I've been studiously avoiding ArbCom and other dramaboards for some time (or I would have presented a bunch of evidence in support of a recent desysop). In this case, I feel compelled to come back out of the woodwork. I haven't participated in the previous phases, and am not sure whether it's even permissible to add to the proposed decision page (I forget all the ArbCom bureaucracy as soon as I'm away from it for a while), so the talk page seems like a good bet.
It's my perception that this entire case is a "death of the thousand cuts" exercise, a selective cherry-picking of comments and incidents that aren't perfect, to paint a falsely demonizing picture. I'm not going to pore over every claim, but just look at two that stuck out while scanning through all this:
Commenting that FAC would be a lot better if its current participants behaved more like one who fairly recently died is hardly any kind of besmirching of the deceased (rather, the opposite), nor a personal attack against those other editors. It's a common sort of sentiment about the departed and about the good ol' days of their presence. Perhaps more to the point, the behavioral criticism at the base of this is in fact spot-on. FAC has run off the rails (probably around 2016 if not earlier), and has become the worst sort of good-ol'-boy's-club, walled-garden clique that wikiprojects should never be allowed to become. In late 2019 to early 2019, the FACTION in control of that venue hounded away the no. 2 most active FAC reviewer, simply because they didn't care for his personality and because he insisted on FA candidate articles being compliant with MoS (which is actually one of the FA requirements, and GA requirements before that). Only about a year before that, FAC erupted in a shitstorm of drama over a similar attempt to get a candidate page to comply with a simple MoS line item; there was not a valid IAR/LOCALCONSENSUS reason to do something different, it was simply an OWN/VESTED matter of the principal page author's preferences, with FAC regulars leaping to defend their buddy's ILIKEIT pseudo-reason and to pretend that CONLEVEL policy doesn't exist (and wasn't written specifically to thwart this sort of nonsense). That festival of melodrama culminated in at least two FAC regulars proposing variants of an "anti-MoS" for FAC only. People tire of style disputes and tend to sympathize with an "aw, fuck it" attitude, but imagine any other wikiproject on the system declaring an intent to draft their own counter-guideline or counter-policy, against any WP:P&G page. It's just unconscionable.
Kudpung is entirely right to criticise the collective "culture" at FAC; it is getting increasinly un-wiki. And do so was not an admin action, nor did it have implications for ADMINCOND more generally.
As the real world, dealing with "Trumpism" and related movements on the one hand, and downright aggressive socio-political reform agendas from special interests on the other, features a lot of heated debates, and some of them spill over onto Wikipedia, we can expect people here to have concerns about the neutrality of and ADVOCACY/BATTLEGROUND/TRUTH/GREATWRONGS/CIVILPOV motivations of particular editors involved in those disputes here. In an age where TERF is a thing and cis-women identifying with it say things like "a trans-woman who claims to be a lesbian is a sneaky rapist man", etc. (here's some real gems I hadn't seen before; the pool of them grows all the time: [1][2][3][4]), there is in fact some palpable misandry in the air. It may not have been very politic to wonder out loud whether an editor self-identifying publicly as a cis-lesbian is in agreement with general/average cis-lesbian socio-political advocacy viewpoints. There is clearly something of a doctrinaire mindset in that community, in the sense of it being organized as an activism force. And that doctrine does sometimes lean misandrist (e.g. "every man is a potential rapist", and other such inflammatory statements). But airing such a concern about what politics someone might be bringing – even if perhaps it would've been better kept to oneself – isn't a personal attack. It's natural human politics. And in this environment, such concerns are elevated because we know for a fact that organized groups of PoV pushers of every kind – religious, philosopho-economic, nationalist, commercial, governmental, and every other sort – are always trying to skew our coverage.
Kudpung is being a normal bias-alert Wikipedian, and by now has almost certainly learned a bit about when to silently look for clear bias and when to hypothesize openly. Even the person who was queried as to any connection between their group self-identification and their views on-site does not believe that the comment was misogynist. In short, it is not an anti-X sentiment to wonder whether someone identifying as X is bringing an anti-Y viewpoint that is demonstrably common among those identifying as X. Frankly, we deal with this all the time at all those "my ethnicity/religion/country/whatever versus yours" disputes that are on WP:AC/DS lockdown. If, e.g., someone self-identifying as an Armenian starts editing a bunch of material about Turks and Kurds and Azerbaijanis and Greeks – or vice versa from any of these culture-conflict directions – we should be alert (though perhaps quiet about our alertness). There's just presently a whole lot of hyper-sensitivity when it comes to gender-related anything being involved. I've been bitten in the ass by this myself, e.g. being attacked as "transphobic" for resisting attempts by TG/NB language-reform activists to force Wikipedia to use protologistic neo-pronouns like hirs, zie, etc, in Wikipedia's own voice (when singular-they will do just fine and actually has consensus support).
Notably, anyone subject to such actual personal attacks (like being called "transphobic") will find no support whatsoever at ANI or any other venue, if false accusations seem to align emotionally with the average socio-political concerns of the WP community in the aggregate (no matter how off-base the accusation is). It's exactly like it being fine call someone a Nazi, without evidence, just because Nazis are bad and we don't like them. The current overly emotionalized issues are too fresh for some to see through the fallacy yet, and this has a corrosive and very lopsided effect on the community and its self-regulation. Thus Kudpung can again and again be mislabeled "misogynist" in these proceedings with impunity despite lack of anything like sufficient evidence for such accusations. If you flipped the gender role and brought a female admin to RFARB and started calling them "misandrist" you'd be dogpiled in a heartbeat if your evidence wasn't unbelievably good. And you'd probably be dogpiled anyway, just for daring to perturb the Zeitgeist/orthodoxy of the majority of editors, for too many of whom any criticism (including zero-evidence falsehoods) by someone claiming to be or represent a minority is permissible but any criticism of such an activist is apt be taken as one -ist attack or another and not justifiable for any reason, regardless of proof. False equivalence has turned auto-cannibalistic on this site, and is eating its own tail like Ouroboros. How one can behave on this site (within bounds of and with an eye to facilitating collegial collaboration and encyclopedia work) is not in a one-to-one relationship with off-site behavior in relation to sociological forces and experiences (e.g. women being nervous about male strangers in ways that men usually are not about women, or black Americans reasonably if a bit fallaciously making generalized criticisms of "all those white people" that would be comments of a very different and more actually racist nature going the other direction due to social power imbalances). But too many of our editors want to pretend otherwise.
Anyway, I think Kudpung is being railroaded for a variety of PoV-laden reasons that mostly come down to ill-liberal "must be bad because doesn't think and talk like me" judgmentalism. In closing, I have to observe that Arbcom is not some Personality Examination and Normalization Bureau. We're all different, and Kudpung is not failing ADMINCOND just because some gaggle of individuals communicate differently from him and don't share his exact worldview.
PS: Not directly related to any of this, I want to support the idea I saw on the workshop page of a finding of fact that a habit of "banning" people from one's talk page in response to criticism is not actually permissible. The fact that a not-quite-guideline supplement page says so is irrelevant; ArbCom can say so without citing it, as a WP:Common sense matter, as a behavioral not content matter, and because of the central principle of interpreting all the WP:P&G material in the spirit in which it was intended. The ability under the userpage guidelines to ask that someone stop posting on your user talk page (and the expectation that this should usually be honored) exists for the sole purpose of short-circuiting interpersonal disputes that are not constructive or going to improve any time soon, and which are disrupting the ENC work of the user whose user-talk page it is. The rule, if you can even call it one, is not a license to avoid scrutiny, skirt discussion, or thwart the ability of other editors to raise concerns. It's an exception not a default.
— SMcCandlish ☏ ¢
03:30, 10 February 2020 (UTC)
Since I was asked for sources, explanations, etc. from some of you, I'll ping you here, as the original thread was hatted as not the right kind of discussion for the talk page of that phase of an RFARB. So much for WP:NOT#BUREAUCRACY.
@GorillaWarfare and Amorymeltzer: First, apologies to GorillaWarfare for the mis-identication [10]; I must have confused details in one evidence/workshop thread with those from another. Sorry about that. Anyway, I didn't say anything about queer people as a class (which includes me, BTW), nor say the other things either of you suggest I did (including "generalizing for an entire group" [11], which is in essence what I'm objecting to in the first place myself). Please read people's actual words [12] without imagining what they might have meant if you rearranged the words and cut bits of them out to stick with other words, or if they said something different because someone else whom you ideologically oppose wrote something in their place to offend you. [sigh] This kind of willful mis-spinning to create a spectre of X-phobia to attack and to demonize someone with is precisely what I was talking about in the original thread. I don't want be right about Wikipedia having a disturbing trend of people trying to "manufacture enemies" over interpretational and doctrinal-wording questions, without even asking whether one's interpretation bears any relation to actual intent and meaning. Anyway, I'm happy that Lourdes got it, though.
Sources: Spend a minute on Google and you can find more material on anti-male messaging in feminist and lesbian activism than you'll need, including its serious origins in revolutionary first-wave feminism, its use as satire (against men, and first-wave feminists, and "polite" proto- and quasi-feminists) in second-wave messaging, and now outright humor in third-wave/millennial feminism, yet also a renewed actual serious form in trans-exclusionary radical feminism (presently a hotbed of dispute on Wikipedia, and not going away any time soon).
I'll collect some immediate finds and why I think what they're telling us matters here:
A good overview is probably Jillian Horowitz's piece in Digital America [13]; it's worth re-quoting its own pull quote: "Many feminists ... have re-deployed misandry alternately as an elaborate joke, a rhetorical weapon, a model for resistance to patriarchy, and as a survival strategy. Particularly on the Internet, they have done so with all of the inventiveness and strength that man-hating requires." That last bit is tongue-in-cheek of course. Some of the rhetorical/resistance material is less so (e.g. here, in Slate). Another Slate editorial, by Lena Wilson [14] (self-described as a millennial cis-lesbian), ties the anti-male (and anti-transwoman) stances to second-wave feminism ("sex-segregated activism and spaces" ... "these second-wave practices come from lesbian feminists, women who were determined to separate themselves from men romantically, historically, and politically. To many of them, that meant (and still means) defying medical and social abuse against those with vaginas, fighting against male violence, and re-centering women in all narratives.").
Scholarly material often focuses on ethnic-minority-specific misandry concerns [15][16][17]; these seems to be the only context in which the exact words misandry/misandrist have much acceptance in that register, due to baggage the terms have accreted. But the more general notion appears pretty often in feminism and gender-studies material, including critiques of modern feminism. A controversial one was Janet Halley's Split Decisions. I'm not finding [legal!] full free text of it, being a 2006 book from Princeton U. Pr., but this review covers the gist [18], and curiously enough relates to TERF vs. trans-inclusion concerns (see reviewer's footnote: CEDAW "should centre on gender not 'women'."), which are deeply tied to the matter, at least inasmuch as WP in 2020 is apt to have internal issues relating to anti-male PoV or perceptions thereof. WP will be wrestling with that for a while, and the heat is enough that RFARB is probably imminent. The intersection of feminism and misandry (as concept more than practice) has received plenty of mainstream media attention, e.g. in Time [19] and with counter-pieces like this one [20]. A good point in the latter: "Misandry has gone mainstream, and unfortunately the irony seems to be lost on men." While it's a shame that's true, it mostly is, and that has implications in the WP environment. I'm not going to trawl through newsy publications or the blogosphere for more like this; that pair is a fully illustrative example.
Interestingly, a Journal of Lesbian Studies piece as far back as 2007 [21] remarks on "the strongly anti-male stance of Lesbian Feminism", in a piece on the eroding border between "butch" lesbianism and trans-masculinity (F-to-M), years before the breakout of the TERFwar. This journal in particular is a ripe field for harvesting references to both broad social perception of anti-male stances (especially in second-wave feminism) and narrow feminist and lesbian messaging that explicitly fits the description (albeit often said to be satiric). However, it's almost all paywalled. (I don't presently have WP:LIBRARY-provided access methods through any of those journal walls; forgot to renew them). "Women's Histories of AIDS", a well-known piece by Nancy E. Stoller [22], reprinted since 1995 in half a dozen feminism/gender-studies and AIDS-related anthologies, also suggests there's a generational divide on the matter, between second- and third-wave feminists (specifically lesbian ones in this piece's exact context): "The younger generation of lesbian AIDS activists carries a different psychology, culture, politics, and sexuality from those who came to the movement in the early eighties. These activists are connected to the older women by the term 'lesbian' and by some similarities of sexual practice. Many, however, see their elders as sexually repressed, conservative, and somewhat anti-male." See below for more about a possible "wave split". And feminists have written before about institutions moving away from "women's studies" to "gender studies" from 1970s onward (i.e. shortly after the establishment of such programs) not primarily for trans inclusion but for distancing from already common public association of radical feminism with man-hating. Bell Hooks's Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics (2000) doesn't mince words about it: "When contemporary feminist movement first began there was a fierce anti-male faction." While this is a summary work, not an in-depth history, the follow-on material is correct that moving away from this reactive position to a more nuanced philosophy of resistance to patriarchal social structure was an actual doctrinal struggle within the movement and one that did not have a unanimous result, nor perfectly consistent results even among those largely making that viewpoint transition.
There is of course the really obvious false-equivalence matter: in a male-dominated and still too LGBT-hostile culture, over-generalized anti-male commentary (and especially "make a point" usages that are intended to provoke reaction and thought) aren't directly comparable to an inverse use of misogynist messaging as a dominance mechanism. And not even all sources we'd think should get this do get it; cf. this 2016 piece in Psychology Today [23] which seems almost stubbornly clueless. But this brings me back to the point I led to in the second bullet in the original post: Supposing that everyday permissiveness toward anti-male (like anti-white, anti-Western, anti-any-dominant-group) sentiment, for false-equivalence reasons, should translate into on-Wikipedia permissiveness regarding internal behavior and content-bias evaluation is itself a false equivalence of a different sort, of equating how matters are argued out there in wild 'n' wooly land, with how they can permissibly be discussed in a collegial environment.
Daring to even suggest that anti-male sentiment (serious or satirical) and concerns regarding it can be a factor in on-site behavior, and in our analyses of editorial and sourcing biases, seems to raise umbrage simply because the terms misandry/misandrist tend to be associated with "manosphere" echo chambers [24], at least by people who follow online trends and wallow in social media. The fact that an extreme of misogynist-leaning "men's rights advocates" likes to use the terms doesn't rob them of plain-English meaning (especially since they came into any currency to begin with in feminist writing in the early 1970s; the notion was popularized by Joanna Russ to parody "polite" first-wave feminists and their sensibilities [25]). Nor does that recent connection to online sources of the proverbial "male tears" indicate anything negative about people willing to discuss such matters on more sensible terms. (Some of the academic material [26] is also clear to distinguish between the crazy-MRA scene on Reddit and 4chan one the one hand, and on the other, more rationale men's-issues concerns that co-evolved with mainstream feminism, as a pro-feminist men’s liberation movement in the 1960s–1970s.) That the MRA crowd may exaggerate out of all proportion, and obsess over and verbally weaponize, some concerns doesn't mean the concerns have zero basis and no implication for WP:NPOV or inter-editor behavior on this site (especially when use of anti-man messaging is explicitly being spun as a patriarchy-fighting tool on the other side).
WP isn't Facebook, and our output (and internal discourse about it) is necessarily as meta as we can muster about the world we're editorially observing. WP's editorship is surely and rightly dominated by sex/gender-egalitarians, but we still have to separate our causes from our writing about causes and examining of how we're writing about causes. Feminists in particular are in a position to be especially mindful of straw-man/equivocation/guilt-by-association fallacies, being damned tired of having to defend feminism as not meaning "female-supremacism"; so please don't try to suggest that someone raising concerns about anti-male sentiment as an influencing factor is somehow a "masculist" and a "misogynist". Cf. previous material on falsely labeling people "transphobic" simply because they don't buy into non-neutrally using invented recently coined pseudo-pronouns in WP's own voice.
This isn't the time or place to get into it in detail (I'm sure it'll be its own RfArb soon enough!), but all of this is tightly bound up with trans-exclusionary vs. -inclusionary feminism today. The TERF debate has given the matter a whole new set of legs, since the root of TERFism is anti-male sentiment in first-wave revolutionaryism and especially in second-wave separatism (on two levels, even: against transwomen for "being men" and against transmen for "abandoning womanhood" – remarkably similar to "separate but equal" and "race traitor" lingo, and to "Christendom versus heathens" and "apostasy" long before that; it's all highly ideological). Given that the "TERFwars" are already rolling over WP in waves of PoV-pushing and ugly battlegrounding, it's essentially inherent in the very observation of it that the underlying overgeneralized male-critical perspective is by very definition a factor in it. Analogy: if there were a wave of emotive promotion of creationism washing over the 'pedia, it would be obvious that faith-based reasoning was part of it. Observing that connection is not equivalent, either, to saying that everyone espousing religious faith is a creationism PoV pusher either, just like observing the (sometimes actually serious) anti-male views of TERFs and some other feminist camps is no way a suggestion that all feminists or all lesbians are anti-male. The mischaracterizations of what I said, like this RfArb itself, and the overall debate that spawned it are rife with affirmation of the consequent.
That's actually enough material with which to write an article on feminism and anti-male messages (especially if replacing Hooks with a more in-depth history of feminism). Or, rather, one-third of an article, the rest being about patriarchal attempts to dismiss feminism in general as "man-hating", plus the recent Internet-enabled MRA "myth of misandry" and its relationship to incels and other online misogyny). But, we already have a page at Misandry, and it is not exactly ideal. I'm not sure the title is either given the baggage of the word. But, I would rather light my own hair on fire than try starting or overhauling any article in this issue-space, due to all the drama surrounding it.
I'll repeat that Kudpung probably shouldn't've wondered aloud whether something like a casually or actively anti-male position was part of the subcultural background of another editor in a particular instance, but that it's not really plausible that Kudpung hasn't learned from this. ArbCom (and desysopping) aren't a punishment/vengeance mechanism, but preventative. Is Kudpung really likely to do it again? Unless there's some other and much more objective reason to desysop Kudpung (wheelwarring, abuse of tools to push a viewpoint, etc.), then that case should close without a desysop. The emptiness, pro or con, of the "Comment by Arbitrators" section under "Kudpung desysopped" in "Proposed remedies" on the workshop page is reason for concern about the outcome; we usually have a much clearer idea where a case is going by now. (And I didn't post to the workshop talk page because the workshop has been closed since 4 February.) — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢
06:31, 11 February 2020 (UTC) (reply)
PS, @Chris.sherlock: The only parts of this you got correct were "Kudpung was [not] disrespectful to deceased editor Brian Boulton", "FAC is a ... clique", "Kudpung has been unfairly labelled a misogynist", and "Kudpung is being “railroaded'". All the other material in your "summary" is distortion, which appears intentional as an attempt at argument to ridicule. See what I said up top about people not reading what others actually wrote while instead taking little parts of what they wrote and combining that with extraneous stuff to manufacture a transparently fake bogeyman. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢
06:31, 11 February 2020 (UTC)
03:30, 10 February 2020 (UTC)
The same pattern applies to