Userpage modules in the "special" banner slot (dynamic list):
/Ukraine, 13 March 2022 – 4 September 2022
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/Jew Trans Soul Rebel, 4 September 2022 – 11 October 2022
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/HATEDISRUPT, 11 October 2022 – 16 October 2022
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/not just disappointed, 16 October 2022 – 24 October 2022
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There's always the temptation, with these things, to compare to majority or plurality groups. "What if someone said this about cis people?" "What if someone said this about white people?" But it doesn't work that way. I could say "Ban all cis people from Wikipedia", and that would be disruptive and offensive, but it wouldn't put cis people in (reasonable) fear. There is no plausible future where Wikipedia imposes discriminatory policies against cis people, or even makes it permissible to advocate for such. (And if you think there is, put the computer down and step slowly away from whatever sites you've been on.) For trans people this fear exists, and its reasonableness is reënforced every time the community decides our persecutors and would-be persecutors are the real victims here.
51 out of 108 (plus 8 neutral). Remember that number, 51. Don't remember the names. Some reasons were better than others, and people change, and this isn't an individual problem. But remember the number. This is a collective problem. Our community still sees trans editors' right to edit in peace as lesser. As something negotiable, something to wikilawyer over. This is not a new problem. On the individual level, it's often not even one driven by malice. Since I became an admin, I've had to convince multiple experienced, reasonable, kind-hearted administrators that various transphobic attacks were worthy of administrative intervention, in contexts where I would not have had to for other groups. Much of the Anglosphere (in particular one culturally influential island) sees trans people as a political issue first and a group of people second—and thus using Wikipedia to agitate against us is the lesser offense of FORUM-ing, and not what it really is: hate speech and perversion of Wikipedia's purpose. I'm not just disappointed in our community. I'm disgusted with our community. Not any one editor of 51, not even the 51 collectively, but our community as a whole. A community that has seen fit to tell trans editors that our safety and wellbeing is, at best, an issue on par with making sure a single editor doesn't feel too called-out for engaging in hate speech against us. I want a way to make people understand. But I still don't know how to get past that issue that you either know what it's like to reasonably fear your own persecution, or you don't. And if you don't, yeah, maybe this seems overblown or a waste of time. But consider perhaps the precedent you tend toward setting when you say that someone editing with an overtly transphobic agenda is welcome here as long as they don't touch gender-related pages, or even, for some, without that requirement. Still free to drive away trans and nonbinary editors in any number of ways, so long as they can find a single admin to unblock them in a year or two once people have forgotten. Naïveté. I'd like to chalk a lot of it up to naïveté. But I'll close with a story: Some years ago (row 364 [.xlsx]), I was sitting in a bus shelter with my partner; this was before my transition but from attire we were both very obviously queer. A teenager biked up to us and started hurling slurs at us. When he failed to cow either of us, he threatened to shoot me, and reached behind his back. For an interminable moment I tracked his hands, matched his footwork, and waited to see if he'd reach the point where I would be forced to strike first. He made two half-steps backwards, found himself off-balance, and turned and fled with some parting slurs. I don't think his motive there was of profound hatred for queer people. He said he was 15, but to me looked about 13. I don't think he really had a gun. I think his motive was impressing a younger boy who was there with him, showing him he was tough. That doesn't change much, though. The harm was still done. Much greater harms were nearly done, to one or both of us. A less malevolent motive is some consolation, but the harm remains. So yes. Disgusted. And devoid of any confidence that I will stop feeling that way anytime soon. Anyways, back to writing articles and doing boring admin work.— Tamzin Hadasa
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/Jew Trans Soul Rebel/alt1, 25 November 2022 – 25 December 2022
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monsuta li lawa ala e mi[1]
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/On the Death of One Biographized, 27 December 2022 – 17 January 2023
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On the Death of One Biographized
"Half of the women I looked up to a decade ago are either dead or struggling with SERIOUS chronic/terminal illnesses because that’s life for us. ... You should prepare to get people out of jail, defend friends getting hauled out of public restrooms, be ready to visit friends in the hospital, and to do more for each other in general than straight cis people your age or older." — Mira Bellwether (Z''L), tweet thread "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed". — Allen Ginsberg (Z''L), Howl
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/On Harassment, 17 January 2023 – 20 March 2023
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On Harassment |
/RIPNBB, 1 September 2023 – 1 October 2023
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/The Sight, 1 October 2023 – 13 October 2023
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/civilians, 13 October 2023 – 27 November 2023
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This War of Mine is not my favorite boardgame, but it's the best I've ever played. Framed by Hemingway's words "In modern war ... you will die like a dog for no reason", it is a war game from the perspective of civilians, loosely inspired by the siege of Sarajevo. The first several times I played, I lost, sometimes for dumb mistakes like trying to salvage a seemingly-dud bomb, but more often due to the cruel, intentionally un-fun nature of the work—more interactive art than game—situations where one character gets shot just for stepping out the front door to look for people to talk to, and others get shot or stabbed looking for bandages for them at night, and everyone dies of infection. Eventually I won with a coldly calculating strategy, sacrificing one character and badly wounding two others in order to win. That felt wrong. It isn't how I would approach such a situation in real life. So I set out to win while playing compassionately. Over the course of two in-game weeks and most of a real-life day and night, I moved my characters about like real people trying to look out for each other. I was doing decently, but it could have gone either way, when I reached a critical moment: This War of Mine comes with a book of custom "scripts", over a thousand scenarios based on in-game decisions, only a small fraction of which will arise in a single play-through. One in-game night, as I sifted through goods in abandoned homes, I triggered a script that broke the fourth wall. It gave me a massive one-time bonus, if I agreed to read up on the siege of Sarajevo. I already knew a fair bit about Sarajevo, so I made a deal with myself: I had a copy of my father's book Martyrs' Day—a first-hand account of the Gulf War, including Kuwait under Iraqi occupation—and I would read that. I continued the play-through. Thanks to the bonus and continuing good luck, my characters prospered. On the last day, victory already guaranteed, I had one character step outside, spending one of three precious actions and risking sniper fire, to find someone else to shelter. I ended the game with each character in perfect health in every way. I won. I consulted the scoring rules. I had reached an impossible 30 out of 30, and had succeeded in other ways the scoring didn't even account for. I checked online. Every other person to ever claim a 30, let alone a 30-and-then-some, had gotten one of a few simple rules wrong; I hadn't. I had played, perhaps, the best ever campaign of This War of Mine. Except I still had a book to read. It sat on my desk for months, and then I and it wound up on opposite coasts for a bit. And so I didn't proclaim victory. And then two journalists named Pierre Zakrzewski and Oleksandra Kuvshynova were killed by Russian forces in Ukraine, and that stirred something in me, so I did something I'd only done once before: I wrote a Wikipedia article, about the two of them and all the other journalists killed in that war. (See previous userpage banner.) And around the time that I wrote about Yevhenii Bal, tortured to death at the age of 78 by men from a country he had defended while in the Soviet Navy, just for having photos of himself with Ukrainian marines, I felt I had finally satisfied the spirit of what the fourth-wall-breaking script had asked of me. I could finally say I had "beaten" This War of Mine, but by then that didn't feel like much of an accomplishment. And that was the point, wasn't it? War isn't a game. Killing civilians is bad. And if you read that and think I'm only calling out your side or only talking about one conflict, then take a step back and consider what that says about yourself. |
/ACE2023, 27 November 2023 – 20 December 2023
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The 2023 Arbitration Committee elections are upon us. If admin accountability and ArbCom transparency matter to you, check out my guide. If they don't, or they do but you think I have shitty judgment, then don't! Either way, your vote counts! |
/hi, 28 June 2024 – 1 September 2024
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Hi there! Are you a journalist or academic? Are you planning to write about me in a news article or journal article? Would you like to not be seriously, embarrassingly wrong? Well good news, I'm usually happy to chat. Both you and I benefit from you getting things right the first time around. To correct a few misconceptions:
That's who I'm not. Take a second to check out my userpage below and learn a bit about who I am. Then drop me a line. |
