 | This is an essay. It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article, nor is it one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community. Some essays represent widespread norms; others only represent minority viewpoints. |
 | This page in a nutshell: Summary of this editor's views on writing about transgender and nonbinary/genderqueer subjects; excerpted statements of mine on these matters; and an FAQ on the debate that compels me to have this page in the first place. |
I'm very sorry – of course – that what I wrote in a crappy humor essay was seen as hurtful to anyone. I should have been more sensitive to the possibility that it would be, in ways counter to the intent of the material. Allowing it to be reused in Signpost was a very bad idea, though other editors should not be blamed for what I wrote.
Newimpartial smartly summarized [1] that,
per CIVIL, we are responsible for what we actually say, not simply for what we intend. In fact, as a best practice, we ought to imagine what the impact of our remarks would be on a highly sensitive person whom we love, who is temperamentally unable to let go of an issue, rather than placing the burden on our interlocutors to "just get over" the unintended consequences of our own utterances.
This is very well said, and speaks directly to how I erred.
However, individuals who are still falsely stating that I am, or the material is, "transphobic" need to stop smear-campaigning and trying to reignite strife about a matter the community has already settled and moved on from.
Since it looks like I'll be attacked with socio-politically motivated distortions of my positions on transgender, non-binary, and genderqueer (hereafter TG/NB/GQ) people until the end of time, I should probably spell out my actual views on TG/NB/GQ matters relevant to Wikipedia, and collect diffs that demonstrate them in application (and how consistent they've been for years). It gets tiresome to correct and refute false claims about this stuff manually, over and over again.
It will also probably be useful to lay out the entire history of the underlying community debate and the essay behind it, in FAQ form. I'm not going to do that as a "diff farm", since a lot of people probably don't want their usernames dragged back into this (and the community does not want the Signpost page prominently made visible).