Wikimedia Diversity Conference 2013/Documentation/Katie Chan

Session: Katie Chan // Where's the T in Wikimedia Diversity

Abstract

When the Wikimedia community talks about diversity issues, a lot of thoughts and bits are given to the low proportion of female editors, global south and attitudes towards lesbian, gay and bisexual editors and article subjects. What is often not addressed are transgender issues, how they affect those of our editors that are concerned by these issues, and whether our approach towards transgender issues and subjects on our projects involve appropriate sensitivities. When transgender related discussions do occur, many of the participants often demonstrate a critical lack of understanding of the issues involved. This presentation will focus on transgender and gender nonconforming topics, Wikimedia projects coverage of it, and discuss possible initiatives to improve Wikimedia movement treatments of this area.

Starting point / Insights

We split the world into two groups, depending in child's external genitals. First question on meeting a newborn is "boy or girl". People who don't match this face hostility. Parents who don't conform can even be threaten with having their babies taken from them.

Challenges

Around 1% of the world has gender dysphoria to some extent.
WMF editor survey 2011: What is your gender? options: male, female, transgender, transsexual + prefer not to say (2012)-> a beginning, but still inappropriate, difficult because there is no agreed-upon standard, don't have an accurate way to capture the info yet.
WMF wiki has settings for gender, and now has more flexibility on pronouns.
WMF tries to be inclusive - doesn't always achieve this. e.g. trans participant was having a discussion with volunteer, and volunteer asked "are you a boy or a girl". This can be hurtful to TG person.
MOS states that a person should be referred to by the pronouns that they most recently choose. This is problematic in cases like Manning's.
After public statement, Wikipedia got Chelsea Manning's page right, but soon reverted. Lots of hurtful comments made, as editors made assumptions about Manning and transgender people in general that reflected their lack of understanding of the issues.
Also had knock-on effects on other articles on other LGBT people, and moves to change the MOS.
discussion still ongoing on ArbCom's decision to ban some editors, etc
TG topics are still limited, missing or badly written. This is a problem because WP is often the first stop for info, and often copied.

Ideas

Consider events (edit-a-thons, etc) to improve our coverage of Transgender topics
We need to better educate ourselves.
Educate our volunteers.
Improve our coverage.
Think about how we collect info on our events/participants.

Questions / Next steps recommendations

Q: Needed some more info, so very useful. Question is: "Nothing about us without us". So don't want to impose my understanding on trans Wikimedians. Want to empower. Don't want to ask people straight up: want to be sensitive. Is LGBT group maybe a place to go to get input when working on articles related to trans issues?

A: All over the world there are people who can help. Problem is that not all TG people want to publicly identify themselves. So asking on a mailing list might not work - rather maybe approach non-Wikimedia orgs first? Not all gay orgs are TG friendly, so choose carefully.