Talk:Catherine Butler

Gender transition?

The change of authorial name from Charles to Catherine suggests male-to-female gender transition, as do the following pages: 

• Catherine Butler's Facebook page and these posts on it, among others:
  • with regard to Trans Privacy Not Jail — Sign the Petition: This law stigmatizes trans people. What next? Will we have to wear a bell to let "normal" people know we're around? (Note the pronoun "we".)
  • Report: French government accused of transgender hypocrisy ([Pink News])

• Catherine Butler's personal webpage at Cardiff University, listing, among others, these items that are also in this article:

  Honours and awards

  Mythopoeic Scholarship Award, 2009

  Previous academic positions

  Associate Professor, University of the West of England

These don't prove anything, and it would be WP: Synthesis to draw any conclusions in the article, especially under WP:BLP. But if someone has the inclination to look into it more thoroughly and can find reliable evidence, this would be an important fact about the subject. I've linked to this entry from the Talk page of WikiProject LGBT studies.

--Thnidu (talk) 03:54, 1 December 2016 (UTC)

I agree that this is a bit tricky, but I do want to stress that we are allowed to use a person's own primary source content about themselves as sourcing for basic biographical content. For instance, if a writer is out as gay or lesbian on their own website, we are allowed to use that as sourcing for including their sexual orientation in their Wikipedia article even if we can't actually find a media article that calls them that — in fact, for sexual orientation their own statements about themselves can actually be more definitive than third-party sources that have been known to occasionally misidentify people as gay or lesbian who actually aren't.

For what it's worth, there's also this blog post for a publication called The Transadvocate, and this review of The Danish Girl in which Butler fairly clearly identifies (her/them?)self as transgender. This is also, for the record, an issue that's clearly been lingering for a while, as the change of "brother" to "sibling" (and concurrent conversion of all gendered pronouns in the entire article to "Butler") happened in 2009.

My main worry here, accordingly, is less about moving the article's title or identifying Butler as transgender, and more about the question of whether Butler prefers female or gender-neutral pronouns. Bearcat (talk) 23:11, 3 December 2016 (UTC)

@Bearcat: I've incorporated the best refs into a new § Personal (maybe should be "Biography?") and moved the page to the new name. Haven't touched the anaphors. --Thnidu (talk) 02:39, 4 December 2016 (UTC)

@Bearcat: I'm in correspondence with both Catherine and Martin. They are quite cooperative and I am working on cleaning up the page. I'm about to pull the long list of books, library counts, and honors to boil it down to something more concise and not loaded with trivia.

About pronouns, she writes:

As to your question about pronouns and kinship terms, etc., I identify as female, so female pronouns, plus words such as sister, daughter, etc., are appropriate.

Actually, since that's much the simpler task, I'll do that before the bibliography. --Thnidu (talk) 23:01, 19 January 2017 (UTC)

notes on relatives

Here to check out further when I have time, or by anyone else who wants to.  Confirmed below.

• composer Martin Butler, brother?
  • Philip Pullman, edited by Catherine Butler, Tommy Halsdorf, Palgrave Macmillan, Jul 15, 2014
    • Butler's dedication: "For my brother, Martin Butler" Thnidu (talk) 23:56, 2 January 2017 (UTC)

Update

I found a dead link on Martin Butler's University of Sussex web page and wrote to inform him of it and ask about the relationships. He replied

You are correct on all counts - viz. the dead links (thanks for pointing these out!) and the assertions concerning Cathy's and my family connections, although I'm afraid I cannot provide citable sources for the latter.

Of course, we can't use personal email as a reliable source, but I mention this here as a matter of record and to encourage anyone who wants to search for one. --Thnidu (talk) 01:10, 13 January 2017 (UTC)

libraries and reviews

Here's the long list of libraries and reviews, before I boil it down:

Butler's most important academic work, Four British fantasists : place and culture in the children's fantasies of Penelope Lively, Alan Garner, Diana Wynne Jones, and Susan Cooper won the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award (2009) in the Mythopoeic Scholarship category and is in 236 libraries according to WorldCat, and has been reviewed in the standard book review sources and academic journals. Another academic work, Teaching Children's Fiction is in 148 libraries. Of Butler's fiction, Timon's Tide is the most widely held and reviewed: over 300 libraries & reviews. Among her other fiction, Death of a Ghost, The Fetch of Mardy Watt, Calypso Dreaming, The Lurkers, are each in about 100 libraries and with journal reviews. Thnidu (talk) 09:23, 25 January 2017 (UTC)

References