Hi Mina! I am not sure if we got to meet online, but I see you are Greek and involved in Outreach activities so I hope we will eventually even meet in person in the Balkans. Meanwhile I see you attended many Wikimanias and glad to see you have friendly friends who claim to be pro diversity and confortable with LGBTQ folx, so I am curious about the one you ask a question for. Is she not comfortable asking this question herself? Why do you think that is the case? Queering Wikipedia 2023 event organizing team is planning offline events and we would like to have them welcoming to all well intendended and tolerant folx. I am curious to know which exact incidents of harassment by 'males who identify as women' do you refer to? Also as you think it is a valid concern, I would love to know why you think this could happen in Wikimania? Because people are mostly Wikipedians and Wikimedians? (hope your friend did not misunderstand the wikiMANIA part of the brand) Unrelated to our context, do you and your friend think harassment happens because someone is not-cis? I would think it is mostly because those people are harassers and they are in bigger numbers as cis. Thank you for your answers in advance! Best Z. Blace p.s. As a neo-nazi and right-wing militants attack victim (also known to be on their lists) I would love to raise concerns over tolerance for neo-nazi, right-wing and pro-gun militants in Wikimedia, but there was historically no or very little support for concrete work, so I would love for us to brainstorm at one point what makes sense to do, where and when. On Fri, Jun 23, 2023 at 8:23 PM Mina Theofilatou <saintfevrier(a)gmail.com> wrote:

Dear organizers - for the (self announced) transparency plan commitment of publishing list of scholarship grantees in May - it would be useful to do it at least in June as we are almost in July. It would also likely reduce the number of repeating questions. Best Z. Blace On Sat, Jun 24, 2023 at 7:15 AM Mohd Sayeed <sayeed8545(a)gmail.com> wrote: pradipguhilote(a)gmail.com> wrote: lot of questions related to travel to Singapore: visas, vaccines, hotels, weather… We invite you to take a look at our Travel page on the Wikimania Wiki, with subpages for e-visas, attendee information, and accommodations. Feel free to leave a message on any relevant talk pages or reach out to us at wikimania(a)wikimedia.org if anything is unclear or incomplete. everyone needs to fill out a Singapore entry card before arrival. Also Singapore requires a yellow fever vaccine from many countries–please see if yours is on the list!

OK so I've finally found some time to sit at my computer and write a proper reply. I will refrain from addressing Z.'s concerns on my eligibility as a scholarship recipient (and all the related sarcasm) for Wikimania 2023 as I have already replied to that on the renamed thread "selection criteria". I read through the comments on gender policy in this thread and I'm afraid that I will have to be somewhat explicit to get my point across. I am 56 years old (my friend interested in attending Wikimania23 is several years older) and I have been to many conferences on four continents, I'd say over a hundred (not all Wikimedia-related of course). I am a cis-gender woman - apologies if I'm not using the right terms, until recently "woman" or "female" was enough to describe what I am - and naturally I have used dozens of women's restrooms (and locker rooms occasionally). Not once have I experienced a disturbing incident involving a man or male in a space designated for women because quite simply, I have never seen a man - a male-presenting individual, that is - using the space (except for the occasional "emergency", whereby the male uses the women's toilet and apologises for doing so if he encounters a woman while "relieving" himself. I've had to do the same on a few occasions in the men's toilets). Such was the situation in the *pre*-self-identification era. It is very possible that throughout the years I have encountered trans women in the women's restrooms without even being aware of it: a female-presenting trans individual in a space designated for women is naturally, perfectly acceptable and no cause for concern. In the era of self-identification however, an individual who presents as a man - with a beard etc. features of a male physique - can self-identify as a woman (female) and proceed to use spaces designated for women. So, in the hypothetical case that this man who identifies as a woman exits the bathroom stall with his penis in his hand, shaking off the extra urine (apologies for being explicit) - a frequent and non-offensive action in men's restrooms, especially those with urinals - encounters a woman and the woman is offended, would she be entitled to express her discomfort to Trust and Safety? (apologies if the name of the dept has changed, that's the name I remember). Or would she get a reply along the lines of "we understand that you feel offended and that you experienced discomfort from the encounter, but our gender policy is self-identification and this man identifies as a woman so (s)he can use the women's restrooms and there's nothing we can do about it". Same goes for AFAB individuals who are female-presenting but identify as men. A man using the men's toilets may feel discomfort at the sight of e.g. period blood and pads (again, apologies for the explicitness!) in a stall. I have tried to describe the issue as respectfully as possible. Again, apologies for being explicit, it was inevitable. I do agree that *generally* Wikipedians are respectful of others and would *generally* not intentionally cause discomfort to others using gender-designated toilets - or worse yet, go so far as to harass - but if norms of common decency were self-evident to everyone, there would be no need for a Trust and Safety dept in the first place. Best, Mina <https://www.avast.com/sig-email?utm_medium=email&utm_source=link&utm_campaign=sig-email&utm_content=webmail> Χωρίς ιούς.www.avast.com <https://www.avast.com/sig-email?utm_medium=email&utm_source=link&utm_campaign=sig-email&utm_content=webmail> <#DAB4FAD8-2DD7-40BB-A1B8-4E2AA1F9FDF2> On Sat, Jun 24, 2023 at 8:25 AM Željko Blaće &lt;zblace(a)mi2.hr&gt; wrote:

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. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/02/Resolution_for_report_o… <https://www.avast.com/sig-email?utm_medium=email&utm_source=link&utm_campaign=sig-email&utm_content=webmail> Χωρίς ιούς.www.avast.com <https://www.avast.com/sig-email?utm_medium=email&utm_source=link&utm_campaign=sig-email&utm_content=webmail> <#DAB4FAD8-2DD7-40BB-A1B8-4E2AA1F9FDF2> On Thu, Jun 29, 2023 at 1:39 AM effe iets anders &lt;effeietsanders(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: