Hi Lodewijk and Claudia and thanks for your replies.
Apologies if I used the wrong word in my original email: I agree with you that the situations I am describing are not harassment per se, so I used the word "discomfort" in the description of what I meant. Sincere apologies to any list members who may feel offended, that was not my intention. I was merely relaying the concerns of my friend, to the extent that they sounded reasonable to me.
As for your further comments, which go so far as to name me "transphobic", well that is one of the reasons I have distanced myself from the Wikimedia Movement at this stage. I had distanced myself in the past too, after an incident at Wikimania in 2016 which caused me severe discomfort (seems that "harassment" is a sensitive word so I will avoid it, even though it was acknowledged by T&S that it was indeed that. I got an apologetic email in private, even though I had specifically requested that any communication be public as was the incident. Z, if you're reading, I'm all for public communication when the issues being discussed have been initiated in public. To cut a long story short, I'm certain that the "Code of Conduct" and "friendly space policy" guidelines would command that shouting at and intimidating a fellow Wikipedian in a public space in the presence of many Wikipedians and a T&S staff member is not acceptable. Noone stepped in to stop the offender on the spot, not even the T&S employee: they just watched while I was being shouted at. I made a complaint and after months of investigation I managed to elicit a response from the "investigating" team. I had no choice but to make it public so I uploaded a screenshot of the email to Commons. I've linked to the screenshot below to help you understand what I am talking about, and why I have little confidence in Trust and Safety). I gradually gained back my confidence in the movement and participated for another four years, i.e. 2017-2021, but when I realised in 2022 that NPOV has gone totally out the window I'm through with the Movement.
Back to the "transphobic" name-calling: it seems that anyone who expresses the slightest concern about gender policies is easily branded as transphobic. Some even go so far as to brand them as "alt right". Blaire White, an extremely attractive and happy trans woman who is calling out the pressure being exerted on minors to transition at ages when the brain is still developing, is "transphobic". Scott Newgent is "transphobic". "What is a Woman '' is a documentary for "transphobics". Johanna Olson-Kennedy, who publicly addressed parents at a conference saying that "the good thing about double mastectomies is that if the girl regrets at a later point in her life, she can go ahead and get breasts" is a "hero". Why am I going into such detail? Well because two of the participants in this list encouraged me to write an article on Wikipedia about it. Have you any idea how difficult it is to express so much as an inkling of "the other side of the story" to a "contentious topic"? But isn't that what NPOV is supposed to be about? Any attempts I have made to add this simple sentence in a neutral manner with a reliable source to Johanna Olson-Kennedy's article was met with rapid reverts and even a deletion discussion. The result was "keep", but do you really think I am willing to expend more time and energy on edit-warring over edits that used to be perfectly acceptable? Same for my efforts on John Ioannidis's page: one of the most highly cited researchers in the world is being blatantly slandered for his objections to lockdowns during the Covid-19 crisis. By whom? By a certain globally unimportant doctor who goes by the name of David Gorski. Ever heard of him? Oh, but on Wikipedia his blog "Science Based Medicine" seems to be the epitome of reliability in anything from Covid to transgender procedures on underage girls.
I look at the history of articles. I also look at discussion pages, and quite frankly these are currently the most effective ways of obtaining reliable information on Wikipedia. So in one such session, when I looked at the history of "John Ioannidis" and noticed that I was not the only one trying to "inject" some NPOV into the Covid-19 paragraph of the article, I checked the contribs of the other editor and saw that he had edited the page "Irreversible Damage". That's how I learned about that book, which I ordered and read, along with TRANS by Helen Joyce (a notable author with an article on Wikipedia). Interestingly, Gorski was involved in this issue too: one of the co-founders of SBM had written a positive review for "Irreversible Damage: the Transgender Craze Seducing our Daughters", and the review remained on the website for seven months. Then, after seven months the article was taken down and a slandering ensued. Are we supposed to believe that the science behind the book changed 180 degrees in seven months?
Returning to the original issue, hmm. If everyone at Wikimania is so quick to be offended by the slightest concern about gender policies, then perhaps it's better if we """transphobic"""", """"conservative"""", """"alt-right""" folks (lots of quotation marks) simply not attend? I will relay this to my friend. It has been an enlightening discussion, thank you.
