Board Thread:Support Requests - Community Management/@comment-25620470-20150907220403/@comment-24473195-20150907225358

MissLunaRose wrote: I'm not sure if there is much of a community to host such a discussion. It has seemed awfully dead while I've been there...

I was the original writer of the article. (It's fairly new.) Because of the name Amelia, I assumed Baggs was female and started using she/her pronouns, but as I researched I saw pages referring to Baggs with sie/hir. So I confirmed that this was what Baggs wanted, and I switched. Later, I found that an editor had changed it.

I know that the standard in news media is to use the pronouns a person wants to have used for them. http://www.glaad.org/reference/transgender

I probably shouldn't be, but I just feel really upset about this. A lot of people on the autism spectrum are transgender and I'm worried they'd feel hurt or unwelcome if they see Baggs described as female. Well, then I think you made the right call to bring this to Community Central. Hopefully others can add their views on this matter.

The problem I see is that the editors of that article seem biased possibly because of their personal experiences. But that's the reason why individuals are required to do fact checking and get another editor to review their articles before they are published. You see it from the perspective of someone who is aware of afflictions of autism and transgender difficulties.

But here's another perspective, suppose a 12 year old child reads that article with all those "unknown" words referring to the person, do you believe the child would understand the article, what about non-native English speakers?

The bottom line is that the article is written for the readers. The gender of the person is not really necessary to read and understand about autism, which is the center focus of wikia and the article. In fact, it is entirely conceivable that since that person wrote their last article they have changed their mind and prefer to be referred to as a male.

So personally, I think that the editors of that article are focusing on the wrong thing, and I'd also say that writing the pronoun so many times is not the best way to discuss the person's life.

Anyway, ultimately if you don't find the resolution you are looking for here. Feel free to contact wikia staff (Support) to ask directly about the official policy.