Talk:Ed Le Brocq

Latest comment: 8 years ago by Greenwoodtree in topic Name and tense

Name and tense

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I am uneasy with using "he" for things that happened at a time when he was "she". --Gerda Arendt (talk) 05:45, 12 September 2016 (UTC)Reply

Gerda Arendt: These kind of matters are addressed at MOS:GENDERID. Afterwriting (talk) 08:14, 12 September 2016 (UTC)Reply
I read that guideline. It doesn't tell me what to do if gender changes in life. When a woman's name changes by marriage, I refer to her by maiden name until the marriage, by the new family name afterwards. It seems wrong to say - in Ayres' childhood - "he", while for mother and the world it was "she". --Gerda Arendt (talk) 08:25, 12 September 2016 (UTC)Reply
Actually it does refer to this issue when it says "This applies in references to any phase of that person's life, unless the subject has indicated a preference otherwise." I am sympathetic to your concerns but any other way of wording things is probably too complicated and confusing. Afterwriting (talk) 08:42, 12 September 2016 (UTC)Reply
The present version with "sic" when referring to "Emma" and "her" seems even more confusing to me. How about mentioning in the lead, that coming out was 2016, and everything before was Emma? A woman was admired for the cycling trip. Emma quit as a presenter, not Eddie. - The article was written by an editor who left, I'm only the caretaker ;) --Gerda Arendt (talk) 09:32, 12 September 2016 (UTC)Reply
Hi Gerda, I do understand where you're coming from. There's a Wikipedia essay on gender identity that expands FAQs/corollaries resulting from those paragraphs in the Manual of Style; the section under the heading "Retroactivity" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Gender_identity#Retroactivity - may help to address your concerns (basically it generally has to be assumed retroactively that a transgender person has always been of the gender that they currently identify as; i.e. they didn't change, but simply came out). Yes I know this takes getting used to! I added the "sic"s to the quote because of the MOS paragraph suggesting it for direct quotations. We could add the word "transgender" to the first paragraph; I didn't so far because I wasn't sure if this would be an overemphasis (I noticed that many articles on transgender people don't mention it until later in the article), but am open to other opinions. --Greenwoodtree 12:14, 12 September 2016 (UTC)Reply