original gender in order for things to make sense. Gaijin42 (talk) 21:20, 9 September 2013 (UTC)

• Delete without prejudice to developing better wording. There should be an assumption in favour of using the most recent pronoun, but the guidance is at present too rigid. It ought to allow for pronoun usage, for example, to reflect the preferences of the subject or to avoid confusing, tortured or deceptive text. I find the peripheral guidance on this wrong-headed. There is nothing wrong with saying that a transgender man once worked as a air-hostess and we should certainly not go by a rule of pretending that they never give birth. Wikipedia should reflect the world.

I think the guidance has been drawn up with two aims in mind. It should properly deal only with style related to gender-identity, but I think it is also trying to deal with the issue of privacy in low-profile BLPs. These are separate issues that should be dealt with separately.

@-sche. The argument that personal pronouns refer rather than describe may be tempting, but it is not correct. They do both. The fact that they do both may be more or less important depending on context, but consider: "When my son came to visit, I offered her a cup of tea". Formerip (talk) 21:31, 9 September 2013 (UTC)

• Delete per Gaijin42. The guideline pretends to follow the wishes of trans people, but there is no reason to suppose that all trans people feel this way - it's legislating how they are supposed to feel. Also, the guideline doesn't follow usage in the real world, either in reliable sources, or in manuals of style. StAnselm (talk) 21:44, 9 September 2013 (UTC)

To be clear, whilst the NLGJA recommends using pronoun-at-the-time, the AP and GLAAD both recommend using current pronoun without qualification. So it is true that these manuals do not explicitly advocate current-pronoun-always, nor do they advocate pronoun-at-the-time. Chris Smowton (talk) 13:06, 10 September 2013 (UTC)

• Keep as better for article consistency and more respectful to transgender people (per sche). I don't buy the argument that we need to change the MOS in a way that could potentially damage dozens of articles because purely hypothetical individual subjects might feel differently; if we have a subject who does feel that they have changed gender rather than always having been the gender they have revealed themselves to be, WP:IAR and handle that article differently. Don't open the door to trolls. –Roscelese (talk ⋅ contribs) 22:04, 9 September 2013 (UTC)

If I read your comment correctly, your belief is that most transgender individuals prefer to be referred to using the current preferred pronouns throughout all phases of their life, and that only a few transgender individuals feel differently? CaseyPenk (talk) 22:09, 9 September 2013 (UTC)

Which is not something that can be concluded from the evidence so far adduced. We have evidence that LGBT organisations advise that (linguistic) gender should match the identity of the person at the time and that transgender people talking about their childhood match their gender to their sex at birth. We don't seem to have anything, so far, pointing the other way. Formerip (talk) 22:25, 9 September 2013 (UTC)

• Keep It is my understanding that the majority of experts on the issue of gender identity take the position that the gender of a person is fixed before the age of three and remains unchanged over the course of a person's life. If that is correct, then it would be factually inaccurate to say that a transgender person "changed" gender. As an encyclopedia, factual accuracy is paramount, so the pronouns we use should reflect our current best information on a person's gender. If we find out that an article has inaccurately said that a person of one gender is actually the other gender, then we must change the article to remove the false information. 99.192.71.2 (talk) 22:06, 9 September 2013 (UTC) (=99.192....)

I will quote from this article in Encyclopedia Britannica:

Basic gender identity—the concept “I am a boy” or “I am a girl”—is generally established by the time the child reaches the age of three and is extremely difficult to modify thereafter.

CaseyPenk (talk) 22:13, 9 September 2013 (UTC)

Wikipedia's own Gender identity page cites two scholarly books in support of the same claim. 99.192.71.2 (talk) 22:40, 9 September 2013 (UTC) (=99.192....)

It's a general statement which may generally be true, but is complicated by the existence of transgender people. I don't imagine that this leaflet, written by transgender people, is intended for three year-olds. Formerip (talk) 22:42, 9 September 2013 (UTC)

If there is anything in that leaflet that contradicts the claim that gender is fixed in early childhood, point it out. I just briefly skimmed it and saw nothing that did that. 99.192.71.2 (talk) 22:51, 9 September 2013 (UTC) (=99.192....)

The title. Not "I am transgender, what do I do?", but "I think I might be transgender, now what do I do?". Formerip (talk) 22:57, 9 September 2013 (UTC)

That does not indicate anything about gender change. "I think I might be X" just means that I do not know for sure, but leaves open the possibility that I am and always have been X. 99.192.71.2 (talk) 23:27, 9 September 2013 (UTC) (=99.192....)

Perhaps, or perhaps not. But consider the statement cited above: "Basic gender identity—the concept “I am a boy” or “I am a girl”—is generally established by the time the child reaches the age of three and is extremely difficult to modify thereafter". Clearly, this is a general statement which does not take into account the experiences of transgender people. Formerip (talk) 23:45, 9 September 2013 (UTC)

If you are saying you think the Britannica article has it wrong, I agree. They also talk about "the proper identity" for a person, which assumes that there is something wrong with being transgender. I think we would all say that it is unfortunate, since typically a transgender person prefers a different body, but to call it "improper" is to us a moralizing term. It also talks about "sex-appropriate behaviour" as if that were not morally loaded. So no, I don't have much faith in Britannica on this. 99.192.71.2 (talk) 23:56, 9 September 2013 (UTC) (=99.192....)

My position is that this should be about human dignity before it is about scientific theory. A ten-year old biological girl who later identifies as a transgender man might be theorised as a boy. But that doesn't mean we have the right to insist she is one. Or, for that matter, deny she is one. Formerip (talk) 00:44, 10 September 2013 (UTC)

• Change to "This applies in references to any phase of that person's life, unless the person in question has expressed different desires in a WP:RS. If the person has expressed different desires, then follow those desires." There is absolutely nothing wrong with the sentence "He gave birth to his first child." Some men have uteruses. Some women have penises. This wording conforms to the AP Stylebook, the GLAAD guidelines, the NCTE's advice, the advice of UC Berkeley's Center for Gender Equity, and is common practice with people and in areas who are aware of trans issues. I'm significantly concerned that some commenters on this page don't appear to have looked at any material about this issue before they !voted, and I presume the closing admin will discount !votes based on uninformed personal opinion. Kevin Gorman (talk) 22:12, 9 September 2013 (UTC)

Most !votes have been thoughtful and grounded in reasonable rationales. I have yet to see any !votes that are hateful or propose ridiculous and untenable theories about transgender people. Most editors who support deletion of the sentence have put forward rationales based on reasonable pretenses, such as the desire to accurately described what reliable sources viewed the subject's gender to be at that phase in that person's life. Could you please identify which particular !votes you see as purely personal opinion? It may also help to respond to such comments so as to draw attention to what you view as faulty reasoning. Were I the closing admin I would not see the preceding comments as worthy of being discarded, sans an explanation of which ones should be discounted and why. CaseyPenk (talk) 22:19, 9 September 2013 (UTC)

The comment of StAnselm is problematic because although StAnselm claims the guideline doesn't follow usage in the real world, reliable sources, or in manuals of style, StAnselm provides no examples demonstrating that, StAnselm just puts the claim out there. I quoted several guidelines from reliable sources and the only stylebook I have on hand, all of which disagree with StAnselm. Gaijin42's comment is problematic because it is based on his personal feelings and among other things completely disregards academic consensus that gender identity is almost always formed at a young age and that most trans people do experience gender dysphoria or identify as a gender other than the sex they were born as from a very very young age. GRuban's comment is similarly problematic in that it disregards academic consensus that gender identity is formed at a young age, and is also disrespectful to trans people. I'm placing these here rather than in-line comments because I don't really want to get in to an argument with someone who, say, believes that trans people "suddenly realize" they want to switch genders when they're in their twenties. As an aside: since the gendergap list has a high number of subscribers who are knowledgeable about gender issues, I've gone ahead and notified that list of this discussion with a neutrally worded message. Kevin Gorman (talk) 22:34, 9 September 2013 (UTC)

I'll ping them here in case they want to respond to your concern or edit their rationales: User:StAnselm, User:Gaijin42, User:GRuban. If you find !votes provided without rationales troublesome, I assume you have similar qualms about User:Pass a Method's !vote, which the user provided with no rationale other than deferring to another editor.

Also, Gaijin42 cited Wikipedia policies in the rationale. Policy-backed arguments are generally strong. CaseyPenk (talk) 22:47, 9 September 2013 (UTC)

!Votes that don't provide their own unique rationale can be useful in pointing out to the closing admin that they should probably pay extra attention to the person whose rationale is being differed to, but yeah, I wouldn't really expect "keep per soandso" to hold the same weight as a full vote. Policy backed arguments are generally strong, but policy backed arguments that fly in the face of academic consensus - not so much. Kevin Gorman (talk) 23:04, 9 September 2013 (UTC)

Since I've been mentioned here, I was particularly thinking of the NLGJA's suggestion on "using the name and gender the individual used publicly at that time". I also note the issue is not covered in the Chicago Manual of Style, so presumably it advocates historical pronoun use. Moreover, I would like some evidence that the AP Stylebook advocates the usage discussed here. It certainly advocates current pronoun usage based on the subject's preference, but does it advocate historical use of the same? I can't even find that in the GLAAD Media Reference Guide. StAnselm (talk) 01:12, 10 September 2013 (UTC)

You are making problematic claims about what the sources recommend. GLAAD explicitly advises "It is usually best to report on transgender people's stories from the present day instead of narrating them from some point or multiple points in the past, thus avoiding confusion and potentially disrespectful use of incorrect pronouns." in your own link. I also don't know how Chicago not covering your preferred usage is evidence of them advocating your preferred usage. __Elaqueate (talk) 09:32, 11 September 2013 (UTC)

"It is usually best to report on transgender people's stories from the present day instead"

• Unfortunately, that's not a luxury we have. As an encyclopedia we have a responsibility to report on all parts of her life and cannot focus exclusively on the present day; furthermore, since Wikipedia is explicitly not written in a news style, we cannot write in a reporting tone or use present tense, as if we were telling story. We simply cannot say "She leaks the documents, then she gets arrested," as if it were a play-by-play. We have to use the past tense, and say, "(s)he leaked the documents, then (s)he got arrested." What may work for journalists doesn't always work here. CaseyPenk (talk) 01:16, 12 September 2013 (UTC)

CaseyPenk, since writing an encyclopedia is different from writing a news story as you point out, then it would seem that we really should put little weight (if any) on the style guidance that NGLJA gave to a journalist about pronoun use, sine it was (at best) advice for a different style of writing. 99.192.81.252 (talk) 03:40, 12 September 2013 (UTC) (=99.192....)

Okay, well in that case we have no guidelines to follow so we should default to the encyclopedic norm - describing the subject at a given time as it was known at the time. What you're saying is really that we shouldn't have any special journalistic exception for transgender people, and it seems that most people support that. CaseyPenk (talk) 04:10, 12 September 2013 (UTC)

No, the encyclopedic norm is not to describe the subject "as it was known at the time", but to describe the subject as they were at the time. So 10 years ago Manning was not just "known as" "Bradley", that was actually her name then. But also 10 years ago she was "known as" male, but she actually was female. Think of a transgender person as like someone who is in disguise and pretending to be the gender they are not, because that is pretty close to the reality. I quickly must add the disclaimer that this is not to say that a transgender person can be blamed for lying about their gender, but they are typically lying about it and for many, many years. Lying about your gender can literally be a matter of life and death for transgender people. But it is still a lie, and so as an encyclopedia we should not perpetuate the lie when we discover it. We now know that Manning is female. To continue to use male pronouns for Manning is to perpetuate the lie. 99.192.81.252 (talk) 04:24, 12 September 2013 (UTC) (=99.192....)

"as it was known at the time" <-- I believe very strongly in this definition. We are in the business of meta-reporting; reporting about reporting. Not reporting on our own, or spreading the truth, or even determining the truth. Just passing along what others have said. Rather mundane but that's our only goal and our only capability.

"as an encyclopedia we should not perpetuate the lie when we discover it" <-- Again, we are not in the business of "exposing" lies. That's the job of AdBusters, PETA, Heritage Foundation, GLAAD, and any number of other political or advocacy organizations. We are not in the business of "liberating" the public from "falsehoods" about gender; we simply report whatever accurate or not-so-accurate things the reliable sources say. It comes down to reliable sources. That's the only test we should use, and the results are unambiguous. They refer to Manning's younger years using "he." It's really that simple.

You seem still attached to the idea that Wikipedia should be exposing the truth, or even figuring the truth out. Well, think of it this way. Wikipedia is a robot. We can only do rote actions. Monkey see, monkey do. We parse a CBS News article, we copy the text, and then we paste it into a Wikipedia article (ignore copyvio concerns for the moment). The CBS News article describes "he" and then "she." All we have done is copied the text; we have not editorialized on it. We have simply quoted verbatim from a reliable source. Rather than invent our own arcane and elaborate solution, let's do as we have always done at the most fundamental level when writing Wikpedia articles: let's be robots. Let's do the only thing Wikipedia was ever designed to do: pass along what others have written. CaseyPenk (talk) 04:36, 12 September 2013 (UTC)

You still don't get it. I am not arguing for some sort of crusading advocacy of political agendas. When I say "as an encyclopedia we should not perpetuate the lie when we discover it" what I mean is the obvious. Take the previously repeated Memphis/Nashville example. If all the reliable sources over a period of 10 years say X was born in Memphis, we put that on X's Wikipedia page. But if reliable sources subsequently report that this was an error or a lie and X was actually born in Nashville, we report that. We certainly don't continue to say that for those ten years it was the case that X was born in Memphis, but then after that it became the case that X was born in Nashville. That's crazy. So if for many years people thought that Manning was male, but now we have the reliable sources to verify that she is female, we should not perpetuate the lie.

Also, you cannot possibly believe strongly in continuing to report information "as it was known at the time" when we subsequently have reliable sources that this information was false. It wasn't until 1974 that Jack Nicholson learned the true identity of his parents. His mother is a person he believed to be his sister, and the person he thought was his mother is his grandmother. This all happened after he was a world-famous movie star and twice nominated for "Best Actor" Oscars. His Wikipedia page accurately reports this story. So if in 1971 he had taken his mother (who he thought at the time was his sister) as his date for the Oscars, the Wikipedia page should not say "his date for the Oscars was his sister" even if every reliable source of that time reported that as the case. When errors are discovered (as reported in more recent reliable sources) we correct past errors. We do this every day on Wikipedia pages. We do not preserve errors as if they were facts. 99.192.81.252 (talk) 05:29, 12 September 2013 (UTC) (=99.192....)

I see your point quite clearly. We are rehashing the same debate and I've made myself clear so this is all I'll be saying: it would be an outrageous and unfortunate deception to pretend as if Chelsea did not live her life as a male up until her sentencing. We have a basic responsibility to tell history as it was, not as we interpret it now. I'll leave it at that. CaseyPenk (talk) 05:42, 12 September 2013 (UTC)

"it would be an outrageous and unfortunate deception to pretend as if Chelsea did not live her life as a male up until her sentencing." I agree 100%. The page should not do that. So just as Nicholson's page tells how he believed that his actual birth mother was his sister for the first half of his life even though she was his birth mother the whole time, Manning's page should say that she lived as a male up to her sentencing, even though she was female the whole time (and we have her statement published in oodles of news reports as verification of this). "We have a basic responsibility to tell history as it was, not as we interpret it now." I agree 100%. History as it was is that she was a female person in a male body, believed by all to be male for most of her life, who claimed to be male for most of her life and lived as male for most of her life. But at the same time, she was female. That's what all the reliable sources tell us. 99.192.81.252 (talk) 05:55, 12 September 2013 (UTC) (=99.192....)

I agree with 99.192 here, but I think we're talking past each other to some extent. I think (or hope) the disagreement is not over whether or not to report information which reliable sources say is incorrect; I think the disagreement is over whether or not the information that "at age 10, Manning was male" (as opposed to "...was living as a male") is incorrect or not (a disagreement fuelled by some sources' use of "he" to refer to Manning when writing about events that occurred before the 22nd of August).

If this were actually a disagreement over whether or not to repeat old sources' incorrect information, I would ask if you could point to any article in Wikipedia which presented, as if it were accurate, a statement which reliable sources now agreed was inaccurate. (I would then mention the article on WP:RSN so it could be cleaned up.) -sche (talk) 06:35, 12 September 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for the ping, Casey. So if "academic consensus" should say that gender identity is fixed by age three, should we write "he" until age three and "she" afterwards, though the actual personal decision should have been made at age twelve, and the public announcement at age twenty? That's silly. "Academic consensus" has never controlled a specific person's decision about anything, much less something so personal. All "academic consensus" it can do is talk about a theoretical person, not a real one, or at best about the majority, or the group. But people are individuals, not a faceless mass. I reject utterly the claim that treating our subjects as individuals, and going by their statements, and the statements of reliable sources specifically about them, rather than some sort of "academic consensus" from experts who had never met them, is somehow disrespectful of them. It is a strange sort of respect to treat our subjects as an undifferentiated mass, rather than as people with complex thoughts and expressions. --GRuban (talk) 01:11, 12 September 2013 (UTC)

GRuban, I don't think you understand how gender works. The idea that a person's gender is not fixed until the person is around 3 does not mean that a person already has a gender before that. It means that a younger child actually does not have a gender at all. So the idea that "he" is the right pronoun for a pre-gender person misunderstands how it works. For most people their sex and their gender "match" (for lack of a better word), so you can make a good guess about gender by checking the "naughty bits" and thus make a pronoun choice for the pre-gender child. But sometimes we get it wrong and afterwards have to correct the error. Think of it like a pregnant woman who is told by her doctor that the child will be a girl, but then at birth it turns out that the child is a boy. Surprise! Mistakes happen. But the fact that the parents of this child might have said "she" and "her" frequently during the pregnancy does not mean that the chird really was female before being born. Same for the mistakenly identified transgender child. 99.192.81.252 (talk) 03:40, 12 September 2013 (UTC) (=99.192....)

Oh nuts - I guess this will teach me to make a minor point and a major point in the same post, or risk someone addressing the minor, and ignoring the major. Let me strike that to avoid confusion. The major point is that "academic consensus" about people in general is not applicable to a specific person. We are all very different from the crowd, and deserve to be treated as individuals. Some have gender fixed, and some have it mutable, and some decide early, and some decide late. And I still reject that saying that is offensive; in fact, I'd be offended if someone told me something important about me were determined by some kind of "academic consensus". --GRuban (talk) 21:54, 12 September 2013 (UTC)

• Keep per Roscelese. Pass a Method talk 22:20, 9 September 2013 (UTC)
• Keep, many editors and especially vandals need a clear understanding of this because trans issues are just as of yet beyond their understanding. Or worse, they see trans people as morally inferior and wish to make this point through poor writing and editing. It seems this same argument needs to be asked and answered even with a good explanation. Imagine the disruption without a clear directive. Sportfan5000 (talk) 22:23, 9 September 2013 (UTC)

We can have guidance that achieves this aim without it being totally inflexible. Formerip (talk) 22:45, 9 September 2013 (UTC)

That flexibleness unfortunately devolves into "wikilawyering" ad nauseum that generally disrespects non-gender binary people, and anyone different. It's systematic bias that this should be addressing, not an exceptional case that may need an exemption. Sportfan5000 (talk) 02:22, 11 September 2013 (UTC)

• Keep as a clarification of our WP:BLP policy. Not using a transperson's preferred pronoun is deeply disrespectful of that person and would violate the spirit (if not the letter) of WP:BLP. It is also more consistent if we use the same pronoun throughout. Kaldari (talk) 22:43, 9 September 2013 (UTC)
• Keep - Pretty horrifying that you've felt the need to ask this, as it appears you seem to be pushing for a mass violation of WP:BLP and unleashing the maximum amount of drama possible on any and all articles relating to transgender people. Artw (talk) 23:02, 9 September 2013 (UTC)

A number of editors have expressed concerns over the use of current pronouns in past phases of a person's life. You can find a number of discussions on that very topic on Talk:Bradley Manning. Please do not accuse other editors of POV-pushing or of "unleashing the maximum amount of drama possible," as that could be construed as a personal attack. CaseyPenk (talk) 23:06, 9 September 2013 (UTC)

Yes, this conversation has been had many times, and you have been involved many times, and each time the importance of the correct pronoun has been stressed to you, and yet here we are again. You are right to note that a lot of these discussions get pretty heated, as they often seem to be driven by deliberate obtuseness, and accusations of bigotry often follow. The MOS is useful both as guidance and so that there are no excuses for going over old ground on multiple pages - removing the line would mean that argument dragged out repeatedly with all associated drama. Artw (talk) 23:27, 9 September 2013 (UTC)

"and each time the importance of the correct pronoun has been stressed to you" - I am not a school kid, so please do not treat me as such. I use the she pronoun consistently; please do not suggest otherwise. Many others disagree with you about this topic, as you can see from the delete !votes. A discussion is fully warranted. If the matter were settled it would be all keep !votes. CaseyPenk (talk) 00:41, 10 September 2013 (UTC)

• Delete - this is not to say that the opposite should be our standard, but usage beyond Wikipedia does not seem to be standardized on this yet; we're in a period of linguistic flux. The argument that someone who changes public gender was always actually their newly identified gender runs into scrapes with the admittedly small portion who do transgender reversal (and sources that say that gender identity cannot be made to change are not the same as saying that gender identity cannot change; I cannot be made to change my age, but my age will change without my trying). The statement that we should stick with the pronoun that the subject prefers makes an assumption about what the subject would prefer for their past, which I doubt we have sourced for most subjects. --Nat Gertler (talk) 23:19, 9 September 2013 (UTC)
• Keep, perhaps adding the caveat that if a person is well documented as preferring pronouns that pertain to their public identity at the time then that choice is acceptable for that person. Without such a known preference, referring to a trans person as a child using their asserted gender is harmless, whilst referring to them using their birth sex may constitute an unwitting slur, so the existing language is most likely to keep Wiki properly respectful to its subjects. Chris Smowton (talk) 23:26, 9 September 2013 (UTC)

• "referring to a trans person as a child using their asserted gender is harmless, whilst referring to them using their birth sex may constitute an unwitting slur"

Do you have any reliable sources to indicate this is true for all transgender people? CaseyPenk (talk) 01:19, 10 September 2013 (UTC)

No, because that's not what I'm claiming. I'm claiming that it's more likely to needlessly offend if you use their old pronoun than if you use their new one. Given the whole point of the MOS passage in question is to avoid being dickish without good reason we should take this more careful route. Are you honestly contending the opposite, that there are trans people in greater numbers that find it very offensive to use their new pronoun about their pre-transition life? Chris Smowton (talk) 12:32, 10 September 2013 (UTC)

• Delete. Prefer the principle of being guided by reliable sources beig taken to the lowest levels, sentence by sentence. Use the pronouns that are used in the sources that support the material on a sentence by sentence basis. Do not impose artificial consistency as an editorial decision. Allow for people have separate phases of life. A biography may use different names and titles for the child, the unmarried woman, the younger married woman, etc. If the pronoun changes across phases, so be it.

I support the deletion of the entire second dot point of MOSIDENTITY ("Any person whose..."). It supports editorial revisionism and the writing of material not in keeping with the sources supporting the material. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 01:10, 10 September 2013 (UTC)

• Delete per Gaijin42 and SmokeyJoe. GregJackP Boomer! 01:17, 10 September 2013 (UTC)
• Delete since the current phrasing is too rigid. If the article subject expresses a desire to be identified by different pronouns for each stage of his or her life, then we should have the discretion to follow those wishes. Edge3 (talk) 02:01, 10 September 2013 (UTC)
• Delete Nobody can alter the way they were born, I would use the opposite sex pronouns up to the person's id. change. - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 02:04, 10 September 2013 (UTC)
• Keep, and I can't believe we're seriously having to discuss this. Sceptre ^(talk) 05:11, 10 September 2013 (UTC)

Regardless of whether you think it should be discussed, it would be more helpful if you provided a rationale. CaseyPenk (talk) 05:20, 10 September 2013 (UTC)

• Delete There is no clear guidance in the wider media on applying new gender identifiers retrospectively. Indeed, neither the AP Stylebook or GLAAD explicitly address historical application. The National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association clarified their stance and recommends using the name and gender the individual used publicly at that time (see [2]). In short there is no universal outside authority, but one organization which has issued explicit guidelines that the The New York Times has agreed to abide by do not recommend retrospective application. The New York Times is unlikely to be on its own in adopting the NLGJA's recommendations, so you have to ask if it is wise for Wikipedia to adopt a contrary position? Wikipedia should be following trends, not establishing them. Betty Logan (talk) 07:28, 10 September 2013 (UTC)
• Change (or keep if there is no consensus for change). I can't really put the case for keeping better than -sche did, and there is a distinct difference between trans* people and people who convert from one religion to another. A religious conversion is a change from being a member of religion X to a member of religion Y, it is sometimes described as being a rebirth or a fresh start, or seeing the light - it is a change and not retroactive. A trans* person does not change from being male to female (or vice versa) they realise that their gender identity is not the gender they were assigned at birth, and at some point they choose to ask the world to refer to them as the gender they are and always have been rather than the incorrect gender they were assigned at birth. The transition isn't between being male and being female (or vice versa), it is a transition in the identity presented to the world. Kevin Gorman though makes the very good point that although most trans* people express the desire to be identified as their correct gender for their entire life, a minority do not and we have no reason to disregard those wishes. Kevin's wording of "This applies in references to any phase of that person's life, unless the person in question has expressed different desires in a WP:RS. If the person has expressed different desires, then follow those desires." I don't think is perfect but it would need minor wordsmithing only. Thryduulf (talk) 07:39, 10 September 2013 (UTC)
• Delete in favor of the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association position. Chelsea Manning's lawyer even made a statement to a wikipedia user saying that the pronouns should reflect the gender society perceived her as at the time. The current guideline is far too strict. There should be consistency between articles, so if a user reads 3 transgendered pages, the same rules apply to every page. Users shouldn't need to visit talk/policy pages, or research the subject's preference to determine what is going on. The point of the MOS is consistency between pages. If I am reading this debate correctly this entire conversation comes down to one thing. Should we be writing articles from the perspective of the subject (personal gender identity) or the way society viewed them (perceived gender identity) at the time? Using one pronoun before transition and another after does NOT invalidate the fact they have been the same gender their entire life, it merely reflects how society at large documented the subject at different points in time. tldr: NLGJA policy should replace current wording. Xkcdreader (talk) 12:59, 10 September 2013 (UTC)
• Keep - If for nothing else than the sake of simplicity. It strikes me that it will be difficult for readers to track subjects throughout an article if the gender of the pronoun is switching. NickCT (talk) 13:09, 10 September 2013 (UTC)
• Change per Kevin Gorman and/or Keep per NickCT. I think it would be equally confusing if not more to use both pronouns, certainly it would be more difficult for the editors writing the article who would have to juggle both female and male pronouns in a way that is comprehensible and at the same way respectful. I don't think it is particularly confusing with examples such as "she went to an all boys school" as long as it has been previously made clear the person is a trans woman. Space simian (talk) 13:28, 10 September 2013 (UTC)
• Delete/Change. To the person who pointed out that we say "'Mrs. Smith did X as a child'", let me reply that that although you may think the "Mrs." part supports keeping the line, the other part--the "child" part--supports deleting it. After all, Mrs. Smith isn't a child now--we say "Mrs. Smith, as a child" because we recognize that she was a child at the time the event took place.

And about personal versus perceived identity: there's another way to think of it. The subject's personal identity has changed. At the time, the subject considered himself male. The subject can say "I now think I was female all along"--but cannot say "I thought I was female all along", because she didn't. If you could go back in time and ask for a self-identification, this person would have said "I'm male". Ken Arromdee (talk) 16:36, 10 September 2013 (UTC)

Ken, see 99.192's comment beginning "The experts say that gender is fixed in early childhood..." -- the person's public persona has changed, but their internal identification, as far as we understand the matter, has not. She genuinely did think she was female all along. This is not to say that it's impossible to develop GID later in life, but I've never heard of such a thing. Chris Smowton (talk) 17:33, 10 September 2013 (UTC)

• Delete - Reading through the Bradley Manning article for mere interest, I was constantly confused when reading "she" with reference to her childhood. Whatever she may identify as now, she was not a "she" when a child. If Wikipedia editors find this confusing, I can imagine the general public does even moreso. Icemuon (talk) 16:44, 10 September 2013 (UTC)
• Keep For the sake of consistency consistent pronoun use makes for good sense and easy readability. Likewise, it affords a small amount of respect to the subject which must be of at least some importance.Pez Dispens3r (talk) 17:03, 10 September 2013 (UTC)
• Delete - To summarize/quote good points above:

1. "Is is arguably more neutral to portray events as others viewed them, and not solely through the lens of an individuals' lived experience."
2. Confusing and even deceptive/manipulative (for example pushing different identities at different points to win political/personal points/achieve personal/political goals, perhaps only short term)
3. "It is a violation of WP:V and WP:BLP to make this a blanket policy/guideline. Just because SOME trans people feel that way their entire life, does not mean that ALL trans people feel that way their entire life, and we should not be making such statements on their behalf." (But also subject to # 2 above.) And "The guideline pretends to follow the wishes of trans people, but there is no reason to suppose that all trans people feel this way - it's legislating how they are supposed to feel." Excellent points emphasizing wikipedia rules and not political promotion via wikipedia. Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_not#Wikipedia_is_not_a_soapbox_or_means_of_promotion (How hard to editor/advocates work to get this NewStatesman article published? [http://www.newstatesman.com/alex-hern/2013/09/chelsea-manning-gets-put-back-closet-wikipedia "Chelsea Manning gets put back in the closet by Wikipedia ")
4. "Prefer the principle of being guided by reliable sources being taken to the lowest levels, sentence by sentence. Use the pronouns that are used in the sources that support the material on a sentence by sentence basis. Do not impose artificial consistency as an editorial decision. Allow for people have separate phases of life." Excellent point.
5. "There is no clear guidance in the wider media on applying new gender identifiers retrospectively." User:Carolmooredc 18:22, 10 September 2013 (UTC)

• Keep, for a bunch of reasons that have been stated already, but I think it's better to be consistent, especially when some ambiguity/controversy over when the person transitioned crops up. Even in the case of Chelsea Manning, there's the thing over the name "Breanna" she used a few months ago before she came out, and there have been other things in the past, I think, so making the split between when we use "he" then "she" is just going to be a mess. Haipa Doragon (talk) 18:33, 10 September 2013 (UTC)
• Delete per WP:V. The verifiable status of a pronoun exists in reliable secondary sources which Wikipedia is based on. We do not rewrite secondary sources to our own whims, that is original research and synthesis. We report what is contained in secondary sources. We need to adhere to what the sources report in referring to the subjects of biographies or the whole premise of WP:V is in question. Elizium23 (talk) 20:27, 10 September 2013 (UTC)

  @Elizium23: You might like to read (and join; it hasn't been archived yet) the dedicated discussion about WP:V and pronouns here. In short, changing "John made his discovery of foobarium in 1923" to "Jane made her discovery of foobarium in 1923" based on a reliable source saying "John = Jane" seems no more like OR / SYNTHESIS than saying "foobarium is water-soluble" based on reliable sources saying "foobarium is soluble in H2O" and "water = H2O". Do you object to the latter?

  A bigger question: if books published after a trans woman comes out do use "she" even when writing about her childhood (when she was living as a male), would you have a problem with WP citing those books and using "she" when discussing her childhood? If those books contain information about her childhood that no other books contain, would you change the "she" to "he" when adding the info to WP, or would you mix pronouns (saying "he" when citing a book that said "as a child, he..." and saying "she" when citing a book that said "as a child, she..."), or would it not be possible to include the information at all? I'm curious, because I expect it's a common occurrence when people become famous only after transitioning. -sche (talk) 21:16, 10 September 2013 (UTC)

I think that if reliable secondary sources present a contradiction or a variety of terms then editorial discretion and WP:CONSENSUS need to be used to establish consistency and clarity of usage. Elizium23 (talk) 21:21, 10 September 2013 (UTC)

• If and when reliable sources refer to Chelsea's childhood, adolescence, and military service using feminine pronouns, I am more than supportive of using feminine pronouns throughout her life. CaseyPenk (talk) 21:27, 10 September 2013 (UTC)

• Keep. 1. We're making a political statement no matter what we do. a: Using the original pronoun throughout life implies that the trans person is making it up. b: Switching back and forth implies that the trans person actually changed gender. c: Using the recent pronoun implies that the trans person always was that gender. Option c is the most polite of these routes. Ordinarily, that wouldn't factor in here much, but since these options are so similar in most other respects, courtesy should be enough to tip the scale. 2. The closest we have to a scientific evidence on trans individuals seems to say that they do not decide to become female or male but rather discover that they always were, probably because their brain anatomy or body chemistry is closer to that of their gender identity than that of their genitalia. Some juries are still out and there is a lot that we don't yet know about what creates gender in humans, but at the moment, using the most recent preferred pronoun throughout the subject's life looks like the most accurate way to go. Darkfrog24 (talk) 22:23, 10 September 2013 (UTC)

• Change to accommodate personal preference or else Keep — I've gone back and forth about this over the last week or so. There's no great answer to this question. On the one hand, science seems to say that gender identity is generally fixed at a very young age. On the other hand, it doesn't seem to be unequivocally settled (I think? Not sure if there's much other than the report mentioned above saying "fixed by age 3"). Plus people's personal preferences are all over the map, at least judging from Ms Manning's choice, and arguably if they were notable for something they did as a man maybe it's confusing to use "she" throughout the article, like for instance with the Wachowski Brothers (were they never really brothers even though that's what they called themselves?). But really, I don't think it's actually confusing, it's just unxpected and unfamiliar. Who is going to be confused – if the article reminds us that "Chelsea was Bradley" – if the article says, "she was the star of the boys' choir"? Nobody, I don't think; assuming otherwise is an insult to our readers. In the end, I'm most convinced by the discussion I had with a friend, which is essentially the same as the other editor above, who said that if I was talking about some transgender friend of mine I totally would say that she went to a boys' school as a kid, especially if I were talking in a group with her, because to do otherwise would be totally insulting. I don't think this is different even if it is an encyclopedia and not a social conversation. That said, if people express a personal preference I can't see why we shouldn't respect it one way or the other. AgnosticAphid talk 01:13, 11 September 2013 (UTC)
  • In the interest of WP:BLP, I should note that the above poster seems to be confusing The Weinstein Brothers, who are, to the best of my knowledge (and by the status of our articles), still brothers, with The Wachowskis, for whom the term is trickier to apply. --Nat Gertler (talk) 01:39, 11 September 2013 (UTC)
    • Oh dear, you're quite right about that. It's just something I am not familiar with but casually read last week and should have checked before bringing up. I've fixed my comment. Thanks. AgnosticAphid talk 01:50, 11 September 2013 (UTC)
• Delete per my comments in the first section of this page and per my rationales here. The article on Dee Palmer is a great example of where such rigid wording goes off the rails, it's something that should be done case-by-case. The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい) 15:46, 11 September 2013 (UTC)
• Delete or (as a second choice) change to reflect current personal preference as to past identification. As two LGBT organizations have contradictory standards, this version also disrespects the subject's self-identity. I would prefer to be able to use the pronoun that current reliable sources use to refer to the subject, but that may also be confusing, as, apparently different major newspapers' style guides take different positions. (As I've noted before, the two female-to-male trans people use the female pronoun in referring to their own past life, sometimes referring to the female state as another person.) — Arthur Rubin (talk) 17:02, 11 September 2013 (UTC)

  Comment. That is nonsense. We refer to ourselves with I/me, which have no gender. (Arthur Rubin, please alter your statement so it is less confusing.) Georgia guy (talk) 17:11, 11 September 2013 (UTC)

Georgia guy, please do not reject the good-faith responses of others as "nonsense." CaseyPenk (talk) 17:14, 11 September 2013 (UTC)

He's saying that he knows some trans men who refer to themselves as she/her when they're talking about themselves; and I'm revealing that that clearly makes no sense. Georgia guy (talk) 17:18, 11 September 2013 (UTC)

It sounds like Arthur's friends refer to previous parts of their lives using third person ("sometimes referring to the female state as another person"). So they would use "she played in the sandbox" rather than "I played in the sandbox," presumably to demarcate their current selves from their past selves. CaseyPenk (talk) 17:28, 11 September 2013 (UTC)

• Delete - Our general policy is to go where the sources lead us. Before the ID change we certainly use the birth pronoun. Afterwords we would use the new pronoun. I do agree with a previous editor though, in that this would be a general guideline and we would need to take it case-by-case. Fyunck(click) (talk) 18:05, 11 September 2013 (UTC)
• Keep, per my comments in the previous thread. Cam94509 (talk) 19:01, 11 September 2013 (UTC)
• Delete If I call myself a cat, I am wrong. If I call myself a table, I am wrong. I have all the biological parts of a man, so if I call myself a woman before I've had the surgery to change that (which, for clarification, I have no intention of doing) why am I not equally wrong? The "feelings" of the people involved should have no bearing at all in what is supposed to be a repository of fact without bias. Sonar1313 (talk) 19:38, 11 September 2013 (UTC)

Sonar1313, I advise against comparing people to inanimate objects such as cats or tables. Some editors may find such comparisons highly offensive. CaseyPenk (talk) 19:49, 11 September 2013 (UTC)

In that case, say this: I am not the President of the United States, and if I call myself that, I'm wrong. If I call myself a resident of Bangladesh, I am wrong. These are facts as well, and they don't cease to be facts just because I think they're true in my head. Even so, I'm not budging from the position that feelings and being offended shouldn't come into play here. The moment someone holds back on publishing a true and verifiable fact on Wikipedia (or worse, changes one) because it might offend someone is the moment Wikipedia ceases to be a reliable, credible source of information. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Sonar1313 (talk • contribs) 23:06, 11 September 2013 (UTC)

Riddle me this, captain. As you can see from our article on gender, gender contains both a biological and a self-identification component. Why is self-identification an unacceptable basis for determining someone's gender? If someone says they're a man, are they not a man? If you think self-identification is not an acceptable basis for determining facts about people, how would you determine whether someone was gay, straight, or bisexual? Ask their sex partners how into it they seemed? Try to calculate it based upon what proportion of seemingly romantic public sightings were with men versus women? What about for religion? Should we say that if someone says, "I'm Jewish," we need to independently verify they've met some litmus test of how frequently they've been seen at temple? No, of course not, we take people at their word when it comes to this sort of self-identification question. AgnosticAphid talk 23:16, 11 September 2013 (UTC)

Except that doesn't address the question, which is, if someone says, for example, "I'm Jewish", do we need to call them Rabbi when talking about their earlier life when they prayed at a mosque? --GRuban (talk) 01:11, 12 September 2013 (UTC)

An excellent point; as well, "gender" and "sex" are distinct concepts (which, by the way, is an entirely modern construct, according to the cited article) and the English language - nor any language, for that matter - has no separate set of he/she pronouns for gender and for sex. Biologically speaking, one is either a man or a woman. (Or, I suppose, in the middle of a change, which is its own pronoun trouble and not being covered here.) Therefore it is entirely appropriate to match the pronoun to biological sex. Also, here is a further point in support of deleting the sentence. Cat Stevens was mentioned earlier. His birth name is Steven Georgiou, and he is referred to as such in his Wikipedia article during the period of his life prior to when he was known as Cat Stevens or Yusuf Islam. Consistency demands the same treatment for these pronouns. Sonar1313 (talk) 01:33, 12 September 2013 (UTC)

• Delete. The gender language should map the gender change. We should use the former gender language for the former phase of life, then change this language along with the gender change. Binksternet (talk) 21:18, 11 September 2013 (UTC)
• Delete/Change per others, identity can change throughout a persons life. That one transwoman wants to be called female throughout her life doesn't mean that another transwoman won't want it to be a distinct step that signifies an important event in her life. If that person indicated "from this day forward," gender should reflect the pronoun in the distinct phases of their life. It is insulting to presume we know more about their feelings than they do. It would be just as insulting to declare someone transgender before they have made that declaration (i.e. "outing"). This discussion happened more than a year ago when people wanted to start calling Pvt. Manning "Breanna" and "she" before the press release that declared his transwoman identity. It may equally be insulting to people they may have been in relationships with and that must also be taken into account. (i.e. a transwoman that was married to a hetero, cis-female prior to identifying as transwoman - that former spouse may have BLP concerns if we are forced to say the former spouse married a woman - Manning identified and lived as a gay man and the former boyfriend might have an issue if we claim he was involved in a relationship with a woman). Considering that mislabeling/misidentifting gender has led to violence against transgender individuals, we shouldn't remove previous identities and rewrite gender without consideration of the effect/harm/wishes of the subject and those who might feel harmed or slighted by the change. --DHeyward (talk) 22:36, 11 September 2013 (UTC)

• Keep but allow for exceptions for people who have specifically requested not to have their current pronouns applied to historical discussion. MaxHarmony (talk) 01:07, 12 September 2013 (UTC)

• MaxHarmony, why do you suggest this instead of the inverse (strike the word "not" from your suggestion, and assume that we will use at-the-time pronouns unless told otherwise)? CaseyPenk (talk) 01:19, 12 September 2013 (UTC)

• I would assume because, for most transgender people, the current preferred pronoun is also the preferred retrospective pronoun. Cam94509 (talk) 03:18, 12 September 2013 (UTC)

• Delete or Change I don't think that the wording should be so inflexible, as it can force articles into using unnecessarily clunky and confusing sentences to shoehorn past events into this style either by replacing the pronouns or studiously avoiding them. I think that in many cases using the same pronouns throughout all life stages is reasonable and will have little impact on clarity or readability, but there are also many scenarios where the gender that they were interacting with the world in is pertinent to the facts being presented or makes them more easily understandable. Whilst I think that articles should be internally consistent with the style they use (throughout life or pronouns used in sources at the time), I think they should be able to use either if it is sensible to do so. --Jeude54cartes (talk) 10:13, 12 September 2013 (UTC)
• Comment – I will post my own opinion later. But I note that most people voting "Delete" are actually proposing a change. We can't just delete the sentence and leave nothing in its place. At the very least, if there is no consensus on how to refer to earlier phases in a person's life, the guideline should explicitly say so. This would prevent it from being misinterpreted as mandating something it doesn't. – Smyth\^talk 11:25, 12 September 2013 (UTC)

No, I actually think just deleting it is the best option. I can think of ways that it could be better worded, but I think we will wait an eternity for a consensus about that. I'd be happy to be proved wrong, but I think the current wording is inappropriate, so the holding position should be nothing. Formerip (talk) 13:51, 12 September 2013 (UTC)

• Delete As it forces revisionist histories.CombatWombat42 (talk) 13:45, 12 September 2013 (UTC)

This is 50.201.255.38 from below. I'm only picking this vote for this response because it is the most recent one stating this. I feel these votes have things entirely backwards. This is not about any sort of "revisionist history", this is about making sure information inside of articles is not false. In almost any other case where it becomes known through reliable sources that something previously thought true was, in fact, not, any and all articles would be corrected to reflect the new information with little to no opposition. Yes, it would be noted that said fact was once thought to be otherwise, but that is an entirely different thing from repeating the incorrect information in articles as fact.

The whole point of this guideline is to make it clear that trans people are not some exception to this general rule, not that they should be handled differently. For basically no other case of reliable sources correcting a historical error can I see Wikipedia editors sitting around saying that they cannot/should not correct the error (or cannot correct it until some reliable source explicitly tells them to do so). Setting the bar differently for trans people is implicitly (if not explicitly) just as much a political and non-neutral editorial stance as changing pronouns to reflect the reliably reported reality. Simple Sarah (talk) 14:55, 12 September 2013 (UTC)

• Change - Suppose that a person was being described as a man since birth, and at some point the person decided to be called a woman. I think that it would be incorrect to call that person a man throughout the biography article, same with describing the person as a woman throughout the article. I think that we should call the person a man in the earlier part and a woman in the latter. It will get confusing, I know, but the opposite would be incorrect. --NaBUru38 (talk) 15:36, 12 September 2013 (UTC)
• Delete or Change. While we should rely on the sources for pronoun usage in general, much has been made about preferences of the class of person in question. No where do any of the "keep" votes provide evidence that all transgendered people prefer a unified pronoun. In fact, the current style intentionaly ignores those that have specifically stated they prefer a mixed usage depending upon the phase of their life under discussion. How anyone can support a unified approach that a one size fits all scheme protects transgendered persons yet ignores a stated preference on an individual is baffling. Two kinds of pork (talk) 17:23, 12 September 2013 (UTC)
• Delete. Either choice will put us at odds with the wishes of certain individuals, but changing whole-life pronouns also puts us at odds with verifiability. --erachima talk 20:51, 12 September 2013 (UTC)

Please explain why retroactive pronouns are at odds with verifiability. People keep stating this and I have yet to see anything that explains why this is true in an satisfactory manner. Verifiability is intended to prevent things such as original research or non-neutral points of view. All the existing guideline in question here is saying is that a person is a reliable source for verifying their own gender and that, therefore, Wikipedia should follow suit. If people are intending to challenge that people are the best sources for their own gender, they should clearly state that along with some very good evidence for why that's the case. Simple Sarah (talk) 21:02, 12 September 2013 (UTC)

All trans people have made verifiable statements that contrary to their biological sex of X, they are actually of gender Y, and have always considered themselves to be gender Y, even when they used and presented themselves repeatedly as gender X? While that is a common assertion by LGBT groups, it is not a verifiable fact. For those individuals who have said such statements, we can take that into account per WP:V, but for those that have not, we are making something up using WP:SYNTH of what LGBT groups say, SOME scientists say, etc. We have documented cases to the contrary (Notice that CaseyPink is now saying we should ignore Manning's statement in this regard, because when it doesn't fit the agenda, apparently the wishes of the individual are irrelevant. Gaijin42 (talk) 21:10, 12 September 2013 (UTC)

The "naive" interpretation of gender is that biological sex = gender, and it is unchangable. The LGBT line is that they are unrelated, but still unchangable. This is at odds of the very concept of TRANSITION, which explicitly indicates change. If there is a transition, there is by definition a BEFORE. Maybe the internal transition happened prior to the public transition. Maybe it happened at the moment of birth. BUT WE DO NOT KNOW. We should not be making these statements on the behalf of anyone. We cannot assume ANY aspect of the persons identity on their behalf. Gaijin42 (talk) 21:16, 12 September 2013 (UTC)

Except that is exactly what you're proposing. When a trans person comes out and says "I'm a (wo)man" (I'll keep it to binary identities for now), you're essentially saying that the position Wikipedia should take is "No, you're not." or, at best, "I'm going assume that right up until you said that, you were the other." This is not even remotely viewpoint neutral, no matter how much you might want to present it as such. And remember, the status quo does not make something neutral, it just makes something the status quo. And if you are going to assert that clearly what trans people say should be ignored because it's not reliable, please present evidence to indicate why your stance is somehow more neutral or accurate. Simple Sarah (talk) 21:29, 12 September 2013 (UTC)

They made one statement that they are gender X. They made MANY statements and actions previously indicating they were gender Y, in some cases specifically stating that they were gender Y. We have specific statements from Manning and others saying somethign to the contrary. We have incidents such as [3] where trans people specifically say that the change in genders (and back again in this case) was sudden and not a life long bit of knowledge. In the case of notable people, we have hundreds, thousands, or hundreds of thousands of references using the opposite gender. It is 100% the opposite of verifiability to assume anything other that what we can reliably source. We have many sources refering to prior gender in some cases. If there is no source saying "Nope, all of that is wrong, I was lying before" then all we know is that they NOW say they are the other gender. We knownothing about their prior gender except what THEY THEMSELVES presented themselves as, and how it was reported. Gaijin42 (talk) 23:24, 12 September 2013 (UTC)

Ignore new sources, because old sources? That won't end up well. In 99% of reliable sources about people's birth sex, we are relying on some measure of self-reporting. Most of the time it matches up with expectation, but that's not because it was verified by an outside authority. No one is putting reference notes to third-party reported pictures of genitals to back up article statements. In the case of your outlier "person who switches back" example, you are still relying on a reputable source that reports what a subject says their gender identity is. And the news articles about this subject consistently use his most current preferred pronoun throughout, even for historical events where he reports strongly, convincingly feeling that he was a woman and presented to the world as a woman, as well as being reported in reliable sources as a person using feminine pronouns. __Elaqueate (talk) 11:24, 13 September 2013 (UTC)

Old sources that ARE NOT CONTRADICTED by new sources. Unless the new sources says "I have always been a(n) X", we have no knowledge of what they previously considered themselves to be, except for the actions and presentation that they took at that time. So, old sources beat NO sources. There is a huge ASSUMPTION that they always felt that way, but we should not be making that decision on their behalf. Gaijin42 (talk) 14:44, 13 September 2013 (UTC)

Gender identity is like sexual orientation in a lot of ways. Most people identify as heterosexual, so most notable people identify as heterosexual as well. But most of them never publicly comment on their sexual orientation and, if they do, they don't do it very often, leaving very large gaps of time where we don't know how they identify. But Wikipedia pages need not comment on the sexual orientation, so it's not a problem.

With gender identity, we are at least as much at a loss for information other than assumptions. Does any of us know what the true gender identity is for Tom Hanks or Angela Merkel or J. K. Rowling? Nope. So far as I know none of them has ever said what it is because people who are not transgender never think it is something worth mentioning and people who are, but have decided to keep it private, won't usually comment either. But Wikipedia pages DO need to choose pronouns to use, so we DO need to make some assumption (and that is all we can do) about gender. There is no assumption-free position.

So the issue is not WHETHER we make assumptions about gender, but which ones we should make. It is uncontroversial that when a person has made no public statement about their gender and their sex is not controversial to assume that their sex and gender "match". So we assume that Hanks is male and that Merkel and Rowling are female and use the pronouns that correspond. That is what the sources we use do, too. They do not "fact check" the gender of these people before deciding on a pronoun. With transgender people, the best expert opinions we have are that gender is fixed and does not change. The typical story transgender people tell is that they have always felt that they were the gender they identify with and did not "change" gender at some point. That makes it the most reasonable thing to do to assume that all people, transgender or otherwise, have always been the gender they are now.

Assumptions are unavoidable unless we ban all pronouns and gendered words. The question is merely WHICH assumption makes the most sense. 99.192.51.41 (talk) 15:25, 13 September 2013 (UTC) (=99.192....)

Survey on pronouns throughout life: arbitrary break

Delete It is not 1984 and we should not engage wp in Doublethink. Arzel (talk) 17:11, 13 September 2013 (UTC)

Strong Keep: Those arguing that it is some kind of revisionism to use a person's current preferred pronouns for earlier periods of their life, misunderstand the issue, and in particular misunderstand the perspective of trans people. Even in the case of trans people who recognize their need to transition quite late in life, typically that isn't because they have ever identified with their assigned gender. That gender has been imposed on them, nonconsensually. It is disrespectful not to recognize that. --Daira Hopwood ⚥ (talk) 19:22, 13 September 2013 (UTC)

Wikipedia is a place to respect, but not bow to, "the perspective of trans people". We can't just use the perspective of any limited group of people to make policy. We must recognise the realities of the world as it is.CombatWombat42 (talk) 21:58, 17 September 2013 (UTC)

Keep: I am a trans woman, and honestly it just seems bizzare to talk about my past using masculine pronouns. Using a phrase like "when he was 10" to talk about someone who is a woman simply doesn't make sense, even if that person or the people they knew didn't realize they were female yet. I am active in the trans community, and I don't know of anyone who would prefer to be referred to that way. People above have already linked to all sorts of resources and style guides explaining why it is the only respectful way to talk about a trans person. Seeing people insist on misgendering someone before their public transition just makes it seem like they're saying that trans people aren't really their transitioned gender until they've made some arbitrary step that is decided by the one writing the article. Instead of choosing to delete that line based on your own personal feelings and assumptions about a situation you can't possibly understand, try talking to trans people or looking into resources written by organizations familiar with trans issues - show that you actually care enough about the situation to consider the opinions of those it affects and who understand it the most. Katie R (talk) 19:54, 13 September 2013 (UTC)

I would like to add that I am in favor of changing it so that if a trans person specifically states that they prefer to be called by the other set of pronouns pre-transistion, that we should respect their wishes. Katie R (talk) 19:59, 13 September 2013 (UTC)

I understand your POV, and if we were having a discussion at a coffee shop I would probably follow your choice of pronouns. However, this is an encyclopedia, so we have to think about ALL of our readers, and we may have to do things that may go against the subject's wishes in order to better represent reliable sources and tell an accurate story - indeed, we do that a lot. The reason a lot of us are arguing for the "previous" pronouns is because gender has multiple components - one of them is your internal identity, but the other is your social identity, and you aren't necessarily always in control of your social/public identity - and it is your social identity that determines which soccer team you play on or which locker room you use etc - and I think recognizing that social identity and not confusing it through the use of retroactive pronouns is a more accurate portrayal of how the world saw person X at a given point in time Y. You said: "Seeing people insist on misgendering someone before their public transition just makes it seem like they're saying that trans people aren't really their transitioned gender until they've made some arbitrary step" - No! It is not making any claim about their own personal gender identity - it is rather making a claim of how the world saw them at that time. The problem with he/she is a) we don't have a viable and widely used 3rd option b) it stands in for both sex and gender and c) it conflates personal identity with social identity. I don't think we are saying that editors can decide arbitrarily at what point to stop using "he" and to start using "she"; instead we are stating that one a trans person publicly comes out and says "I am a woman", we are assuming going forward that society will begin to treat this person as a woman, and so use the "she" pronouns.--Obi-Wan Kenobi (talk) 20:44, 13 September 2013 (UTC)

"... a more accurate portrayal of how the world saw person X ..." This is silly. There is an entire category called Category:Impostors that is full of people who were "seen by the world" in a certain way that was later found out to be false. When that happens, it is acceptable (and sometimes essential) to report the false impression, but we report it as false, not as true. Wikipedia is not in the business of preserving false impressions the public had of people just because that is how they were seen at the time. When reliable sources tell us that a previous belief, no matter how widely it was believed, is not actually true, we correct the error on our pages. To suggest we should do otherwise is to suggest we should write fiction.

Grey Owl was not the man he claimed to be, even though his claims were widely believed at the time. The word "claimed" is is used a lot on his Wikipedia page to make it clear that these widespread beliefs were false. Arnaud du Tilh was not Martin Guerre, even though it was widely believed that he was. The word "claimed" is used a lot on that page, too. And Lennay Kekua never existed, no matter how many people thought she did.

Transgender people typically will claim to be the gender they are not and are typically widely believed to be the gender they are not before they make the truth known. If you want to say "Smith claimed to be a woman in 1986" or "in 1986 everyone thought Smith was a woman" that's fine. But to say "in 1986 she..." is to perpetuate the error as much as it would be to say that in 1556 Martin Guerre returned home. He didn't. And Lennay Kekua didn't die in 2012, no matter how many people believed she did at the time. 99.192.76.246 (talk) 23:51, 13 September 2013 (UTC) (=99.192....)

Keep. I believe this is in keeping with the latest opinions of the AMA and the DSM. Also, picture yourself face-to-face with a transgender person; to refer to that person knowingly with a wrong pronoun would be rude (and confusing), no matter whether you're referring to the past or the present. Furthermore, a person is transgender before coming out and transitioning. Startswithj (talk) 03:30, 14 September 2013 (UTC)

Keep in mind that wikipeia is not "face-to-face" with a transgendered person, it is reporting events. CombatWombat42 (talk) 21:58, 17 September 2013 (UTC)

I meant to illustrate that in a real-world example it would be rude, awkward, and confusing. Perhaps it would be more clear to specify that whether we are writing/reading (speaking/hearing) of the past, we still do so in the present—and in the present, we know the subject's gender identity. Pronouns refer to gender identity, which does not change (as opposed to gender expression, which does). Startswithj (talk) 15:28, 18 September 2013 (UTC)

I think that saying that "pronouns refer to gender identity" begs a "sez who" response. Certainly, we feel free to refer to a baby as he or she without asking then about their gender identity. Through most of the use of the English language, he or she were seen as referring to "sex", and gender was an attribute of words, not of people. There is a good case to be made that pronouns should refer to gender identity (as well as a good case that the world should default to gender-neutral pronouns), and we may well be trending toward that, but that is not uniformly how the English language is used today. The question then is: should Wikipedia prescribe a more narrow set of acceptable uses than is currently generally exercised in English? --Nat Gertler (talk) 16:16, 18 September 2013 (UTC)

Keep. As I argued at length on this page nearly a year ago[4], (1) it is common, if not usual, to refer to a person at any point in the past using the referential words that currently refer to them; (2) referring to someone using the words that currently refer never suggests anything about what terms were appropriate in the past (and thus the position to keep is more neutral than the alternative); and (3) writing as though a person has changed gender identity is often done for dramatic or sensationalistic reasons and thus does not fit an encyclopedic tone. Also, as 99.192.71.2 has observed above, gender identity is established at an early age; most of what is characterized as gender identity changes is really just a change in who recognizes the true gender identity.

If there is a decision to change despite the reasons not to do so, then I hope we go with Kevin Gorman's suggestion: "This applies in references to any phase of that person's life, unless the person in question has expressed different desires in a WP:RS. If the person has expressed different desires, then follow those desires."

-- Marie Paradox (talk) 04:13, 16 September 2013 (UTC)

Do not delete There are two major convenitions, and different people prefer different ones. But I think we should change, not delete - explain both conventions, and give advice on when each are preferred, for instance, if someone's autobiography uses one, we should likely follow that. Adam Cuerden ^(talk) 08:08, 16 September 2013 (UTC)

• Keep per -sche, although I would also be happy with wording such as Kevin Gorman's suggestion of following a subject's explicit, clear and unambiguous request that people referring to them do something else. —me_and 21:23, 16 September 2013 (UTC)

Discussion on pronouns throughout life

Pronouns throughout life: NLGJA guidelines

• My problem is with the re-writing of past events before the name change. Why isn't there more acknowledgment of the NLGJA policy? A spokesperson for the group said it would recommend “he” for historical reference: “When writing about events prior to when the person began living publicly as the opposite gender, NLGJA recommends using the name and gender the individual used publicly at that time. For example: Chelsea Manning, formerly known as Bradley, came out as transgender last week. In a statement, Manning said she had felt this way since childhood. Manning grew up in Oklahoma. In middle school, he was very outspoken in class about government issues and religious beliefs, friends said.”

The full article is here. It was Betty Logan who drew my attention to that article, and I fully agree with her points near the top of an earlier discussion on this page, particularly:

The use of the female pronoun in such instances removes clarity from expressing a factual claim. It undermines WP:V, not least because you are not representing the claim as clearly as possible. You are effectively introducing wordplay to alter the context and expression of a fact that is not present in the source. MOS:IDENTITY is a nice guiding principle to have, but not if it compromises the documenting of fact, which is the over-riding goal of Wikipedia. In cases where the events of a person's life or facts about them are clearly contingent on them being biologically male/female then they shouldn't be compromised by revisionist gender pronouns. Betty Logan (talk) 20:01, 22 August 2013 (UTC)

When building an encyclopedia we should respect history before anything else. The "she" pronoun should not be applied retrospectively when the subject was male. The "inconsistency of pronouns will confuse our readers" argument doesn't hold up. The reader is much more likely to be confused as to how the person was perceived by misidentifying the contemporaneous gender. When Manning was in the military everyone saw the person as male. Sources reporting on the trial wrote about Manning as male. WP should reflect that because it's not an account from the subject's POV, it's an encyclopedia. - Gothicfilm (talk) 19:23, 9 September 2013 (UTC)

• I won't address your entire post, but I would note that the NLGJA is focused on gay and lesbian - not transgender - issues. There has been historical animosity between gay/lesbian people and transgender people. That animosity still exists to some degree, although I think it is getting better. I think there are two main reasons for that animosity:

1. In some senses, gays/lesbians have different goals for the LGBT movement than transgender people do. Transgender people might value hormone replacement therapy more than same-sex marriage rights, and vice versa for gays/lesbians.
2. Gays and lesbians may not fully understand the experiences of transgender people, just as I do not fully understand the experiences of some groups to which I do not belong. Whether a lack of understanding of transgender issues factors into the NLGJA guidelines, I am not sure, but you may wish to consider that possibility. CaseyPenk (talk) 19:26, 9 September 2013 (UTC)

From their website: "Founded in 1990, NLGJA is an organization of journalists, media professionals, educators and students working from within the news industry to foster fair and accurate coverage of LGBT issues. NLGJA opposes all forms of workplace bias and provides professional development to its members." so I'm not sure if your statement is true Casey.--Obi-Wan Kenobi (talk) 19:29, 9 September 2013 (UTC)

Name-dropping the term "LGBT" is common; many organizations do that. Actually following through on issues of interest to the "T" part is much more difficult. For example, many transgender people criticize the Human Rights Campaign for neglecting transgender issues despite the HRC claiming to speak for all LGBT people. While the NLGJA might not be actively hostile to transgender causes, it might not be the most supportive. CaseyPenk (talk) 19:32, 9 September 2013 (UTC)

You should write an email to NGLJA and GLAAD and ask them why they have disparate guidelines then.--Obi-Wan Kenobi (talk) 19:33, 9 September 2013 (UTC)

I'm not sure if that was serious or rhetorical. I don't claim to definitively understand why different organizations issue different guidelines; but the tensions between L/G and T is one possible reason. CaseyPenk (talk) 19:34, 9 September 2013 (UTC)

I don't think we should assume any tension as a reason to diminish the NLGJA policy. The principle of writing accurately for an encyclopedia holds. The article is about events that occurred and how RS reported those events. - Gothicfilm (talk) 19:41, 9 September 2013 (UTC)

Again, I am not necessarily assuming tension - but I am suggesting that tension may be there. CaseyPenk (talk) 19:52, 9 September 2013 (UTC)

A lot of weight seems to be being put on a the second had report of a comment one spokesperson made in an email. This was not an officially published statement of policy nor was it a public announcement of any kind marking an "official" position on pronouns. Furthermore, that email refers to the "gender the individual used publicly at that time." Note it does not say the "gender the individual was at that time." So even the NLGJA seems to be saying that Manning was female at the time. If their advice to journalists is based on worrying about confusion rather than accuracy, then we really should NOT take this advice. But I would like to hear more from NLGJA or some other similar organization before concluding that it is accurate to use "he". 99.192.71.2 (talk) 22:19, 9 September 2013 (UTC) (-99.192....)

"If their advice to journalists is based on worrying about confusion rather than accuracy, then we really should NOT take this advice." Where in the WP:RS policy are we instructed to not take such advice? CaseyPenk (talk) 15:10, 10 September 2013 (UTC)

This question misses the point entirely. The question is not whether or not NLGJA is a reliable source. Whether or not something is a reliable source is a question we ask about matters of fact. That is, when source X says Y is true, we want to know if source X is reliable with regards to fact Y. But when some organization says "it's a good idea to do A because it's less confusing than doing B" we are not talking about facts, but advice. We might agree that it is less confusing to do A and we might take them as being a reliable source that doing A is less confusing than doing B, but if it is the case that doing A is to say things that are less confusing wile false and doing B is to say things that are more confusing while true, then Wikipedia clearly needs to do B. Do I really have to cite a policy that says Wikipedia should report things that are true rather than things that are false even when the lie is less confusing?

The NLGJA seems to be saying that it is false that Manning was male as a child, but less confusing to the reader to use male pronouns for the period of her life when she was "Bradley". I agree, which is why Wikipedia should use female pronouns for her childhood. We can do things to help mitigate the confusion, but we should not compromise on the truth. 99.192.66.121 (talk) 15:39, 10 September 2013 (UTC) (=99.192....)

How do you know what the truth of Manning's childhood gender identity is? Have they explicitly said it? Oh, you don't have a source? Thats not much truth then is it...Gaijin42 (talk) 15:52, 10 September 2013 (UTC)

The experts say that gender is fixed in early childhood and does not change over the course of a life. Manning says she is a woman and has felt this way since early childhood. QED. 99.192.66.121 (talk) 16:33, 10 September 2013 (UTC) (=99.192....)

Experts don't make blanket assertions about gender especially since everyone's experience can be different. Besides, this MOS is based mostly on those that have dysphoria and go through a change in gender identity at some point in their adult lives. In Manning's case the letter specifically said "from this point forward" and it was also confirmed from the attorney that "she" should be used in the future. In a September 3, 2013 letter, however, Manning's attorney used "he" in reference "Bradley Manning." I'd also note that if we went by "experts" and not by the person's preference, Manning would have been called "Breanna" and we would have switched to "she" more than a year ago. We did not, because Manning did not. Manning was living as a gay man for his adult life. It would not be unheard of for the male gay partner of a heretofore unknown transwoman to commit violence against that woman when she comes out as transwoman and starts living as a woman while the partner believes he is in a relationship with a man. There are many reasons why someone may make a distinction in the different portions of their lives and it's really not up to us to force a concept on them. Certainly no "expert" would agree that every transgender person should a) start living their life in that gender role, b) start hormone therapy and c) have surgery. It's not cookie cutter and any "expert" would know that. None of the DSM criteria for GID/GD require childhood identification of gender for diagnosis, BTW. --DHeyward (talk) 00:03, 12 September 2013 (UTC)

The lawyer has explicitly said that the use of masculine pronouns in legal requests was a specific and and expected exception to preferred usage. There is no "fuzziness" about this. The lawyer has used feminine pronouns consistently and repeatedly on national television, on every post-announcement press release, he's changed the twitter account and explained that "Chelsea" and feminine pronouns are what Chelsea prefers. The exceptions are caused by working within an unsympathetic environment for legal and military paperwork. You are trying to take a stated and explained exception as proof that there is no clear and overwhelming preference. And I am finding your reasoning specious that it is "forcing a concept" on someone if you were to use the pronouns they stated a preference for. We are also not talking about publishing unsourced material on any "unknown" trans woman. You are twisting the concept of outing a person who has not stated something into the idea that a trans person should be ignored and misgendered for their own good. __Elaqueate (talk) 00:37, 12 September 2013 (UTC)

"And I am finding your reasoning specious that it is "forcing a concept" on someone if you were to use the pronouns they stated a preference for."

• It's one thing to use their preferred pronouns to describe their life from this day forward; it's another to foist such pronouns upon their entire life if they have not expressed such a desire. What we're saying is that stating a pronoun preference does not necessarily mean that person prefers those pronouns to be used throughout their entire life. Even Chelsea said, from this day forward. CaseyPenk (talk) 01:09, 12 September 2013 (UTC)

I think people should have stories using their preferred pronouns. It's better to accidentally use the current stated (or as presented) pronoun when narrating the past from our position here in the present than to use the former pronoun. The sources are clear that there is harm to some from misgendering using the past one. I don't see any source anywhere suggesting harm has come from accidentally using a stated and preferred one too much. It's best to find out preferences, of course. __Elaqueate (talk) 02:11, 12 September 2013 (UTC)

CaseyPenk, please notice where her lawyer says {http://www.armycourtmartialdefense.info/ "Yesterday was my first opportunity to speak with Chelsea since her sentencing."] Notice that it says "her" sentencing, an event that happened pre-announcement. Also please, watch the Today show segment on Youtube you'll see her lawyer talking about the reasons "She" leaked documents, about the chat sessions "she" took part in. All past events, and they use "she" almost invisibly because we know we're talking about a person we call "she" now. It's not a matter of re-writing the past, as it is referencing that we're talking about the person/subject we know now. __Elaqueate (talk) 02:58, 12 September 2013 (UTC)

Elaqueate, please point me to the source where the lawyer said gender pronouns would be an exception. Obviously, "Bradley" is the name the army uses and future court filings will match that. But using "he" instead of "she" in a letter of pardon to President Obama? Too rigid a system? Too difficult for the President to grasp?? Seriously?? Are you proposing that we should write the article so that even the President can't understand it? I find the masculine gender pronoun legal argument as specious. As for "forcing a concept", I don't think I used that term so I am not sure why you quoted it. I said a transgender persons wishes should be respected whether they wish to be known going forward or whether they wish their entire biography to use a particular pronoun is up to them. Manning was diagnosed over a year ago and there were people that changed to name in the article to "Breanna" and the pronouns to "she" more than a year before she came out as Chelsea. It should not be MOS style to adopt a transgender identity before the person themselves have requested it which is the same as ignoring their preference for past tense reference using their gender assigned at birth. If Manning wishes to be called "Bradley" and "he" for every event up to the press release, and "Chelsea" and "she" after, that's their choice, not an agenda. The specious argument is the one that acknowledges that gender identity can be forced on someone before they have accepted it themselves as happened in May 2012 to "Breanna Manning" or that each and every transgender person's experience is the same and uniform. Respecting their wishes may or may not be a complete rewrite of an article. What's even more appalling is guessing their wishes based on a manual. --DHeyward (talk) 01:24, 12 September 2013 (UTC)

You seem to be arguing that Chelsea Manning and her lawyer don't know what pronouns they prefer, because of the pardon letter. When someone actively asserts that they prefer feminine pronouns it is certainly more of a stretch to assume they want masculine pronouns anywhere. "Prefer" is the word she used. And that she would "expect" that masculine pronouns would be used for legal paperwork and things having to do at the trial. So it shouldn't be some weird "gotcha" moment when it turns up on a plea for pardon. We also have her chatlog where she said didn't want the public to see her as a "boy". I don't know why people are mystifying this. If you look at the lawyer's statements here and here, you'll see pretty bald statements of preference. I haven't seen any usage on their part that doesn't match what they explained ahead of time. As for your argument against people who wanted to do something about "Breanna", well, it seems like you're not very happy with them. It would be bad to make choices without any declaration of any preference. I don't know what that has to do after Chelsea has made a direct announcement of her preference. The statement "I prefer feminine pronouns" does not imply "Only on tuesdays". She listed the exceptions that did apply (legal work and communications to government). __Elaqueate (talk) 02:11, 12 September 2013 (UTC)

Actually, I'm only arguing what I argued but you seem like you'd rather create a strawman to argue with. There simply is no reason to use feminine pronouns with correspondence to the President. It's not like it will come down to "You used the wrong pronouns, pardon denied." How do you feel about the editors that jumped on "Breanna" and rewrote the article with "Breanna" and feminine pronouns more than a year before Manning announced "I am Chelsea?" That's the heart of the policy: Do we consider the subject when we make gender identification claims? The rush to make her a woman prior to her own conclusions in August, 2013 is just as bad and harmful as ignoring her desire after she has accepted it. I submit that we do consider the subject yet you seem to steadfastly cling to the belief that we know better than the subjects and persons unrelated to the case at hand can and should direct how a person is referenced. Are you going to be just as unwilling to accept her desire for hormone therapy but not surgery or are you going to insist that she wants surgery, too, when she has clearly said she doesn't? --DHeyward (talk) 04:27, 12 September 2013 (UTC)

I don't know why you are so concerned about how they talk to the President. They have said that she prefers feminine pronouns and they made a clear indication that they would make an exception for communications with the government. Are you saying people should take this admitted exception as evidence that she changed her mind about being a woman and wanting feminine pronouns? __Elaqueate (talk) 08:57, 12 September 2013 (UTC)

Where have they made a "clear indication that they would make an exception for communications with the government?" I am only aware of official court filings for the case and that only excepted the name, not gender pronouns. Certainly if they petition the government for hormone therapy, it will use the gender that she identifies with as it would be odd to petition for female hormone therapies for a man, correct? The physician and psychiatric reports will use feminine pronouns, I presume, to justify treatment as they are treating a woman with female hormones. I hope you don't believe that she is "officially" a man until medical intervention takes place to transform physical appearance. I find it troublesome that the correspondence for a pardon didn't mention transgender issues as a mitigating factor for commutation or pardon. It was certainly used in trial and it was certainly used to garner support in the LGBT community yet the complete absence of it in the form of a public petition, post her transgender identity announcement, strikes me as odd. There are people arguing that using the wrong gender pronoun or birth name are the most damaging things that a transgender person can undergo and is akin to physical violence, yet a petition to the President fails to use the correct name, gender pronouns or even mention gender dysphoria when her advocates claim this is her highest concern. Why is that not considered transphobic? It's not necessary to cause her this stress in that type of correspondence. Turning on the analytical hat tells me that this is not "accidental" or "necessary." Rather it's a form of pandering to the various support groups that have different agendas that may not overlap. LGBT supporters claim it's the establishment that forces her to use her birth name and gender when addressing the President which is absolutely false. Transgender people write the President all the time for transgender issues and they use their experience and their self-declared identity and the President isn't going to just toss them over pronouns. Chelsea may wish to live her life as female and be referred to using female gender terms but it is obviously secondary to securing her release from custody. To that end, it is not unreasonable to use the name she is corresponding with or use pronouns that she herself uses when not discussing gender dysphoria or identity. In this particular case, using the notable name, and using masculine pronouns for accounts that she herself uses masculine pronouns for, is not unreasonable. In the personal section of her bio, it is certainly appropriate and preferred to note and use feminine pronouns if that is how she prefers it. The edict that all transgender people be referred to as the gender they have identified with is not appropriate for every single person. Gender and name preference is appropriate in context and history using editorial discretion. In this case, notable events in the past, present and future have and will continue to have a "Bradley Manning" component and apparently, the subject uses masculine pronouns when she is referring to herself as "Bradley Manning." Directly quoting her in contemporary correspondence should not create an MOS conflict.--DHeyward (talk) 16:34, 12 September 2013 (UTC)

You: "Where have they made a "clear indication that they would make an exception for communications with the government?"

The source I gave you when you asked this before: "While PVT Manning wants supporters to acknowledge and respect her gender identity as she proceeds into the post-trial state of her life, she also expects that the name Bradley Manning and the male pronoun will continue to be used in certain instances. These instances include any reference to the trial, in legal documents, in communication with the government, in the current petition to the White House calling for clemency, and on the envelope of letters written to her by supporters." Statement by lawyer.

You spend a lot of time explaining that we should do what she wants, as justification that we should do the opposite of what she says she prefers. You even question if she is guilty of transphobia against herself! Wonderment! __Elaqueate (talk) 19:18, 12 September 2013 (UTC)

You realize that the "petition to the White House calling for clemency" is not the Sept. 3 2013 letter to President Obama, correct? She did not need to use male gender pronouns and certainly the President is not going to reject it based on the "wrong" (i.e. "correct") pronoun. I did not question that she is transphobic, rather that the idea of using her previous name and male gender pronouns is *gasp* NOT transphobic (it's a rhetorical question, designed to make people understand that their position is flawed). The wholesale replacement of name and pronouns in historical records when she herself recognizes that it's not appropriate or desired is what I question. She doesn't seem to fit in the box you want to put her in by having exemptions and exclusions so you simply deny they exist. "Any reference to the trial" for instance seems to indicate a desire to use male pronouns and the name she was charged and convicted under. She separated out official court correspondence and petitions as being different than just the routine reference we might find in, say, a newspaper or encyclopedia. This is quite a natural reaction for people that want to put a painful period of their past behind them and often a reason for name changes. Why would you deny that request or even deny that the request exists? Private correspondence by an editor with her lawyer expressed pride in her male attired Army photograph and presumably that is the photo she would like identified with her Army service and trial. When more female attired photographs emerge, will there be a zealous attempt to replace every photograph to comport your view of how she should behave and look as well as what photos she should be proud of (this is a rhetorical question, see above)? It would not be unreasonable to think that she wants "Bradley" to be the convicted and conflicted person and "Chelsea" to be free from that burden. I suspect that's also the reason why "Breanna" as her alternate identity was jettisoned as it's inexorably wrapped up with Bradley as an alt and not a new, separate, all-female idenity. That's pure speculation but it makes sense considering what people expect when they transition from a dysphoric state to contentment. She, herself, has used male pronouns and "Bradley" when it is not required. We should take her word, then, that it is a preference when referring to her trial and that period of her life to use "Bradley" and male pronouns as she has done. I am not sure how you have divined preference when she voluntarily uses the opposite of what you have divined for her. Incredulous. --DHeyward (talk) 23:53, 12 September 2013 (UTC)

"You realize that the "petition to the White House calling for clemency" is not the Sept. 3 2013 letter..." Yes I realize this. The petition was started on August 20, two days before the announcement. That could be why it was started in the name of Bradley Manning. It is currently housed under a link urging people to sign the petition to ask that "Chelsea Manning" gets a pardon. I don't think it's a conspiracy theory to force the public to use masculine pronouns because Chelsea Manning must want them used a lot. You spend a lot of time speculating how I would argue in future scenarios (why?) and are heavily relying on the idea that Chelsea obviously and strongly desires masculine pronouns. "...it is a preference when referring to her trial..." This is your interpretation. As the main source for this section states "Expects,” of course, is not “prefers." She didn't say she preferred masculine pronouns. She said the opposite. In the same sentence. Specific to the MOS, I repeat that it would be bad to make choices without any declaration of any preference. I don't find your argument compelling that Chelsea wants people to call her "he" when she's said the opposite. I don't think the MOS should be changed to deny people's preferences when those preferences are truthful, stated, and reported. __Elaqueate (talk) 08:37, 13 September 2013 (UTC)

And that "Expects,” of course, is not “prefers." article makes my point exactly. Read the paragraph after that quote and you will see.

"And when I asked the NLGJA by e-mail to clarify its policy on reporting about Manning’s past, a spokesperson for the group said it would recommend “he” for historical reference too: “When writing about events prior to when the person began living publicly as the opposite gender, NLGJA recommends using the name and gender the individual used publicly at that time. For example: Chelsea Manning, formerly known as Bradley, came out as transgender last week. In a statement, Manning said she had felt this way since childhood. Manning grew up in Oklahoma. In middle school, he was very outspoken in class about government issues and religious beliefs, friends said.”"

It's not a conspiracy theory, either. Rather it's a marketing strategy. If you think Obama's feelings about DADT "evolved" after he was elected and really had a conversion, I have bridge to sell you in Manhattan. I don't think anyone seriously doubts that he would have liked to have taken that position on the campaign trail in 2008 except it doesn't sell well in flyover country. Likewise, I think contemporary references and correspondence by Manning that use "he" and "Bradley" when they are not required is to appeal to a broader audience that generally support whistleblowers but may not be particularly concerned with transgender issues and politics. Manning will use "Bradley" and "he" when referring to the trial. That's already established. If you want to parse "expects" vs "preferred", I think she "prefers" to be free but "expects" she will not be. I am sure she would have preferred to have been born with biological parts that matched her identity. She would have preferred to grow up as a child and young adult as female. However, she did not and it was overwhelmingly anxiety ridden to live as male and as "Bradley." She changed and announced it. But that doesn't change the record of how she lived prior to that point or about what made her notable. When we write about her, present tense and personal life pronouns in her bio should be "she". References to her notability (i.e. main article title), her history prior to coming out as Chelsea and especially her time gathering, disseminating and releasing classified information, as well as the arrest, trial and conviction, should use male gender pronouns and "Bradley" as she has stated and demonstrated. She has done this in correspondence. It's stated as policy for NLGJA in your above quote. It makes sense. And from a humaneness standpoint, it allows Chelsea to separate a part of her life where she considers herself ill with gender dysphoria to being well. An MOS requirement that we ignore all that and exclusively and without discretion use the post-announcement gender and name goes against what Chelsea herself is doing, it goes against the historical style reference you used to distinguish "expects" vs. "prefers" above, and it leaves no discretion for editors. --DHeyward (talk) 16:28, 13 September 2013 (UTC)

"References to her notability (i.e. main article title), her history prior to coming out as Chelsea and especially her time gathering, disseminating and releasing classified information". It's great that you use feminine pronouns to describe her past actions. See how easy and natural it is? __Elaqueate (talk) 16:47, 13 September 2013 (UTC)

That's present tense discussion, not a characterization of past actions. If I were interviewing her, the dialog would use feminine gender terms but the written interview as a characterization would match the above guidelines. My guess is she would use the same terms (i.e. "as a little boy, I was interested in...." or "living as a gay man ...." ) and it would be odd not to acknowledge that's how she lived and use the gender and name appropriate for it. There's a difference between discussing the subject in the now and writing about historical segments of her life. An encyclopedia by its nature has to do that. "Bradley Manning was arrested and convicted in the case 'United States v. Pfc. Bradley E. Manning.' He was sentenced to 35 years of detention. He was transferred to the Leavenworth detention barracks shortly after conviction. Chelsea (formerly Bradley) is currently detained at Leavenworth and she is seeking treatment for gender dysphoria." See how easy that was? Present ne Past. --DHeyward (talk) 19:49, 13 September 2013 (UTC)

Well, except that you're using the pronoun "he" for events that happened on 23 August 2013. Which, when corrected makes that passage more distracting than the alternate. It's just better to use the preferred pronoun throughout. It's also more respectful. I think there is a reason the policies were clear before people fueled this drama and attempted to make it about Obama and other unrelated things. __Elaqueate (talk) 09:32, 14 September 2013 (UTC)

Which part? Manning's lawyer mentioned Leavenworth on the same show where Chelsea announced her new identity. The sentence had already occurred. Did you wish to change "was transferred" to "was to be transferred"? It had already been determined. --DHeyward (talk) 19:51, 14 September 2013 (UTC)

Pronouns throughout life: Preferences and assumptions

• It is a violation of WP:BLP and WP:V to assume that ALL trans people have the same experience, eg that they have been the "other" gender their entire lives. We should not be making any such blanket statements for all trans people, without a specific statement as to that situation for themselves (Similar to how BLPCAT means we have to have an explicit statement about orientation at all). To make this policy violates the rights of trans people just as much as not respecting their gender preference at all, regardless of what the LGBT PC lobby would say. Gaijin42 (talk) 21:20, 9 September 2013 (UTC)

I have seen people argue that we should respect the "preference" of a subject by using the pronouns they want as an argument for using female pronouns for the entire life of a transgender woman. Now, it seems, you think that a person's "preference" can be an argument for using different pronouns at different times. My response to you is the same as my response to the others who talk about "preference". The pronouns that a person "prefers" we use has no weight at all. Wikipedia is not in the business of writing articles to match the subjects' "preferences". We report the facts as accurately as they can be supported by reliable sources. Reliable sources tell us that gender is fixed in infancy and remains the same throughout a person's life. So an individual person might "prefer" we switch pronouns, but it does not make it accurate. But in general, the idea that we should be deciding policy based on what a subject "prefers" is a very weak argument. 99.192.71.2 (talk) 22:28, 9 September 2013 (UTC) (=99.192....)

Perceived gender identity and personal gender identity are not the same thing. Why is more weight given to how the person felt privately on the inside, rather than how they were seen and documented by society as a whole? Just because a person was a woman inside from birth, doesn't mean they went through life viewed that way by the rest of the world. Also, when people change their names we use their old name until the transition. See: Margaret_Thatcher#Early_life_and_education. Xkcdreader (talk) 13:10, 10 September 2013 (UTC)

"Why is more weight given to how the person felt privately on the inside, rather than how they were seen and documented by society as a whole?" Because we're human beings and have respect for other humans? Powers ^T 14:13, 10 September 2013 (UTC)

She lived in society as a man. She was registered in the military as a man. When she filled out gender on forums she checked male. The fact that she has always been a woman does not change the fact she was living as a man. Past tense sentences such as "She/he attended Elementary School at" should reflect her state at the time. Xkcdreader (talk) 15:20, 10 September 2013 (UTC)

Yes, she was "living as a man", but she was a woman. You say that the text should "reflect her state at the time", and I agree. She, at the time, was a woman who was living as a man, thus her "state" was that she was a woman, but no one knew it. But now that we do know it, we should correct our previous error. 99.192.66.121 (talk) 15:48, 10 September 2013 (UTC) (=99.192....)

Xkcdreader, what you are saying is nonsense on its face. You are arguing that Wikipedia should care more about what people believe is true than what really is true. You are saying that if enough people for a long enough period of time falsely believe that a person is a man, then Wikipedia should count that person as a man even after we learn that this is false. How people are "viewed that way by the rest of the world" might be a good excuse for getting it wrong for all the years we might have gotten it wrong, but it is absurd as a justification for continuing to get it wrong. As for the name change, the situations are not comparable at all. Names change, but gender does not. Making a retroactive name change in articles is to introduce an error. Making a retroactive pronoun change in an article is to correct an error. 99.192.66.121 (talk) 14:31, 10 September 2013 (UTC) (=99.192....)

She was living as a man. It's not some factual error people had wrong, she lived her life as a man. Xkcdreader (talk) 15:22, 10 September 2013 (UTC)

It is correct to say that she was living as a man. It is not correct to say that she was a man. A woman living as a man is a woman and entitled to female pronouns. Thryduulf (talk) 15:44, 10 September 2013 (UTC)

(ec) "Living as a man" and being a man are two very different things. It is a factual error to say that a person is a man when she is a woman who is living as a man. 99.192.66.121 (talk) 15:48, 10 September 2013 (UTC) (=99.192....)

How come no one has commented that in order to make the argument that masculine pronouns must be used for past activities to make sense, Xkcdreader uses feminine pronouns throughout? "She was living as a man." and "She was registered in the military as a man." This proves that it can be used in a way that is invisibly natural. __Elaqueate (talk) 02:45, 12 September 2013 (UTC)

User:Darkfrog24 has made an analogy several times (including once further up on this page) which I'd like to repeat and expand upon: if a country music singer always thought she was born in Memphis, and wrote songs praising Memphis and was given an award by Memphis' mayor and in general lived and was identified by others as a Memphis native — but then researchers find her birth certificate and birth announcements in the papers, and it's learned that she was actually born in Nashville — then we should absolutely note (when relevant) that several of the actions she took, or that others (like Memphis' mayor) took, were based on her being treated as a Memphis native, but we should not say "Memphis native Jane Doe then received an award...". We should say (on the basis of more recent information) that she was born in Nashville. Likewise, if it's relevant, we should note that e.g. Ryan Sallans was living as a woman at the time he did something, but that's different from saying "[since she was a woman,] she ...". -sche (talk) 20:18, 10 September 2013 (UTC)

What we do at Wikipedia is meta-reporting. We summarize reporting and report what reliable sources say, not what the truth is, per se. Traditional reporting is concerned with where the subject was actually born; meta-reporting is concerned with where reliable sources report the subject was born. We would say "NBC News reported in 1946 that X was born in Memphis," and later in the article say "CBS News reported in 2013 that X was born in Nashville." Neither is necessarily "true," but we can talk about both as we do in Metta World Peace (e.g. ESPN called him Ron Artest when he played in 2010, ESPN called him Metta World Peace when he played in 2013). Going back to the birthplace analogy, it is not our place (since we are a secondary source) to assume what NBC News would have said was X's birthplace had they known such information in 1946. That would be original research, synthesis, and a reverse form of crystal balling. CaseyPenk (talk) 21:11, 10 September 2013 (UTC)

Wait, so you would say "in 1993, Jane Doe released a song about her birthplace, Memphis" even though reliable sources showed that Memphis was not her birthplace? Or are we talking past each other about somewhat different things? I haven't seen an article in which every sentence begins with "NBC News reported that...". I've seen and am talking about articles that summarize reliable sources and have footnotes citing them. I'm talking about articles that say either "in 1993, Jane Doe released a song about her birthplace, Memphis^[1]" or "in 1993, Jane Doe released a song about the city she believed to be her birthplace, Memphis^[1]"—and I'm suggesting that if reliable sources confirm that she wasn't born in Memphis (even though older reliable sources assumed she was), we should say the second thing and not the first thing. -sche (talk) 21:43, 10 September 2013 (UTC)

Jane Doe here sounds like someone who has already peaked in her fame; the same is probably true for Chelsea. As such, the number of media reports about both is likely only to decline as time passes (with an occasional spike upon big news). Given the dwindling numbers of new sources that are likely to be produced, I would imagine there are a greater quantity of sources written about their childhoods from before their 2013 announcements, than will be written after their 2013 announcements. Yes, we do give greater weight to more recent sources, but explaining what reliable sources talked about in the past adds to our encyclopedic coverage. Sometimes mis-reporting can be a topic in and of itself, as when CNN got the Obamacare Supreme Court ruling so very wrong. My point is that we have a responsibility to relay what reliable sources have said, without editorializing. If Chelsea becomes a superstar (more so than she is now), and remains a superstar for 20 years, there's almost no question we'll talk about her childhood using feminine pronouns, because the sources will use feminine pronouns to refer to all phases of her life (especially with media becoming more aware of transgender issues, and once she undergoes hormone replacement therapy concerns about her biology will be less persuasive). But until that happens, the pre-2013 status quo (male pronouns for the periods of her life leading up to 2013) seem warranted. CaseyPenk (talk) 21:52, 10 September 2013 (UTC)

"Eventualism can be used to justify almost any policy on the grounds that any harms it might cause will eventually not matter." __Elaqueate (talk) 23:41, 10 September 2013 (UTC)

Whether or not we use the correct pronouns for Manning should not depend on what she does in the future. Powers ^T 22:28, 10 September 2013 (UTC)

Wikipedia is not a crystal ball, so we can't guess if or when Chelsea's childhood will be referred to using feminine pronouns. CaseyPenk (talk) 22:30, 10 September 2013 (UTC)

Um, luckily we can look at reputable sources now? __Elaqueate (talk) 22:53, 10 September 2013 (UTC)

We already have the most reputable source possible. Chelsea herself. She has made it quite clear what she prefers and why. She has made it clear what she wishes and absent proof otherwise it's pretty insulting to assume she is not an expert on herself. Sportfan5000 (talk) 22:58, 10 September 2013 (UTC)

Where in Wikipedia policy do we consider the subject the most important / most reliable source? CaseyPenk (talk) 23:01, 10 September 2013 (UTC)

Where in Wikipedia policy do we not consider someone to be an expert on themselves? Sportfan5000 (talk) 23:10, 10 September 2013 (UTC)

I thought this was one of the places where they were considered the most reliable source?__Elaqueate (talk) 23:17, 10 September 2013 (UTC)

Actually, she hasn't made it perfectly clear. She's given us limited guidance is all. Formerip (talk) 23:12, 10 September 2013 (UTC)

She has made it abundantly clear she identifies as a woman and wants to be addressed accordingly, the rest is nitpicking nuances that are entwined in her legal situation (apparently won't get mail delivered in prison under her new name). Sportfan5000 (talk) 23:23, 10 September 2013 (UTC)

User:SlimVirgin reported receiving an email from David Coombs (Manning's lawyer), and stated that,

"Regarding the pronoun, he [David Coombs] wrote that the female pronoun should be used only for post-announcement material. I also asked about the current main photograph, and he said that Chelsea is proud of the photograph and would want it to be used until a better one becomes available." [Emphasis added.]

It is not clear how much weight should be given to her request (if that is indeed Manning's own request, and not just the lawyer's assumption), but that request does run contrary to the current wording in MOS:IDENTITY which suggests that the current pronoun should "[apply] to any phase of that person's life." -- ToE 04:03, 11 September 2013 (UTC)

How do you figure. The lawyers statement says to only use the female pronoun post announcement, where as IDENTITY says i should apply to their entire life. The two statements are in direct conflict. I can't read, my mistake. Xkcdreader (talk) 04:52, 11 September 2013 (UTC)

It AMAZES me the "we should respect Chelsea's wishes" crowd is in fact going against her wishes by promoting revising historical pronoun use to match her current state. This statement alone should be enough to remove the guideline, it's far too strict. Xkcdreader (talk) 04:50, 11 September 2013 (UTC)

If you look at the survey above you'll see there are many people happy to use that style when a preference is known. Question is, what to do when no preference has been expressed? Chris Smowton (talk) 09:23, 11 September 2013 (UTC)

(1) I have consistently maintained that Wikipedia should not care what a subject wants us to say about them. Wikipedia should be committed to reporting what is true about them, whether that is what they prefer or not. So if it is true that Manning's gender has always been female, then the female pronoun is the correct one to use, no matter what she wants us to use. (2) I put no weight on what one Wikipeidia editor says Manning's lawyer said in an email. We don't know if the editor really ever received any email. Assuming the lawyer did sent an email, the editor did not publish in full the correspondence, so we are relying on that editor's interpretation of the lawyer's comments. And even if the email was sent and it really was from the lawyer and the editor has accurately reported the contents of the discussion, we don't know if the lawyer is representing what Manning has said she wants. So even if you care about Manning's wishes regarding pronouns (and I don't) there is no reliable source to say she wants male pronouns used.

Xkcdreader is AMAZED that people who argued that Manning's wishes should be honoured seem to be arguing against her wishes. I might say I am AMAZED that people who have been arguing "use reliable sources!" are so quick to grant this unverifiable third-hand report status as "reliable", but it actually does not surprise me. I give no weight to this alleged email not because I have no reason to believe that it reflects what Manning wants (even though none we have no reason to think that), but because what Manning wants is not relevant. Doing our best to get the facts right is the only thing that is relevant. 99.192.50.20 (talk) 13:23, 11 September 2013 (UTC) (=99.192....)

"Wikipedia should be committed to reporting what is true about them, whether that is what they prefer or not."

• Verifiability, not truth. CaseyPenk (talk) 14:59, 11 September 2013 (UTC)

As I wrote my comment I thought someone might make the pedantic reply about verifiability vs truth, but it is no more than a pedantic one. The reason that Wikipedia goes with what is verifiable is because that is the best objective approximation of the truth we can get. If Wikipedia did not care at all about the truth, then it would be a pointless project. So when I say that Wikipedia should be committed to reporting the truth I don't say anything radical or false. But no matter how you put it, what a subject wants us to report or the way they prefer that we report it is not and should not be a factor in how we edit pages. This is especially the case when subjects prefer that we report things that we have facts that can be verified to the contrary. The best experts we have tell us that gender is fixed in early childhood and then after does not change. This is verifiable. Manning tells us that she has identified as female since early childhood. This is verifiable. If Manning wants us to use "he" for when she was a child, that's just too bad for her. If she wants us to report a lie, we should not do it when we have verifiable information that the contrary is true. Finally, we actually have no verifiable evidence that Manning wants us to use male pronouns anyway. So even if Wikipedia did care (which it doesn't and shouldn't), we have no verifiable reason to use male pronouns. 99.192.65.23 (talk) 16:13, 11 September 2013 (UTC) (=99.192....)

Please do not suggest that my reasoning is pedantic. There is no "objective" or "true" way to report on Manning's gender. Gender as an inherently complex topic that cannot be easily summarized in a single word, like "he" or "she." Gender experts would agree. CaseyPenk (talk) 16:19, 11 September 2013 (UTC)

While I know that I'm only an IP without an editing history (Or, rather, a shared IP with an edit history from other people), I feel I need to respond to this and some similar comments I've seen from you and others, both here and on other talk pages. First off, WP:TRUTH is an essay, not a policy or a guideline. Second, I believe you are somewhat mistaken on what that essay and WP:V and WP:RS mean. As 99.192 states, they only say that Wikipedia should only include truths that can verified by reliable sources. If reliable sources clearly indicate that someone is a man or woman (Be they transgender or cisgender), then, if WP:V is what you want to point to, that is what Wikipedia should be going by, period. Under the current understanding of gender by people that actually study it, currently the most reliable source for that information is that person themselves. This information, verifiably reported by a reliable source such as major media organizations or (in the case of gender) in a press release or blog post that can clearly be traced back to the person, is all that should be used to determine gender and, in most cases, pronouns.

Now, I have some disagreement with 99.192 over whether or not gender can change or if preferences on pronouns matter (Especially for people that identify as genderqueer or otherwise non-binary). I do think that, absent an explicit statement otherwise by the subject, it should be assumed that the gender of the subject has been fixed and, therefore, pronouns should reflect that reality for their entire lives. In such a case it shouldn't matter that there might be sources that used or continue to use the other set of pronouns, as older sources are clearly no longer reliable on that fact in light of new information and new sources are taking an editorial stance contrary to the current mainstream scientific, psychological, and sociological views (Which, again, makes them unreliable). Put simply, Wikipedia should not be treating outdated or editorial information as verifiable truth when they are verifiably false. Saying "he" for a woman or "she" for man just because at one point those pronouns where once used to refer to the person is simply perpetuating a historical error that has been corrected.

To summarize, WP:TRUTH and WP:V mean that Wikipedia should state the verified truth on a subject, not treat prior factual errors as anything other than just that: Errors. In cases where it is discovered that incorrect pronouns were being used for a subject based on what were previously thought to be reliable sources, those sources should be ignored in so far as they refer to gender and pronouns. Correct and current pronouns should be used. but for the present and historically, since, absent anything indicating otherwise, that is the best assumption to make. 50.201.255.38 (talk) 17:52, 11 September 2013 (UTC)

"new sources are taking an editorial stance contrary to the current mainstream scientific, psychological, and sociological views (Which, again, makes them unreliable)"

• Do you have reliable sourcing for that statement, or is it your opinion? Is the NLGJA therefore unreliable? CaseyPenk (talk) 17:56, 11 September 2013 (UTC)

Considering that the supposed position of NLGJA is being assumed based off of a quote from a spokesperson as presented by a TV critic for Time writing an entertainment blog piece, rather than from from a news story or a NLGJA press release or posting on their website, I question how much weight can be given to it. Regardless, when other groups, such as GLAAD say otherwise on their actual websites I find it strange that people insist we defer to what they interpret the NLGJA to be. GLAAD states, among other things, that "It is usually best to report on transgender people's stories from the present day instead of narrating them from some point or multiple points in the past, thus avoiding confusion and potentially disrespectful use of incorrect pronouns."

As for sources to my above comment, the American Psychological Association says "Use names and pronouns that are appropriate to the person’s gender presentation and identity; if in doubt, ask." This linked from this page for the American Medical Association instructs physicians to use preferred pronouns and names.

What the issue seems to be is that people are pointing out how, strangely enough, very few places have pronoun guidelines to apply to encyclopedias or Wikipedia. I've noticed that some people think that guidelines for pronoun use in the press shouldn't apply to a historical encyclopedia like Wikipedia, but instead that Wikipedia should base things of off, uh, the pronouns used by the press in the past.

And all this aside, this whole idea of changing pronouns is utterly unworkable. At which time should you switch? How would that work with people that transitioned before becoming notable? Would they have consistent pronouns from early parts of their life, whereas someone that became notable before being known to be trans would have the wrong pronouns used for early, non-notable parts of their lives? It seems like people want to toss away a simple, consistent method of writing in favour of one that will be extremely subjective and inconsistent. To reference an example mentioned before, this would mean that for some trans men Wikipedia would say "she gave birth", but for otherwise, like Thomas Beatie, it would have to say "he gave birth." 50.201.255.38 (talk) 19:18, 11 September 2013 (UTC)

"It is usually best to report on transgender people's stories from the present day" - I talked about this above, but we simply don't have the luxury of writing in the present tense. We write in past tense because we're an encyclopedia.

You can write in the past tense from the present day. Tense is grammar, but you are always writing at the time you are writing. A quote from Chelsea's lawyer, "Yesterday was my first opportunity to speak with Chelsea since her sentencing." Notice that it says "her" sentencing. If you watch the Today show segment you'll see her lawyer talks about the reasons "She" leaked documents. __Elaqueate (talk) 02:36, 12 September 2013 (UTC)

• The APA guidelines do not seem to discuss descriptions of people prior to their transition.
• "some people think that guidelines for pronoun use in the press shouldn't apply to a historical encyclopedia like Wikipedia" - we need to be careful with applying press guidelines, because we have different priorities and we are explicitly not a news site. We are not journalists, and we are not here to break ground, or to "expose" anything but what others have reported.
• "simple, consistent method of writing" - yes, but too strict, some say. CaseyPenk (talk) 01:25, 12 September 2013 (UTC)

With regards to the original post, while some trans people are indifferent to how they are referred pre-coming out, I would still, for the avoidance of harm, make an assumption to retroactively apply the pronoun. In good article writing, we should be writing in the historical present. If we make it clear that a person is transgender pretty early on — and, for many notable trans people, coming out is important and should be mentioned in the lede! — I don't think people would be confused (and really, it's offensive making assumptions that our readers are stupid). It's a non-issue based in pedanticism that could be solved with better writing. Sceptre ^(talk) 03:04, 12 September 2013 (UTC)

Pronouns throughout life: Notifications

• Comment: I have notified WikiProject LGBT studies. CaseyPenk (talk) 21:37, 9 September 2013 (UTC)

• Comment: I have notified WikiProject gender studies. CaseyPenk (talk) 21:39, 9 September 2013 (UTC)

• Comment: I have notified the talk page of the Private Manning article. CaseyPenk (talk) 21:49, 9 September 2013 (UTC)

• I have notified the gendergap mailing list since many subscribers are knowledgeable about gender issues. I'm too lazy to dig up a url to an archived copy of my message, but it was written in a neutral manner. Kevin Gorman (talk) 22:36, 9 September 2013 (UTC)

Pronouns throughout life: Usage in actual sources

• Question: We've talked extensively about what reliable sources do, but I haven't read many, if any, post-announcement sources that discuss the childhoods of the subjects (for example, articles about the childhood of Chelsea, written after her announcement). Does anyone have examples of such articles, so we can see what reliable sources use for pronouns when referring to people in their pre-announcement selves (e.g. Chelsea when she was actively serving in the military and in childhood, adolescence, etc.)? That would help bring some more factual clarity to this situation, and allow for more meaningful comparisons, so we need not speculate on what reliable sources say. Thank you. CaseyPenk (talk) 21:34, 10 September 2013 (UTC)

• I think it could also be informative to find reference materials about the lives of people who became famous only after transitioning. I expect that such materials might use one pronoun throughout, which would mean that people who think that changing a book's pronouns violates WP:V or WP:OR (which I don't) would be in the position of supporting retroactive pronouns. -sche (talk) 21:28, 10 September 2013 (UTC)

• That might be an important distinction to make during this discussion - the distinction between people famous before transition and people famous after, or because of, it. For people most/first famous during or after transition, it makes a whole lot of sense to use current pronouns throughout. Most editors have expressed concern with the alternate case - where the person became famous prior to transition. So I think the most revealing sources would be ones on people who transitioned after becoming famous. CaseyPenk (talk) 21:33, 10 September 2013 (UTC)

• • Kristin Beck knew she was a woman since childhood, but the book she co-wrote uses the old name and male pronouns in the pre-announcement phase. http://books.google.com/books/about/Warrior_Princess_A_U_S_Navy_SEAL_s_Journ.html?id=N0k5nQEACAAJ in Kristin beck's case, it was the act of coming out publicly that made her famous, but the authors chose to use male pronouns for the earlier parts of her life.--Obi-Wan Kenobi (talk) 18:47, 11 September 2013 (UTC)
• Chelsea Manning’s Prison I think this may have gotten lost when I commented on it earlier, but this shows how pronoun use can flow when it's not done in a checkerboard ad hoc way, and instead done as per GLAAD style recommendation. __Elaqueate (talk) 23:49, 11 September 2013 (UTC)

Pronouns throughout life: Writing about long-term activities

Question for those who favour using the pronouns a person's contemporaries used: which pronouns should Wikipedia use when writing about something (such as an occupation or membership in a group) that a person started before they came out and continued after they came out? For example, say "John Doe" was considered a male until 1995, when she came out as "Jane Doe": how would you rewrite the following sentences? "Although she began performing in 1995 1990, it was not until the release of her fourth album The Foobarians in 2005 that she found widespread acclaim." - "In 2001, her membership in the Singers' Guild, which she had joined in 1990, lapsed." (The sentences themselves, pronouns aside, were copied with only minimal changes from two Wikipedia articles which were not about transgender people but which demonstrate that WP regularly discusses "lifelong" activities.) -sche (talk) 03:34, 13 September 2013 (UTC)

"Although she began performing in 1995, it was not until the release of her fourth album The Foobarians in 2005 that she found widespread acclaim."

That is fine. She regendered in 1995. Even if the precise months could be an issue, it is close enough. Elsewhere, not far away, there is surely mention of regendering in 1995. The paragraph is written from a 2005 perspective.

"In 2001, her membership in the Singers' Guild, which she had joined in 1990, lapsed."

First impression: fine. Past perfect is very different to simple past in terms of implying 1st hand accuracy of the fine details. She (as she is now) had joined (this is a current description of her past) in 1990.

“She joined in 1990”?

this doesn’t work, unless it is already in the context of gender ambiguity in 1990. “He/She joined in 1990” conveys a first hand, co-temporary observation, following a timecourse. We are yet to come to the regendering. Unupdated observers will remember/record a male gender. Simple past tense use demands explicit updating for (the imaginary) contemporary observer. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 05:07, 13 September 2013 (UTC)

Alright, I've changed the year to make the first example "harder".

Looking at it myself, even if I were writing about and trying to respect the wishes of someone who wanted their pre-transition life to be described using different pronouns, it would seem appropriate to me to say "she began performing...", for much the same reason it seems appropriate to you to say "she had joined": because the pronoun's purpose is to tell the reader that the author is referring to "her, that is, the subject (who is, in the present tense, a woman)".

...and that's why I think the push to use "he" misunderstands what pronouns are for. -sche (talk) 05:21, 13 September 2013 (UTC)

I find myself recalling [5] that such a subjective thing depends on persective.

One circle is orange, the other light brown. But they are the same. Does this mean that they are both orange, or both light brown?

When talking about the preregendered person, what is the perspective of the writer? Is the writer writing from behind the subject eyeballs? From the perspective of an observer present in the same room? Is it a report compiled from multiple sources, much later and far away?

Usually, Wikipedia writes from a detached perspective. However, when articles cover fine details, splitting into multiple sections by chronology and with spinout articles, individual sections can become close in perspective.

Bradley_manning#Early_life. "Manning's sister Casey, 11 years old[er]... became Manning's principal caregiver ...Manning was fed only milk and baby food until she was two, and was always small for her age, particularly for a boy; as an adult she reached..." The perspective here is confused. It is both recompiled and remote, but close at the same time. Here is a neglected, undernourished, fetal abused boy who would later regender. Was this a little boy who would develop psychologically as female, or a female recognized by observers as a little boy? This is too hard. I want to resort to the gender use of the sources. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 06:25, 13 September 2013 (UTC)

Ah, but resorting to sources' usage invites a different problem. I point to a scenario I mentioned several sections earlier: one source uses male pronouns to describe J. Doe's childhood: "Doe moved with his mother from New York to Virginia when he was six. He spent the next five years there, leaving only for a trip to Ithaca with his father on his seventh birthday." Another source uses female pronouns: "At age 6, Doe went to live with her mother in Virginia. Her teachers described her as a lonely child who often complained that she missed New York." Both report Doe's move to VA, but each also reports something the other does not. If Wikipedia is to defer/resort to sources, is it left switching back and forth between pronouns from one fact to the next? Mimicking the pronoun uses of the sources from which one takes individual facts actually seems harder than using one pronoun consistently... -sche (talk) 07:19, 13 September 2013 (UTC)

If the sources were unanimous, we'd follow them, yes? If similar sources are mixed, then we should choose a consistent usage. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 11:18, 13 September 2013 (UTC)

I support using the same pronoun all the way through, but I don't think this question presents a real worry. The problem described could be one for people who change names as well. when talking about the career, for example, of John Cougar aka John Cougar Mellencamp aka John Mellencamp there might be sentences that span across all three names. By carefully choosing when to use a name and when to use a pronoun the problem is easy to solve. So to go back to your examples the problem goes away when you write: "Although Doe began performing in 1990, it was not until the release of her fourth album The Foobarians in 2005 that she found widespread acclaim." For the other sentence, you could write: "In 2001, her membership in the Singers' Guild, which Doe had joined in 1990, lapsed."

These unusual problems are not hard to solve when people take the time to consider the range of available alternatives. It is part of why I think people are talking nonsense when they worry about how "confusing" it will be to a reader to say "she" and "boy" in the same sentence. Once people know the article is about a transgender person the "confusion" goes away for everyone except dumb people and people who don't want to understand what is being said. 99.192.51.41 (talk) 13:47, 13 September 2013 (UTC) (=99.192....)

On retroactivity

Just a thought experiment: why is listing the Ohio State Buckeyes football team as the sole winners of the 2005 and 2008 Big Ten Conference okay and accepted, but retroactively applying pronouns to a trans person controversial? Answers on a postcard. Sceptre ^(talk) 12:29, 15 September 2013 (UTC)

This is a bad example for two reasons: (1) The Buckeyes' page lists them as co-champions, not as sole winners. The same is true for the specific pages for their 2005 and 2008 seasons. (2) Being the 2005 champion and winning the 2005 championship are two different things. It makes sense to say that in 2005 they were co-champions while today they are the sole champions of the 2005 season. Status as "champion" can change, but gender does not, so there is no analogy.

I don't know of a good example where Wikipedia pages were actually changed, but there are a couple of pretty good historical cases where pages would have been retroactively changed on the discovery of an error. One I mentioned above: It wasn't until 1974 that Jack Nicholson learned the true identity of his parents. His mother is a person he believed to be his sister, and the person he thought was his mother is his grandmother. This all happened after he was a world-famous movie star and twice nominated for "Best Actor" Oscars. So if in 1971 he had taken his mother (who he thought at the time was his sister) as his date for the Oscars, the Wikipedia page should not say "his date for the Oscars was his sister" even if every reliable source of that time reported that as the case. When errors are discovered (as reported in more recent reliable sources) we correct past errors.

Another good example is the relationship of Meg White and Jack White. For a period of time when they first became famous they claimed to be brother and sister. Many, many reliable sources took them at their word and printed it as fact. Later it became known and was reported that they are not siblings, but were married and divorced. If their Wikipedia page had reported that they were siblings and used the words "brother" and "sister" in passing references to them it all would have had to been changed when the truth was reported.

Sometimes, as with Jack Nicholson, notable people are ignorant of facts about themselves and so make mistakes in what they tell the media. Sometimes, as with the Whites, notable people lie about themselves and so the media is duped for a time by their false claims. In either case the normal practice of Wikipedia is to change information retroactively when newer reports reveal that the older reports were wrong. So if sometimes people represent their gender to the world as being a gender other than their actual gender, that too is a false claim that results in the media making false claims that cause Wikipedia pages to be in error and in need of correction when newer reports reveal that the older reports were wrong. For anything other than gender this practice is just common sense and is what happens every day. 99.192.68.134 (talk) 13:30, 15 September 2013 (UTC) )(=99.192....)

Actually, "gender" is not any different. There are many cases in history where someone posed as the opposite sex (for example: women who posed as men in order to fight in a war)... some sources might well have used the names and pronouns associated with that posed persona (for example, the muster roles of the regiment and dispatches to headquarters). When the pose is discovered, the "error" is corrected in subsequent sources. Even though a news report of the time might say "Corporal Jones was given a medal for his bravery", we correct it to "Miss Smith was given a medal for her bravery".

"Gender" is a simple fact of biology. If a mammal has a penis, it is Male, and a "he"... if it has a vagina it is female, and is a "she" (OK... hermaphrodites cause problems... but that is a separate issue). Easy to correct if we discover an error.

HOWEVER... "gender identity" is a different matter entirely. Identity is not a fact of biology... it is an opinion, a matter of belief ... a person might firmly believe "I am female"... other people may be of a contrasting opinion, and just as firmly believe that "no, you are male". That's why the pronoun issue is so controversial... it states opinion as if it were biological fact.

It is one thing to prominently note that the subject of an article self-identifies as male or female (it is appropriate to discuss a subject's opinions about themselves)... but when choosing a pronoun, I see no reason why humans should be treated differently than every other mammal... we should base the pronoun on biological fact... not personal opinion. Blueboar (talk) 14:26, 15 September 2013 (UTC)

As an aside, I'm not sure this RfC is the proper venue to be contesting the validity of the gender identities of trans people. Additionally, you seem to want to treat humans exactly the same as other animals which, whatever merits that position may or may not have, is most certainly not how Wikipedia handles it (Not using "it" to refer to humans, for example).

(I typed this in before you edited your comment. I've have decided to leave it here because I feel others have made similar claims to your pre-edit comment)Regardless, your assertion that ignoring gender identity is the only valid WP:NPOV position that can be taken is incorrect. First off, the claimed gender identity of a subject is fact. You might believe that they are just mentally disturbed and that gender identity is nonsense and therefore no weight should be given to it in regards to pronouns, but the fact remains that once it is reported in reliable sources that subject X identifies as gender Y it cannot just be ignored. What you are suggesting is to take the extremely subjective political position of completely ignoring the stated gender identity of the subject under the guise of being neutral, which is entirely against the point of WP:NPOV. Neutral does not mean picking what you feel is the status quo or what you think most people believe, it means giving sources proper weight.

As outlined in the links I posted above as an IP, the American Psychological Association states "Use names and pronouns that are appropriate to the person’s gender presentation and identity; if in doubt, ask.", whereas the American Medical Association links to at least one resource which states that a practice should be using desired pronouns and names. Transgender people are recognized by major medical and mental health organizations as real and their stated (explicitly or implicitly) positions are to refer to them by they pronouns matching the subjects stated gender identity. Unless you're going to argue that these organizations are somehow not reliable sources on these issues, I do not see how you can just ignore them in favour of your vastly oversimplified view of gender.

Under the guidelines you seem to be proposing, Wikipedia articles would be forbidden from using any gendered terms for people unless the state of their genitals at that specific point in time was known. It would also essentially forbid the ever changing of pronouns for trans people unless they provided evidence to your liking that their genitals had changed "enough", which is highly unlikely to happen in most cases because, to put it bluntly, it's not really the business of anyone else. Also, are you saying that should a man lose his penis, due to an accident or some other reason, that he suddenly becomes a neuter? A woman? What about a woman without a vagina for some reason?

And just because you want to ignore intersex people (This discussion is about people and the term intersex is generally considered to be more accurate and proper to use when talking about people compared to hermaphrodite) doesn't mean you're free to just do so. Such people cannot just dismissed because they complicate the black and white position you are trying to take.

Finally, you are making some rather strong assertions in your post without sourcing them in any manner. Simple Sarah (talk) 15:46, 15 September 2013 (UTC)

You misunderstand... what I am suggesting is that we distinguish between gender and gender identity. The first is based on biology... the second is based on belief. I deeply respect the beliefs of others, and think they should be mentioned prominently in articles. But my opinion is that pronouns should be based on actual gender not gender identity. We can and should note gender identities, and give them DUE WEIGHT and respect, but DUE WEIGHT gives precedence to scientific fact over identity, and the fact is gender is determined by biology, while gender identity is not. Blueboar (talk) 16:42, 15 September 2013 (UTC)

With the repeated invocation of the APA and AMA suggestions, it should be noted that these are not intended to be writing style guidelines aimed at objectivity. The APA statement is specifically to answer "How can I be supportive of transgender family members, friends, or significant others?" That is clearly not the central goal of Wikipedia (nor should being specifically nonsupportive be a goal, of course.) Similarly, the GLMA guidelines are for dealing directly with the trasngendered individual themselves in a relationship as a patient, where not being of discomfort to them is the key goal (as they emphasis in one of the other questions of language, a given terminology choice may "interfere with information-gathering and appropriate care".) --Nat Gertler (talk) 16:44, 15 September 2013 (UTC)

Are these medical associations attempting to minimize a non-trivial chance that harm could result? __Elaqueate (talk) 17:17, 15 September 2013 (UTC)

Not by any statement I see in their documents that would apply to use in Wikipedia, as we are not seeking to provide folks with medical care. --Nat Gertler (talk) 17:29, 15 September 2013 (UTC)

Blueboar, you seem mistaken about the biology of gender. A penis is indeed a male trait, but it is not the only male trait. In humans, the biology of gender includes external genitalia, genes (chromosomes), gene expression, body chemistry, secondary sexual characteristics (like breasts and facial hair) and the anatomy of the brain, and these things do not always match. A person can have four male traits and one female trait or two and three. For example, a person with complete androgen insensitivity syndrome has XY genes, which are expressed, high testosterone levels in the blood, largely inactive gonads, female secondary characteristics (breasts and no facial hair) and, usually, a female gender identity. Similarly, it is possible for someone to have a working penis but a female brain and female-like blood chemistry. That is probably what is going on with Manning.

Gender as reported by the subject is not a matter of opinion; it is a matter of limited evidence. We can't give Manning a blood analysis and fMRI, and even if we could, the results would be questionable. We take the subject's word for it because Manning is the only one capable of observing his or her own gender identity.

So yes, gender (in the general definition of the word) is a biological fact, but it is not quite so simple a biological fact.

Referring to gender identity as an opinion suggests that the subjects have a choice in the matter. They do not. It is better described as an observation. Darkfrog24 (talk) 03:33, 16 September 2013 (UTC)

With regards to the Buckeyes, I was making reference to this list: List of Big Ten Conference football champions (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views). Sceptre ^(talk) 11:25, 16 September 2013 (UTC)

I give you the 1956 World Series. It was played "between the New York Yankees (representing the American League) and the defending champion Brooklyn Dodgers (representing the National League)". Later, the Dodgers moved to Los Angeles, and changed their name, but that doesn't mean we write that the 1956 World Series was played between the New York Yankees and the Los Angeles Dodgers. --GRuban (talk) 14:51, 18 September 2013 (UTC)

You give us an irrelevant example. Names change, gender does not. Wikipedia's policy is to refer to people (and teams and places) by the name they had at the time of a notable event. Wikipedia's policy is also to use the gender they had at the time (as opposed to the gender that people might have falsely believed they had). A transgender person's gender does not change. When a transgender person reveals their true gender they are revealing a fact about themselves that was always true, even though no one knew it. So it was Bradley Manning who joined the military, but she was a woman at the time that this happened. She had a male body and she represented herself as a man, but it was not the truth. She was a woman named "Bradley Manning". For our articles to be accurate, we must acknowledge both of these facts about her identity. 99.192.88.142 (talk) 14:58, 18 September 2013 (UTC) (=99.192....)

You make an assumption that cannot be proved, that Manning was always female and only realized it after reaching a certain age. The only provable parts of Manning's life are actions taken and communications made by Manning—there is no objective all-knowing position from which we can assess what gender is the real one or only one. We cannot change policy based on unprovable "facts". I support a MOS which allows gender to change in the article, referring to the subject as he/him for some portions of the biography and she/her for other portions. This would be based on easily verifiable words and actions. Binksternet (talk) 15:19, 18 September 2013 (UTC)

I make no assumptions. I deal only in the facts as reported by reliable sources. Fact 1: The experts on gender identity say that it is fixed in infancy and does not change. So whatever gender any person is (you, me, and Manning included) does not change. Fact 2: Manning has reported that she is a woman and has always felt that way. Each of us are in the unique position to be able to assess what our gender is, so the very best source of all has spoken on the subject. These facts are only unprovable if you choose to ignore the proof that is provided. 99.192.89.57 (talk) 16:26, 18 September 2013 (UTC) (=99.192....)

Other pronouns

There are some people, such as Justin Vivian Bond who prefer invented pronouns ('v' in the case of Bond.) the current Wikipedia article uses Bond and doesn't ever seem to use pronouns, which makes the language rather tortured. Bond has explicitly stated that use of 'he' would be considered an insult or sloppy journalism (http://justinbond.com/?page_id=323), so he's not taking a 'this is my preference but I understand if you don't follow it' approach. there are other TG people who prefer 'they'. Should Wikipedia accede to their demands in this case, or does the MOS language only apply to the standard he/she, and not extend to 'they' or invented pronouns like hir or shim etc? --Obi-Wan Kenobi (talk) 18:34, 11 September 2013 (UTC)

• Currently MOS:IDENTITY reads as applying only to he/she pronouns. If reliable sources use other pronouns we should go with that. Justin Vivian Bond is a special case, because v has expressed WP:BLP-type concerns about certain pronouns. So it makes sense to avoid he/she pronouns in Bond's case - either use tortured "Bond" phrasing or the v pronoun. CaseyPenk (talk) 18:39, 11 September 2013 (UTC)

The MoS should instruct users in correct, general-audience, encyclopedia-appropriate English as that English exists now, not as it might exist in the future or how some people wish it existed. Other than proper nouns and clearly fictional terminology, Wikipedia should categorically reject made-up words and other constructs that are not part of mainstream English. If "v" or "shim" ever enter the standard formal lexicon, we can change the MoS to allow them then.

Otherwise, we'll get linguistic revisionists using Wikipedia as a platform for improvements and "improvements" to the English language. That's pretty much what happened with WP:LQ; popularity won out over verifiability.

As for the singular they, I don't believe it's sufficiently formal for an encyclopedia, but there is a difference of opinion on that. Darkfrog24 (talk) 18:54, 11 September 2013 (UTC)

I understand what you're saying but I would avoid calling alternative pronouns "made-up words and other constructs." Every word was invented at some point, so that's technically tautological. More importantly I think some people take these alternative pronouns very seriously; they use them not so much to play with English but to reflect very deeply-held identities. CaseyPenk (talk) 18:59, 11 September 2013 (UTC)

Certainly every word is made up, and (newly) made up words can become standard, but we should not be using words that are generally unknown or limited in scope. Has the "v" vocabulary gained any traction outside of Bond? There are many other gender neutral pronouns, some which are commonly used (the ungendered he, they), and some which are more rare/recent (E, Ey, Hu, Per, Thon, Jee, Ve, Xe Ze, Zhe). Using whichever random one a person prefers will lead to an unintelligible mess (what about if an article is discussing more than one person with different preferences?!) Until a standard develops, or is used by our reliable sources, we should minimize use of pronouns to avoid the problem (although Bond's article reads horribly due to this) or use the most common neutral pronouns. If reliable sources are using a particular pronoun about a particular person, then use that one. Gaijin42 (talk) 19:12, 11 September 2013 (UTC)

that's not what is suggested - rather, it is that gender neutral invented pronouns have not sufficiently entered the language; and in cases like bond, he made up an entirely new and custom pronoun just for himself (or vself as he'd prefer). But we should document sources. I suggest that we update the language to specifically state that if the subject does not like either he/she, we use the pronoun most often used in RS (either he/she) - And not avoid pronouns which makes the article tortured. Once society/language changes, so can we. We can of course note which gender X identified with - in the case of Bond his gender is transgender (neither male nor female), but 'he' is the most commonly used when they aren't using 'v' or 'Bond'.--Obi-Wan Kenobi (talk) 19:59, 11 September 2013 (UTC)

"we use the pronoun most often used in RS (either he/she)" Unfortunately, that could constitute a BLP violation. And while I'm not planning on pressing charges, I think your use of the "he" pronoun is straying into BLP violation territory, simply because it seems possible for the subject to be harmed by use of that pronoun. CaseyPenk (talk) 20:24, 11 September 2013 (UTC)

There are no charges to press. Doing something that a person doesn't like is explicitly NOT a BLP violation. It might be rude. It might be contrary to their wishes.But there is no libel, or defamation or any other policy violation. MOS:IDENTITY is a style guideline, not part of BLP. If BLP worked that way, every negative item in every BLP article we have would be deleted. Further, when we are actively discussing a policy/guideline, it begs the question to accuse someone of violating your preferred wording/interpretation. Gaijin42 (talk) 21:24, 11 September 2013 (UTC)

I do not prefer one pronoun or another, but I'm concerned that Bond might find "he" to be libellous. CaseyPenk (talk) 21:32, 11 September 2013 (UTC)

Casey, I suggest you look up what the word libel means before tossing it around so lightly. Bond is free to demand that we use an invented pronoun just for him, and we are free to ignore his requests. As I've pointed out on sue gardner's blog, the 'omg people may be hurt/offended by something on Wikipedia' brigade would do well to demonstrate efforts towards correcting massive extant biases/errors/problems, esp outside their special interests, rather than worrying that Bond is annoyed.--Obi-Wan Kenobi (talk) 21:57, 11 September 2013 (UTC)

I am familiar with libel, thank you. The point of BLP is to head off offensive content; some may find improper use of pronouns just as offensive and damaging as falsely stating that someone is addicted to heroin. It is theoretically possible that someone would commit suicide because the wrong pronouns were used (this is obviously an extreme example and is quite unlikely, but it's possible, and that's why we have a heightened sense of scrutiny over this). Ultimately what it means for policy is that we should avoid using pronouns the subject explicitly rejects as offensive. If someone states they may face harm from the "he" pronoun, I don't think it's appropriate to question that and steamroll over their biography with "he." CaseyPenk (talk) 22:08, 11 September 2013 (UTC)

It's theoretically possible that someone might commit suicide over ANYTHING in their wikipedia profile (say, a reminder of a past indiscretion), so your example is rather useless. We have a profile of another trans woman who had been dating somebody who was later killed; she came and asked us to delete her biography since it pained her deeply to see that story every time she pulled up her profile (it was one of the main sources of her notability). She was denied. Again, NOTHING in the BLP says we have to at all costs avoid offending somebody, I don't know where or how people are imagining this to be the point of BLP. In this case, I *do* think it's acceptable to use a standard pronoun even if the subject rejects it. We are an encyclopedia, and we should not be pandering to those who want special pronouns. We're probably going to have to wait until 3rd gender pronouns come into wide use, and then we can start using them.--Obi-Wan Kenobi (talk) 11:33, 12 September 2013 (UTC)

• More thoughts not encapsulated above - It seems rather arbitrary for us to allow people to self-identify as male/female, but not as third gender. It's not our place to make value judgments on which types of identities are "acceptable," so I think we should either accept all forms of gender self-identification or none. When we start saying "only male/female gender binaries are allowed" we get into dangerous POV territory. CaseyPenk (talk) 19:02, 11 September 2013 (UTC)

  I strongly agree with your first sentence and your last sentence. -sche (talk) 20:00, 11 September 2013 (UTC)

I disagree with both. While there is some evidence that gender dysmorphia is real, this is not the case with third gender. (The existence of a third gender role is arguable, but not an actual third gender.) The gender binary may not be either-or, but it does seem to be a binary. We've got people with male characteristics, people with female characteristics, people with some of both, people with not very many of either, but we don't have a third set of affirmative characteristics distinct from male and female. That's what it would take to get me to believe that third gender is real. Darkfrog24 (talk) 03:44, 16 September 2013 (UTC)

Thoughts: Especially because Wikipedia already has articles on people who are neither male nor female (third genders are relatively common in the world, both historically and today), it would be a good idea to agree on one or more ways of writing about them.

1. We could eschew pronouns and use surnames, as the article on Bond does. A drawback is that this is clumsy; a benefit is that it is clear and grammatically acceptable.
2. We could use one or more genderqueer pronouns. A drawback is that there are so many such pronouns that no one is likely to be familiar to many people or recommended by more than one (or any?) style guide. Wiktionary documents over thirty (not even including v!), of which seven met criteria for inclusion in the dictionary as words. (Another drawback is that a large number of the genderqueer pronouns look like typos of he, she or the singular they, and might be subject to repeated good-faith "typofixing" by users unfamiliar with them.)
3. We could use the singular they. A drawback is that this irks some people; a benefit is that it has been used for so many hundreds of years by so many respected authors that it is familiar to most (all?) people.

Are there other options? (I suppose "arbitrarily use either he or she" might be suggested as one, but it doesn't comport with WP:NPOV.) -sche (talk) 19:57, 11 September 2013 (UTC)

• How would these suggestions impact articles on people who can be described accurately and respectfully using he or she pronouns (e.g. with Manning, although we debate which of the two to use, we are still talking within the he-she binary). Would we write he and she out of the guidelines and use last names/genderqueer pronouns/theyfor everyone? I assume that is not the case and last names/genderqueer pronouns/they would only apply to people to which he/she does not apply. CaseyPenk (talk) 20:10, 11 September 2013 (UTC)

I'd think that if standard masculine or feminine pronouns were clearly accurate and respectful to use for a person, it would make the most sense to continue to do so, wouldn't it? 50.201.255.38 (talk) 20:17, 11 September 2013 (UTC)

Correct, I'm suggesting ways of writing about people who are neither male nor female. It would be possible to write about men and women in these ways, too, but I wouldn't (and I would make discussion of whether or not to a separate discussion). -sche (talk) 20:19, 11 September 2013 (UTC)

It would be cool to write about everyone using "they" - get some of these arbitrary gender implications out of our writing.

For now, we'll talk about people who don't identify as male or female. CaseyPenk (talk) 20:22, 11 September 2013 (UTC)

• Comment: I'm fine with using singular they in cases of people with non-binary or indeterminate gender. This blog post gives a bunch of reasons why it's correct, but really, I find a BLP subject's wishes to be more important than prescriptivist whining. Sceptre ^(talk) 21:34, 11 September 2013 (UTC)
• Question. Does anyone have an idea as to how many people with biographies on WP have expressed a desire to be called by a pronoun other than he or she? I think it needs to be more than a few before it needs a formulated approach. Formerip (talk) 22:35, 11 September 2013 (UTC)
• I am also fine with using singular they in cases of people with indeterminate gender. While it may not be considered standard English by all sources, it is vastly preferable to the ridiculous pronoun avoidance currently used in Bond's article, ("Bond began attending elementary school, where Bond first became aware that Bond was unlike the other little boys..."). Using neologistic pronouns is obviously not on the table, no matter what the subject's preferences are. The BLP policy is not about respecting the subject's preferences. It is about doing no harm to them. – Smyth\^talk 14:16, 12 September 2013 (UTC)

• It occurs to me that we should be discussing something slightly broader that the question that was first posed, of what pronouns to use for people who express a specific desire that authors who write in English refer to them by pronouns other than "he" or "she". We should discuss what pronoun to use for people who are neither male nor female. I would hazard a guess that Wikipedia has articles on at least a dozen English-speaking genderqueer people, like Justin Vivian Bond and Genesis P-Orridge, who have specified that they should be referred to by other pronouns. But I would guess that the number of notable people outside the anglosphere who belong to a third gender (or fourth or fifth gender) is larger. Such people are unlikely to have specified what pronouns they want English-speakers to denote them with, but Wikipedia has to denote them somehow. Wikipedia could, of course, defer to the pronouns used by the reliable sources that describe them, if those sources are in English... but would everyone go along with that even if the sources turned out to use ze and hir? -sche (talk) 17:53, 13 September 2013 (UTC)

The Genesis P-Orridge example is interesting because, as far as I can tell, [pronoun] wishes to be known by a special pronoun not because of gender dysphoria but because [pronoun] wishes to be considered an amalgam with [possessive pronoun] dead wife. IMO, it's [possessive pronoun] perfect right to do that if [pronoun] wants, but I can't see the why WP is going along with it.

To explain my use of square brackets: Damned if I'm going to keep looking back at the article for reference..

You may need to give some examples of the people you are talking about outside the Anglosphere. This still seems to me a bit like a discussion in search of an issue. Formerip (talk) 01:49, 14 September 2013 (UTC)

Wikipedia should limit itself to words that are already in accepted usage (except when discussing fiction, as in "muggle" and "Klingon"). This is not the place to push new and non-standard coinages. Let them become accepted out in the world (or not); then change the MoS to match (or don't). Darkfrog24 (talk) 03:44, 16 September 2013 (UTC)

Gender and direct quotations

I propose changing the following:

Direct quotations may need to be handled as exceptions (in some cases adjusting the portion used may reduce apparent contradictions, and " [sic]" may be used where necessary).

to this:

Direct quotations should not be modified to conform with this guideline, but apparent contradictions can be reduced by adjusting the portion quoted or replacing pronouns with the subject's name. " [sic]" may be used where necessary.

I do not believe this to be a change in meaning. The intention of the original guideline is clearly to prevent editors from modifying direct quotations using [brackets] in ways that the source of the quote might reasonably consider to be a misrepresentation. This change would make that intention explicit. It also provides an additional suggested way of resolving the situation: namely, replacing pronouns with names. – Smyth\^talk 11:11, 12 September 2013 (UTC)

Support the change. However, I don't agree that it doesn't change the meaning. There's clearly a difference in meaning between the cautious may need to be handled as exceptions and the direct should not be modified. So I think that there should be some discussion first. Peter coxhead (talk) 11:29, 12 September 2013 (UTC)

Support This seems very sensible. If a quotation like this - "If I told him once, I told him a hundred times that he should be careful with his cheese grater." - is thought to be important enough to be quoted in full in an article, but we subsequently learn that the person being referred to is (and was) actually a "she", the modification I would recommend would be this - "If I told him [Smith] once, I told him a hundred times that he should be careful with his cheese grater." This kind of clarifying parenthetical is done all the time when it is unclear which person a pronoun refers to. If there is still some fear that the quote will be misunderstood a lead-in clarification can help - "Jones, talking about Smith when she was believed to be a man, said...." Perhaps adding a "for example" or two to the text might help, but perhaps it is not necessary. 99.192.71.46 (talk) 12:11, 12 September 2013 (UTC) (=99.192....)

Oppose. There's a contradiction between "Direct quotations should not be modified" and "replacing pronouns with the subject's name". Formerip (talk) 12:41, 12 September 2013 (UTC)

That's why I specifically wrote "should not be modified to conform with this guideline". That would mean actually reversing the gender of the quotation, which would misrepresent the source. On the other hand, exchanging pronouns and nouns, changing tenses, or decapitalizing the start of sentences are all acceptable editorial practices to fit a quotation into its context, as long they are marked with brackets and do not change the quotation's meaning. – Smyth\^talk 14:00, 12 September 2013 (UTC)

That's not clear from your proposal. However, in any case the normal style would be "he [Manning]" (not an actual substitution) which I don't think we even need to mention because of course you can do that where it is helpful. It's also a convention for clarifying text out of context, not changing its meaning. So "He [Manning] wrote to his mother" might be OK if it would otherwise be unclear, but "[Manning] wrote to [Manning's] mother" would be an abuse of the convention. Your proposal seems worded to permit that, although it doesn't even require that brackets are used. Formerip (talk) 14:03, 12 September 2013 (UTC)

I don't believe your last example would be an abuse. That is an acceptable way of editing a quotation which contains a pronoun whose referent is unclear without additional context. As long as the edit is acknowledged with brackets, retaining the pronoun is not required. See here for more examples. – Smyth\^talk 14:44, 12 September 2013 (UTC)

The goal should be to use the minimum intrusion into the quote needed for clarity; it goes with the spirit of direct quotation to be conveying what was actually said. As such, while there may be confusion with simply "after [Manning] wrote to his mother" in some context where there is a third person who is male involved, "after he [Manning] wrote to his mother" would be clear, and less intrusive than "after [Manning] wrote to [Manning's] mother."--Nat Gertler (talk) 14:52, 12 September 2013 (UTC)

Change - eliminate the bit about "sic" altogether. Sic is for "erroneous spelling or other nonstandard presentation", and referring to a person by the gender that they displayed by the time is neither. This seems to be taking the current Wikipedia standard and applying it as the generic standard, and doing so retroactively. We would not put the preacher said "anyone born in the year 1965 A.D. [sic] deserves free cupcakes" in an article that otherwise used CE-style dating. How to view transgendered people even in the current state is not universally held to, not everyone will agree that Chelsea Manning is a "she", but would be even further inappropriate to be quoting an article from last year which said "Bradley said that he [sic] liked cookies" when that quote was done in right-to-any-standard form, using the pronoun that both reflected biological sex and how the subjected presented themselves at the time. There's nothing nonstandard about that, and it seems an odd sort of pointless POV shaming. Put a [Chelsea] if needed, or a (referring to Chelsea as "he"), but [sic] is just wrong. --Nat Gertler (talk) 13:58, 12 September 2013 (UTC)

Yes, I'd support that change. Formerip (talk) 14:01, 12 September 2013 (UTC)

And to make clear, I oppose the originally suggested change. After this bit ends, I should probably propose eliminating the sic portion as a separate !poll. --Nat Gertler (talk) 13:30, 13 September 2013 (UTC)

Change. The incorrect use of "[sic]" should be removed. If changes in pronouns within direct quotes are necessary, necessary, then they should be treated with, "Smith said that [she] was the finest soldier ever" or "Smith said that [Surname] was the finest soldier ever." Either of those would indicate that the original text had been changed. However, the part about treating these things as exceptions may be relevant. If the quote is about the subject's gender, then the pronoun selected indicates the speaker's own conclusions, as in, "The subject's mother said, 'I don't believe in this transgender nonsense. He will always be my little boy.'" Darkfrog24 (talk) 18:20, 12 September 2013 (UTC)

Blank lines and section headings

This is a very minor issue, but I'm looking for consensus to change: "Include one blank line above the heading, and optionally one blank line below it, for readability in the edit window."

Proposed edit: "Include one blank line above the heading (where the heading is preceded by text), and optionally one blank line below it, for readability in the edit window. There is no need to include a blank line between two headings."

The issue is that one of the bots keeps adding space between headers using AWB, which is gumming up the watchlists. This MoS sentence is being cited as the reason for the edits. It means we end up with the following in edit mode, which (if there are a lot of these in an article) is a nuisance on small screens:

==Level 1==

===Level 2===

====Level 3====

Does anyone mind? SlimVirgin ^(talk) 18:43, 13 September 2013 (UTC)

I have no strong opinion one way or the other. On Wiktionary, headers are usually separated by blank lines, and I think it improves legibility. On the other hand, it's also very rare (on Wiktionary) to have more than two headers next to each other without any intervening content. If that situation is more common on Wikipedia, I can see how it might be more legible to reduce the whitespace. IMO, the solution to the specific issue you raise is to tell the bot owner to leave the whitespace alone, since the MOS explicitly does not require anything one way or the other: it says including the whitespace is "optional", but "there is no need" for it. -sche (talk) 19:36, 15 September 2013 (UTC)

Why have you added "(where the heading is preceded by text)"? This creates doubt if the last thing in the previous section is a table, image, or other coding rather than text. There should, however, be an exception for anchor tags (where a heading has been renamed but a tag is required so anchor links to that section still work). —sroc 💬 01:42, 16 September 2013 (UTC)

I normally do not add a blank line below a heading, just as a personal preference. However, it should be noted that while a single blank line is generally disregarded by the software when it follows any parsed code (i.e. section headers, templates, thumbnails, etc.), two blank lines will affect the resulting article. Regardless, the bot in question should not be making purely cosmetic adjustments - as per bot policy - for just the reasons raised here. In other cases, WP:HIDEBOT has info on hiding the edits of specific editors/bots from your watchlist. - Floydian ^τ _¢ 08:31, 17 September 2013 (UTC)

Inconsistent pronouns

A lot of the debate over MOS:IDENTITY stems from the assumption that we have to be consistent in what pronouns we use in an article... but I am going to question that assumption.
Take look at how we present pronouns in our article on Lassie... This is a case where we successfully use two different pronouns in different parts of the article... when discussing the fictional character of "Lassie" we use the pronoun "she", because the character is presented as being female. However, when discussing the actual dogs that portrayed Lassie, we use "he", because all of these dogs were in fact, biologically male.
I think we can deal with pronouns for people in a similar fashion... by separating gender identity from biological gender. When discussing the person's gender identity, it would be appropriate to use "he" or "she" according to that identity... while in other contexts it is more accurate to refer to the person by the appropriate biological pronoun.
And before you assume bad faith... Please note that I don't mean to imply that gender identity is "fictional" like the character "Lassie"... I know it is not. I am not suggesting an exact parallel here. I am merely noting the "Lassie" article as an example of a situation where we were able to successfully use two different pronouns in an article, each depending on context... and suggesting that a context based use of pronouns can be done in other situations. Blueboar (talk) 17:31, 15 September 2013 (UTC)

For the benefit of others, I note that what you term "biological gender" is now usually termed "sex". (If I recall past discussions on this page correctly, you or another user strongly preferred to use the term "gender" rather than the term "sex"; I don't mean to encourage you to change your words, I mean only to clarify things for those who may be unfamiliar with how you use them.) -sche (talk) 18:02, 15 September 2013 (UTC)

Don't think it was me... you may be thinking of another user. Blueboar (talk) 19:05, 15 September 2013 (UTC)

Ah, yes, I was thinking of Darkfrog. In any case, editors may find it helpful to peruse Sex and gender distinction. -sche (talk) 19:25, 15 September 2013 (UTC)

That article provides input from several dictionaries and has a brief criticism section. I recommend it as well. However, I wouldn't go so far as to say that "biological gender" is inappropriate here. "Sex" suggests intercourse and "biological gender" does not. Also, strictly speaking, the state of being male or female is usually referred to as "gender," if "usual" refers to something that happens more frequently than something else. Darkfrog24 (talk) 20:08, 16 September 2013 (UTC)

Please explain when it is best to refer to a trans woman as he/him (besides direct quotations.) Georgia guy (talk) 18:01, 15 September 2013 (UTC)

I think it is best to use "he" in the context of referring to his biological gender, and to use "she" in the context of discssing her gender identity. Blueboar (talk) 19:05, 15 September 2013 (UTC)

Admittedly anecdotal evidence: Speaking as a cis person with a pile of trans friends and acquaintances, who actively tries to be less of a dick, I'd tend to "never ever". I'd say "never ever unless they say so", but I know of literally no examples from my personal sphere. FWIW - David Gerard (talk) 19:15, 15 September 2013 (UTC)

• First off, I believe you should rethink your Lassie reference. You are comparing a fictional character (And the animals that portrayed her) with a trans person, which seems to be suggesting that you feel trans people are just actors for their gender roles playing a part. I'm not sure if this is what you are intending, but if it is then I feel it is out of line, especially for this discussion. This supposed to be about pronouns to apply to trans people, not a debate about if trans people are even the gender they identify as, which seems to be where you want to take it.

Second, you are ignoring all other facets of gender to focus on one specific part of biology: Genital. You are even excluding stuff like genes or the brain, along with non-biological things such as general mental and social aspects. Again, this is not even in line with what Wikipedia itself already states on gender. And, despite my requests, you have provided nothing in the way of references or evidence to support your position, which appears to be either "current genitals" or "whatever I decide they were born as" (I'm not entirely sure which). Simple Sarah (talk) 19:28, 15 September 2013 (UTC)

Yes. Biology is very big. If a man loses his penis, he does not cease to be a man because he still has so many other physical and chemical things that make him male. Darkfrog24 (talk) 20:08, 16 September 2013 (UTC)

Consensus on anything?

It has been over a week now on both proposals and I just want to know where we stand? Is there a clear enough consensus to make any changes to MOS:IDENTITY? - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 00:17, 16 September 2013 (UTC)

My understanding is that RFCs are generally left open for 30 days. GabrielF (talk) 00:42, 16 September 2013 (UTC)

Discussion about collapsing music track lists

Dear All: There is a discussion about whether the track lists for Music of the SaGa series should be collapsed in the article at Talk:Music_of_the_SaGa_series#Collapsed_sections. Please visit the talk page and take a few moments to share your feedback on this issue. --Jax 0677 (talk) 17:37, 16 September 2013 (UTC)

Falklands units

Kindly take note that there is currently a discussion at Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Wikipedia:WikiProject South America/Falkland Islands work group/Units. -- Ohc ^¡digame!_{¿que pasa?} 09:40, 17 September 2013 (UTC)

There is a similar discussion at the Falkland Islands talk page. Michael Glass (talk) 13:46, 17 September 2013 (UTC)

Gender self-identification

In the section MOS:IDENTITY there is, "Any person whose gender might be questioned should be referred to by the pronouns, possessive adjectives, and gendered nouns (for example "man/woman", "waiter/waitress", "chairman/chairwoman") that reflect that person's latest expressed gender self-identification. "

There doesn't seem to be any weight given to the person's physical state, gender legal status, or history of how the person was referred to in the past or presently in reliable sources. Would anyone care to explain? Thanks. --Bob K31416 (talk) 18:39, 17 September 2013 (UTC)

Any variant of it that you propose changing it to that gives appropriate weight to such things?? Georgia guy (talk) 18:45, 17 September 2013 (UTC)

I'd just like to know the reasoning behind the sentence that doesn't give any weight to those other aspects. Could you help out in that regard? Thanks. --Bob K31416 (talk) 18:51, 17 September 2013 (UTC)

I'd like to know if there's a statement you would prefer it to be that gives weight to them. Could you give any suggestions?? Thanks. Georgia guy (talk) 18:54, 17 September 2013 (UTC)

I don't feel that I have a good enough understanding of the situation here to do that, hence my request. I think I'll wait to see what anyone else has to contribute with regard to the info I requested. Thanks, anyhow. --Bob K31416 (talk) 19:05, 17 September 2013 (UTC)

Because, per for example evidence submitted in the current arbitration case, there's quite a lot of evidence that gender identity is particularly sensitive in this manner. I'll refer you to that rather than attempt to prove it on the spot here, as you seem to be asking - David Gerard (talk) 19:51, 17 September 2013 (UTC)

Current arbitration case. --Bob K31416 (talk) 21:38, 17 September 2013 (UTC)

Two things: 1) Trangenderism is a mental/emotional identity, not a physical state. Physical state and legal status are medically irrelevant, and changes to such may depend on an individual's ability to pay for surgery and legal actions. 2) When writing or speaking about a transgender person, we are writing/reading or speaking/hearing in the present, and therefore even when referring in the present to the person's past, the pronoun choice as it is currently known should be used.

• http://www.abct.org/docs/Members/FactSheets/LGBT_for_therapists.doc
• http://www.counseling.org/Resources/Competencies/ALGBTIC_Competencies.pdf
• http://transgenderlawcenter.org/archives/8975
• http://www.glaad.org/files/MediaReferenceGuide2010.pdf?id=99

Startswithj (talk) 20:02, 17 September 2013 (UTC)

In your third link there was the suggestion, "Avoid pronoun confusion when examining the stories and backgrounds of transgender people prior to their transition. In Private Manning’s case, she may simply be referred to as Private Manning." --Bob K31416 (talk) 21:38, 17 September 2013 (UTC)

• I think Bob's question is ultimately why gender identity gets such an elevated privilege over biological sex when referring to a person. Is it because referring to someone by their biological sex (when it doesn't match their gender identity) is insulting, or otherwise might hurt their feelings? Since when has that been a consideration when writing Wikipedia articles? I'm sure that Ayman al-Zawahiri doesn't appreciate being labeled a terrorist in his Wikipedia article, and probably doesn't self-identify as a terrorist. There are probably a number of people on the List of people with bipolar disorder who feel uncomfortable about being on such a public list. However, the feelings of BLP subjects generally do not factor into how we write an article on them. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia that contains objective facts. "Chelsea Manning is a woman" is not a fact, and is not correct. "Chelsea Manning is biologically male, but identifies as a woman" is a fact, and is correct. In my opinion, using female pronouns to refer to someone who is clearly biologically male is just confusing. This doesn't mean that I hate transgendered people, or that I think transgenderism is not real. It just means that, just like any other biographical article, presenting objective facts is more important to me than considering the subject's feelings. ‑Scottywong| speak _ 23:11, 17 September 2013 (UTC)

Scottywong, if you are asking why Wikipedia does things the way they do, then the answer is because that's how the rest of the world does it. If you are asking why the world does it the way they do, then that seems to be a more complicated question. But the answer is probably something like this: If everyone had a sex and gender that "matched" the question of which of these features of a person a pronoun was referring to would not even make sense. So it is only in the case of transgender people that the question even arises. For people who experience their sex and gender not matching, there is nearly universally the view that pronouns should refer to gender, not sex.

For fans of science fiction it also seems to instinctively that pronouns should track gender and not sex. Think of any sci-fi story about one person being transported into another person's body. If John Smith wakes up one morning in the body of Mary Jones, people in the story who know him and are told about the magical body switching will call him "John" and "he" despite the fact that he is now in a female body. Identity that matters to people is internal, not external. The experience of John Smith as described here is actually similar to how transgender people often explain how they feel - that they are in the wrong body.

Philosophers have studied the question of personal identity for hundreds of years, long before anyone thought that being transgender was something that could actually happen. Some have argued that physical continuity is what matters, but most have thought that mental continuity is what counts. So the sci-fi case mentioned above tracks what most philosophers think makes sense for how identity really works. This means that if a person feels (in their mind) like a man but look (in their body) like a woman that they really are a man. So it follows that male pronouns must be used to accurately refer to the person.

So Chelsea Manning is a woman, not a man. It does not matter what her body looks like. Her mental identity is the only identity that matters. That's what philosophers, science fiction fans, and transgender people all tell us. Your opinion about pronouns does not reflect this reality. 99.192.90.227 (talk) 03:03, 18 September 2013 (UTC) (=99.192....)

For the sake of discussion, how would those ideas regarding gender apply to newborn babies? --Bob K31416 (talk) 03:22, 18 September 2013 (UTC)

Well let me put it this way. In the abortion debate it is often said that one of the key points of dispute is whether or not a fetus is a "person". But actually, there are philosophers who will tell you that based on how we actually think of "personhood" that even a newly born infant is still not yet a person. Newborns, so the argument goes, do not have the kind of complex psychology required to actually be a person. If this is true, then it would make sense to say that a newborn does not have a gender yet either.

But most people (including most philosophers) believe that not only does a newborn have a complex enough psychology to be a person, so does a fetus in the late stages of pregnancy. It's pretty hard to know for sure about newborns, let alone fetuses, because we really only have limited ways of measuring what they might be thinking. But if a newborn is a person and if a fetus is a person, then there is no reason to think that this person does not have a gender. We might not know what that gender is due to our communication limitation, but it still might be there.

To my knowledge, the experts on gender identity and childhood development say that gender is not fixed in the first couple of years of life. If this is true, then a newborn might not have a gender. 99.192.83.245 (talk) 03:37, 18 September 2013 (UTC) (=99.192....)

Thanks. When children develop, and their physiology fits in the normal range for their sex, what would cause a physical male to develop a female gender identity? --Bob K31416 (talk) 03:58, 18 September 2013 (UTC)

I'm going to reword your question before giving an unsatisfying answer: What causes any person to develop the gender identity that have? So far as I know, the experts have no idea. It's analogous to the question of sexual orientation. Why do people develop the sexual orientations they come to have? No one knows. 99.192.83.245 (talk) 04:03, 18 September 2013 (UTC) (=99.192....)

Thanks. That's a reasonable answer. --Bob K31416 (talk) 04:44, 18 September 2013 (UTC)

245, I understand everything you're talking about, and I don't disagree. Clearly, transgendered people prefer to be referred to using their pronouns of choice. To do otherwise would be against their wishes, might insult them, or make them sad. But still, my main question hasn't been addressed. BLP tells us to avoid harming the subject of biographical articles. Certainly, using the "wrong" pronoun doesn't harm a transgendered person, even if it might cause them some emotional distress. So, since we don't take the subject's feelings into account for other editorial decisions (see examples in my last comments above), why must we now? (Your answer is "because that's the way the rest of the world does it.")

I understand and am sympathetic to the phenomenon of transgenderism. However, I also know that when I look at a person, I can reliably determine their sex 999 times out of 1000. When I look at a picture of Bradley Manning, I am confident that his sex is male. Therefore, I expect male pronouns to be used in an encyclopedia article about him. If he has had notable gender identity issues, I expect to read about those as well. Perhaps this is just because this is the way my personal experience has been for my whole life. When I see something that looks like a girl, I refer to it as a girl. To do otherwise is jarring and confusing. Maybe it's just something I'll have to get used to. If I knew Manning personally, I'm sure I'd be sympathetic to his gender identity issues, and I'd refer to him using his pronoun of choice. But in an objective encyclopedia article, I would expect his objective sex to be used. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Scottywong (talk • contribs)

Scottywong, (1) "...might insult them, or make them sad." I don't want to speculate on your intent, but the final phrase here reads as insultingly dismissive. (2) "BLP tells us to avoid harming the subject of biographical articles." Actually, no. BLP requires that we take care to be accurate, and it is inaccurate to use "she" for a man or "he" for a woman, no matter haw many news articles do it. So when we have a reliable source about a person's gender (like a public declaration by the person) BLP says we must avoid the factual error of using the wrong pronoun. (3) "Certainly, using the 'wrong' pronoun doesn't harm a transgendered person, even if it might cause them some emotional distress." See point #1. To glibly state that emotional distress is not harm is extremely insulting to anyone who has been psychologically harmed. If you insist that "harm" only means physical harm, then you are ignoring reality. (4) "...the subject's feelings...." Wrong. I have not argued anywhere that the issue is one of taking the subject's feelings into consideration. In fact, I have argued the opposite. We should use the pronouns that are accurate, not the ones that are preferred. So if a transgender woman wanted us to use male pronouns we should not do it, just as if Tom Hanks announced "I am a man, but I want people to use female pronouns when talking about me". That is a request we should ignore because it is not accurate. (5) "Your answer is...." Wrong again. what I said was nothing at all about "feelings" but a simple fact about the meanings of words. Why does Wikipedia use the word "truck" to refer to trucks? Because that's what the word means. Why is that what it means? Because that is how the world uses the word. Why does Wikipedia use "she" and "her" for people whose gender is female? Because that is what the words mean. Why do they mean that? Because that is how the world uses the words. (6) Your whole second paragraph is an interesting discussion of how you see the world, but it is not how the world is. Sex and gender are almost always a "match", so a person's sex is almost always a clear indicator of their gender and thus of what pronoun to use. But in some cases sex and gender do not match and in those rare cases the error can be easily corrected. In that 1 in 1000 case where you mis-identify a person visually, they will typically be quick to point out the error. At that point, only an asshole refuses to accept that the person is the gender they say they are. That's all that is being said here. When a person says "I am a woman" then that's all the source we need. Since the meaning of "she" and "her" is fixed by gender, not by sex, the pronouns we must use is also fixed. 99.192.88.142 (talk) 14:51, 18 September 2013 (UTC) (=99.192....)

Not sure if my message here is needed, but I hope that this discussion doesn't spiral out of control. Invective can be very distracting and obscure any good points that are embedded in a message. --Bob K31416 (talk) 16:13, 18 September 2013 (UTC)

Bob K31416,

The only problem I see in the quoted portion of the MOS is that adjectives, including possessive adjectives, do not refer. The rest looks fine to me. Do you perceive another problem with it that should be brought to our attention?

-- Marie Paradox (talk) 03:29, 18 September 2013 (UTC)

Marie Paradox, possessive adjective certainly do refer. "His" and "her" are possessive adjectives. They refer to the person who is the owner by their gender. As for other adjectives, the pair "blond" and "blonde" are both still used. 99.192.83.245 (talk) 03:44, 18 September 2013 (UTC) (=99.192....)

Marie Paradox, I have the impression that the criterion of gender self-identification is being used in Wikipedia because it is the criterion recommended by advocates for transgender people. Seems like Wikipedia should use a criterion that presents the subject in a well written manner as clearly and as informatively as possible, as long as it doesn't cause harm to the person who is the subject of the article. I think ScottyWong made good points in this regard. In any case, it seems like a difficult situation regardless of which or how the personal pronouns are used. So for me it's not clear yet how the guideline should deal with this situation. --Bob K31416 (talk) 04:42, 18 September 2013 (UTC)