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​ ​ ​ ​For years there has been dispute as to which pronouns this biography should use to refer to its subject. In 2017 Wilderwill edited the article to only refer to Barry by his surname (see Talk:James Barry (surgeon)/Archive 1 § A New Solution to the Pronouns Issue), a compromise that saw no opposition (although also not much support). In the years since, that compromise has become the status quo.

Notably, over the years, there has been no discussion of the applicability of MOS:GENDERID, the guideline that governs biographical subjects' pronouns, which advises (emphases added):

Refer to any person whose gender might be questioned with gendered words (e.g. pronouns, "man/woman", "waiter/waitress") that reflect the person's latest expressed gender self-identification as reported in the most recent reliable sources, even if it does not match what is most common in sources. This holds for any phase of the person's life, unless they have indicated a preference otherwise.

Much discussion in the past has focused on whether Barry was transgender, but GENDERID is not exclusive to transgender people. It is not the goal of this RfC to determine whether Barry was transgender, or what his "true" gender identity was (or for that matter what his sex was). This RfC instead asks two questions:

1. For the purposes of GENDERID, is it accurate to say that Barry's "latest expressed gender self-identification" was as a man?
2. Should we follow GENDERID in this case?

("Yes" to both would mean switching to he/him pronouns. For any other answer, please state your preferred outcome.) -- Tamzin (she/they) | o toki tawa mi. 18:31, 14 June 2021 (UTC)

Survey

• As initiator, Yes to both questions. To date, the pronouns question has largely been discussed in the context of whether Barry was transgender. However, as I argue in the section above, that doesn't matter. For the sake of argument, let's suppose that Barry privately identified as a woman but lived as a man because it was the only way to be a doctor. Even if that were the case, his expressed gender self-identification at the time of his death was as a man. The guideline doesn't inquire as to whether someone was transgender, or what they felt in their heart of hearts. It inquires as to the identity they expressed, and Barry very clearly presented himself as—outwardly identified as—a man. The day he died, every single person who knew him thought of him as a "he". That is where the pronoun inquiry begins, and where it ought to end. If he was a woman, he was a woman who was referred to with he/him pronouns.
  Furthermore, I agree that presentism is an issue here. It would be presentism to use the pronouns used in (some) 20th- and 21st-century scholarship over the ones used in 19th-century reality. Just because some sources have referred to him in an ahistorical manner doesn't mean that we have to. We must not be biased against the past, must not hold ourselves to a lower standard than we would in the case of someone who died today. -- Tamzin (she/they) | o toki tawa mi. 18:31, 14 June 2021 (UTC)
• Opposed as per my remarks in #Revisiting the pronoun question, with an eye to MOS. — Peaceray ( talk) 18:38, 14 June 2021 (UTC)

  Your comment there is mostly speculation as to his motives for living as a man. And my point here is, it doesn't matter why he lived as a man. He did live as a man, for one reason or another. Also, could you explain the relevance of him possibly having borne a child, and of him possibly having been attracted to men? Even in a discussion of private gender identity (which again this is not), I don't see how either of those would be relevant. -- Tamzin (she/they) | o toki tawa mi. 19:07, 14 June 2021 (UTC)

  Actually those comments are quite pertinent to this discussion, which is far more complex that you are framing it. In your own comment you use the expression his expressed gender self-identification using language and concepts that would be unrecognisable in Barry's lifetime. We should not apply present day thinking to the lives of historical figures. To ascribe pronouns to Barry would be to apply modern day standards. The compromise to avoid them allows for neutrality. AutumnKing ( talk) 19:26, 14 June 2021 (UTC)

  I'm just quoting MOS there. I'm aware those concepts didn't exist in Barry's day. The concept of gendered pronouns, however, did exist. -- Tamzin (she/they) | o toki tawa mi. 19:47, 14 June 2021 (UTC)

  We have a difference of opinion as to the relevance. The fact is that British women were oppressed and prevented from going into medical and military service, & this was central for the need to the presentation as a man. Yes, it is speculation to suggest that it would have happened otherwise were it not for these circumstances, but one for which I think most would agree is highly probabile. I think there is a clear need for a holistic approach to the article, & shoehorning pronouns into it conflicts with this.

  There is also the matter of policy, WP:CONSENSUS & WP:EDITCONSENSUS prevails over the MOS:GENDERID guideline, which itself is a recent change. I fail to see why we need to force pronouns into the article when IMHO, editors have already arrived at a workable solution. Peaceray ( talk) 19:29, 14 June 2021 (UTC)

  "most would agree is highly probable"? I wouldn't agree. Many people wouldn't agree. I really feel like you're showing your own bias there. But it doesn't matter. Like I said, if he was a woman, he was a woman who expected people to refer to him as "he". Also, GENDERID has said something similar to this since before the 2017 discussion. Consensus can change, and clearly I'm not the only person who finds the status quo suboptimal. It's not using pronouns that comes off as "shorehorned." Usually that is only done in rare cases where the subject prefers not to be referred to using them. -- Tamzin (she/they) | o toki tawa mi. 19:47, 14 June 2021 (UTC)

  Again, we have a disagreement, specifically as to whether the 19th-century British prohibition on women in medical & military service would require a woman to masquerade as a man in order to serve in that capacity. I strongly feel most would be in agreement with that statement. Peaceray ( talk) 19:52, 14 June 2021 (UTC)

  I agree that a woman in the 19th century would have has to masquerade as a man to become a doctor, yes. One can plausibly ascribe any number of gender identities to Barry. If your point is that the article should not take a position on his gender identity, I agree with that. I just disagree that we should avoid the pronouns used by his contemporaries. -- Tamzin (she/they) | o toki tawa mi. 19:57, 14 June 2021 (UTC)

  For what reason, though? It is plain to see from Florence Nightingale's use of "scare quotes" around the male pronouns when writing about this person that the use of masculine pronouns was merely an indication of what they assumed this person's sex to be. There was no concept of "gender identity" in those days: the only thing anyone cared about was what a person's physical sex was, and gender expression only existed as a method of conveying that information publicly (since going around naked was frowned upon).

  I also note this person - AFAICS - never explicitly said "I am a man." They just used a name dressed a certain way, and that was the assumption. The only instance of this person stating their gender, AFAICT, was in the letter they wrote when they were 19, in which they self-identified as "a girl".

  Now, I have to ask you: if all of these various things you say don't matter don't matter - why is this such a concern for you? Was not MOS:GENDERID written for the purpose and with the intent that these things do, indeed, matter? You are wikilawyering over the fine-toothed minute detail of the letter of MOS:GENDERID in order to prove that it dictates a certain outcome on this matter; and yet, while doing so, you also argue that the reasons and intentions behind the MOS:GENDERID guideline and why it was written in the first place are totally irrelevent. In other words, you are arguing that we should strictly follow the letter of the guideline (as interpreted by you), rather than the spirit of the guideline. For what reason, though? Firejuggler86 ( talk) 19:52, 16 June 2021 (UTC)

  I think I've been pretty clear about why I think this matters. The guidelines say that we follow the pronouns according to someone's last expressed gender self-identification. That's not wiki-lawyering. That's the plain meaning of the guideline, in letter and spirit. I've yet to see a good reason not to follow the guideline here, other than some editors' speculation that Barry would have lived as a woman if he could. By your own reasoning, living as a man his entire adult life, in an era where there was no concept of being transgender or nonbinary, was a prima facie statement of "I am a man", and there's no reason for us as editors to speculate as to whether he privately felt this way, any more than there's reason to do so for contemporary people who live in genders different from those they were assigned at birth. -- Tamzin (she/they) | o toki tawa mi. 20:44, 16 June 2021 (UTC)

• Oppose per Peaceray's general reasoning. Speculation on Barry's gender identity could go multiples way, and there is no definitive answer for it. This is a contentious issue, and I don't see the benefit in changing to use one particular set of pronouns. I think this RfC is unnecessary, as it seems pretty clear based on all the prior talk page discussions that there will not be a consensus for one set of pronouns over another, which is why the article is written the way it is. At a certain point, rehashing these same discussions becomes a waste of time if there are no changes in the information we have about Barry. – wallyfromdilbert ( talk) 18:46, 14 June 2021 (UTC)
• Clear-cut Support. Barry identified as male, regardless of the reasoning behind that, and I see no reason to not follow GENDERID. NekoKatsun ( nyaa) 18:48, 14 June 2021 (UTC)
• Oppose as per my previous remarks. This is an unnecessary change, where a reasonable compromise has already been reached. AutumnKing ( talk) 18:58, 14 June 2021 (UTC)
• Strong Oppose There is too much uncertainty about what has occurred post-mortem. It could be that Barry was born a female and chose to identify as a male in order to practice medicine and surgery during a time of great gender discrimination when such positions were not available to women. It could be that Barry was born intersex. It could be that Barry was actually born male and the entire controversy about Barry having been born a female was the word of an individual who examined the body after Barry's death and tried to engage in blackmail for monetary gain. Who actually knows what happened here. The compromise that was reached seems the most equitable, especially when the truth is obscured and Barry is long deceased. Let's not dig up old skeletons and apply modern ideologies to things that happened so long ago. TrueQuantum ( talk) 19:39, 14 June 2021 (UTC)

  What modern ideologies are being applied here? -- Tamzin (she/they) | o toki tawa mi. 19:53, 14 June 2021 (UTC)

  The modern ideology that we must classify Barry according to Barry's latest gender self-identification when in fact Barry died more than a hundred years ago and Barry's gender preference and identity is actually unknown. I support the rights of transgender individuals. I support the rights of transgender individuals to join the sports teams that they identify with, to use the bathroom they feel is most appropriate to them, and more. But I don't need to virtue signal so hard that I go back hundreds of years to assign the proper gendered pronoun to a long dead surgeon who may or may not have been born female and lived as a male. I don't even know if Barry did this to counteract the severe gender discrimination of the time the way that Mulan pretended to be a man to fight in the army. The past is the past and we don't need to remake it in our image to social justice historical mysteries. TrueQuantum ( talk) 06:05, 15 June 2021 (UTC)

  It appears what you have is an issue with the guideline, for which this RfC is not the proper place. -- Equivamp - talk 01:41, 17 June 2021 (UTC)

  This is the proper place, because there has been WP:CONSENSUS & WP:EDITCONSENSUS here that predated MOS:GENDERID. Consensus is policy, whereas anything from the MOS is a guideline. Therefore we would need to change the consensus here about whether to use Barry's last name instead of pronouns before MOS:GENDERID would be applied here. Peaceray ( talk) 04:13, 17 June 2021 (UTC)

  To reiterate: 1) This is me trying to establish a new consensus. Saying "We need a new consensus" during an open RfC is perfunctory. 2) The previous consensus was never that strong, as a reading of past discussions will indicate. And 3) MOS:GENDERID predates the past consensus; it's simply that the discussion didn't consider it. -- Tamzin (she/they) | o toki tawa mi. 08:09, 17 June 2021 (UTC)

  This issue here is not arguing whether MOS:GENDERID is valid or whether the prior consensus was valid. The issue to me is whether MOS:GENDERID is to be so strictly interpreted that we do not consider the spirit and the intent of the wording and just apply the words like a robot even to historical contexts where it would be nonsensical. I argue that, as human beings, we have the ability to navigate the shades of gray that make the human experience so notable. In fact, it is these very shades of gray that makes the LGBTQ community so vibrant and beautiful. TrueQuantum ( talk) 14:56, 17 June 2021 (UTC)

Support —¿philoserf? ( talk) 19:50, 14 June 2021 (UTC)

• Oppose Barry died more than a hundred years ago. The context for the pronouns is completely different. --- CranberryMuffin ( talk) 23:22, 14 June 2021 (UTC)

  What makes you say that? What exactly was different? ¡Ayvind! (talk) 04:07, 15 June 2021 (UTC)

  What was different was that in those days, genered pronouns were only used to indicate what the person's physical sex was (or in Barry's case what it was believed by others to be). Pronouns are a cultural construct, just like gender is a cultural construct. There can be as many or as few categories of them as can be imagined, and they can have any meaning any particular people assigns to them, and some languages don't even have pronouns at all, or have only neuter ones; or ones that indicate not gender but something else like age, or social status, or whatever. These things are not hard wired, and every culture and every language defines them differently. Same goes with Ages. It is one thing to expect cultural adherence in the present to the presently assigned meanings of these words, but you cannot apply present day concepts and definitions to past societies that had absolutely no concept of these things which we discuss. Firejuggler86 ( talk) 20:08, 16 June 2021 (UTC)

• Support It seems clear that Barry identified as Male, so we should use he/him. However, one alternative would be to use gender neutral they/them, explaining the reasoning in a footnote ¡Ayvind! (talk)
• Oppose – this has been discussed at length, not only here, but at other articles like Albert Cashier. The word transgender was unknown until a century after Barry died. Barry may have been what we now call transgender, but we can't ask someone who is no longer alive, and attempting to project our 21st century notions about sex and gender onto a nineteenth century world is doomed to failure. Professional opportunities for women in the time of Queen Victoria were rare, to say the least; we don't know for sure whether Barry presented as male for reasons of identity, for professional advancement, perhaps to have liaisons with women, or for other reasons, and there's no way to find out. Solutions such as singular they are without support here, and in my mind, the question of Barry's gender identity is undiscoverable. The best outcome, is to avoid forcing Wikipedia to come down on either side of this unknowable question. The best solution, is to avoid speculation, and avoid gendered pronouns. Note that we could certainly echo what is done in the last sentence of the lead at Albert Cashier, and allude to any reliable sources that have speculated that Barry was transgender, as long as it's sourceable, and probably with in-text attribution. That would be fine; however, there is simply no policy-based reason to use male pronouns with confidence in this article. Mathglot ( talk) 05:04, 15 June 2021 (UTC)
• Support - using he/him pronouns, he chose to live his life as a man, and obviously used male pronouns to identify for 50+ years of his life. It was also his wish to be remembered and buried as a man upon his death. Isaidnoway (talk) 08:19, 15 June 2021 (UTC)

This is the most compelling argument I've seen for "Support." It is true that Barry chose to live life as a man and practice as a surgeon, an occupation unfortunately only available to men of that era. Would this, however, erase the historical mystery surrounding Barry's gender? Would it erase the struggles Barry endured as a woman portraying herself as a man so successfully that Barry was able to outperform men and become a legend in the field of surgery? What if Barry really wanted to live as a woman and compromised with that to masquerade as a man just to do the career that she loved? Since this all happened so long ago, it is impossible to tell what is the actual truth. Right now I am torn and can be swayed either way. TrueQuantum ( talk) 13:57, 15 June 2021 (UTC)

I would say that is the point. There are an awful lot of 'what if's' in this situation, and it is not the job of Wikipedia editors to resolve them. The compromise of using no pronouns, and just 'Barry', allows the reader to consider those what if's, without being directed to a conclusion. AutumnKing ( talk) 15:18, 15 June 2021 (UTC)

I don't see using pronouns as an attempt to resolve the 'what ifs'. I often say follow the sources, but in this case, it's a bag of mixed results, some sources exclusively use male pronouns, while others use female, but most use both male and female pronouns, and as usual, Wikipedia editors waaay overthink the issue, not realizing we can walk and chew gum at the same time, by reporting on the 'what ifs', while also using pronouns, and let readers come to their own conclusions. My reasoning for male pronouns is because of his 50+ years identifying as a man, and his desire to be remembered as a man. But I like to chew gum while I walk, so I could live with using both male and female pronouns, but insisting on no pronouns seems a little anal to me. Isaidnoway (talk) 17:24, 15 June 2021 (UTC)

I don't see how those 'what if's' are relevant to the discussion at hand, which consists of two questions - did Barry use male pronouns, and per the MOS should we do the same? There's a lot of ambiguity about his life, but those two questions are straightforward enough to me. NekoKatsun ( nyaa) 17:26, 15 June 2021 (UTC)

I guess for me it all boils down to whether the gender identification was done out of choice or out of coercion. If Dr. Barry really wanted to be a surgeon and the only way Barry could do it was to portray herself as a man, then it doesn't seem to me that this gender identity was one of choice but more of coercion. After all, the only way to be a surgeon in that time was to be male. If Dr. Barry came out and told everyone that she was actually female, she would have been fired and her life ruined. It is in some ways akin to the "Don't ask, don't tell" policy of the 1990s where LGBT people in the army couldn't really express their true sexual orientation for fear of being dishonorably discharged from the military. They would portray themselves as straight out of coercion and not by choice. Now we are applying the context where transgender individuals, by their own wonderful choice, are declaring their pronouns and gender identity. In this context, of course we must respect their decision and their identity. But to apply this to more than a hundred years in the past to what Dr. Barry had to struggle and endure feels like historical revisionism. How do we know if Dr. Barry really wanted to tell the world that she was a proud woman and the best damn surgeon in her field? We don't know. We can never know. And for that reason, I think referring to Dr. Barry as Barry rather than using pronouns makes the most sense in this context. TrueQuantum ( talk) 02:06, 16 June 2021 (UTC)

Nailed it. And female persons disguising themselves as men for reasons like that happens repeatedly through history, most of which had extremely restrictive gender roles. The spirit of MOS:GENDERID is about respecting how a person sees themselves deep down, not what they do for others under social pressure. That's why pronoun changes are applied to someone's entire life when they come out as trans, not just to the post-coming-out period. To insist that Barry must still be referred to as he/him in our world, when they maybe would have been happy to see they could be a woman and a surgeon, is so, so contrary to the spirit of the guideline. Crossroads ^-talk- 23:14, 18 June 2021 (UTC)

• Oppose Unnecessary change. Honolulucb ( talk) 01:10, 16 June 2021 (UTC)
• Support change to male pronouns. It seems a lot of the people commenting are speculating about the subject's gender identity in order to complain about such speculation, but as the nomination states, the relevant portion of MOS:GENDERID does not care about whether or not a person was transgender, just about what that person latest expressed. It's abundantly obvious how the subject presented himself at the end of his life; whether this identification was a genuine sense of identity, or one borne out of convenience/ambition doesn't matter, and we don't have to speculate about it at all in order to satisfy the Manual of Style. -- Equivamp - talk 01:41, 17 June 2021 (UTC)

  What about this hypothetical situation. Let's say a transgender Air Force fighter pilot during the Don't Ask Don't Tell policy era told all of his superiors and colleagues as well on official documents that he was a man. Then he gets shot down over the Persian Gulf and dies for his country. But it turns out from all her diaries and personal writings that she lived as a woman. She had a boyfriend in her private life. She couldn't come out as a woman because doing so would cause her to be dishonorably discharged. But according to MOS:GENDERID her last self-identification was as a male according to all reliable sources reporting on it. Would this be fair and equitable? TrueQuantum ( talk) 16:07, 17 June 2021 (UTC)

  When your argument begins with Whataboutism, you've already lost the argument. Isaidnoway (talk) 22:48, 17 June 2021 (UTC)

  Whataboutism is using a rhetorical example to expose an opponent's hypocrisy. It's a "you also" logical fallacy. I used a rhetorical example not as an attack nor as a way to expose the hypocrisy of someone else but to illustrate an example to make a point. The only "whataboutism" I am guilty of is using the words "What about this" at the beginning of my sentence. TrueQuantum ( talk) 23:31, 17 June 2021 (UTC)

  "Lost the argument"? Not necessarily. TrueQuantum's hypothetical is analogous to the experience of some women who fought in the American Civil War, and died having maintained a male identity for some considerable length of time before death. In this case, their motivation was to stay with their husband or fiancé, but the wish to avoid outing is similar. Their last stated self-identification may have been male, but this did not necessarily reflect their actual gender identity; certainly their husbands did not view them that way, despite their wife's Army uniform, musket, dress sword, or male name. See #The letter and the spirit of MOS:GENDERID in the #Discussion section below. Mathglot ( talk) 23:34, 17 June 2021 (UTC)

  I have to say, I'm a little troubled that this is the second comment here to equate dating men with being a woman. Peaceray earlier said We also tend to assume, rightly or wrongly, that nearly all people who undergo women-to-men transitions are not typically attracted to men. I'm not sure who "we" is in that sentence, but at least by 2021 standards, a majority of the transmasculine people I know are attracted to men; empirical data bears this out. Again, my point here isn't to argue that Barry was transgender—to the contrary, I'd oppose any attempt to make such an assertion in the article—but, if we're talking about indicators that someone does or doesn't identify with a given gender, sexual orientation is emphatically not one. -- Tamzin (she/they) | o toki tawa mi. 23:11, 17 June 2021 (UTC)

  To be clear, I was opining what the general societal tends to assume about women-to-men transitions & sexual preference. I did take a look at the Transgender_sexuality#Transgender_men section to which you linked. It cites one study of American trans men that speaks stongly to your point. However, I would suggest that generalization from one study is imperfect. There should be more studies to see if the results are replicated, & cross-cultural studies as well. Peaceray ( talk) 04:43, 18 June 2021 (UTC)

• Oppose, change isn't necessary. Idealigic ( talk) 18:41, 17 June 2021 (UTC)
• Oppose The change is really unnecessary. Sea Ane ( talk) 22:38, 17 June 2021 (UTC)

Notice: Listed at::

• WT:Manual of Style/Biography
• WT:WikiProject LGBT studies
• WT:WikiProject Women
• Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Gender studies
• Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Women's History
• Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Feminism

Thanks, Mathglot ( talk) 00:21, 18 June 2021 (UTC)

• Support Use of He/Him since he identified as male in both private and public life until his death. BristolTreeHouse ( talk) 06:23, 18 June 2021 (UTC)
• Oppose strongly. Mathglot painstakingly explained why in #The letter and the spirit of MOS:GENDERID below. WP:V is policy and supersedes guidelines, and it is clear that sources are inconsistent on this matter. Using he/him pronouns is POV. We don't know why Barry said and did what they did, and using either set of gender pronouns runs a high risk of what is today called misgendering. "He/him" is not a safe or neutral option. Barry lived at a time of extreme gender restrictions; as laid out below, at that time there were many female persons who did things women weren't allowed to do and in ways that today carry very different connotations about someone's inward gender; to imply that they were all necessarily men could seem misogynist (by attributing women's accomplishments to men) and is a major anachronism. Maybe Barry would have considered themselves a man (trans man) had they lived today, but also maybe not, and using "he/him" implies the former. Some sources claiming that they were a trans man, by the way, may be unreliable if the authors lack relevant expertise in that period of history and are clearly engaged in activistically trying to claim historical figures as this or that. That first paragraph of MOS:GENDERID clearly needs to be revisited. The clear intent/spirit of that paragraph (I was there during the recent debates over that whole section) is to prevent people from refusing to update a BLP's gender because the majority of already existing sources used the old gendered terms from before a recent transition. It was never meant for quasi- WP:WIKILAWYERING over historical figures and for selectively favoring some modern-day RS over others. Such a claim is invalid as against the policies and pillars of Wikipedia, namely WP:NPOV, WP:V, WP:5P2, and WP:5P5. Crossroads ^-talk- 22:40, 18 June 2021 (UTC)
• Oppose use of pronouns. Comment by User:TrueQuantum (02:06, 16 June 2021) is the nutshell for me. I am also persuaded by this: "At a time when women were barred from most formal education and most professions, she had masqueraded as a man in a life-long deception of breathtaking proportions...Thanks to dogged sleuthing, the book fleshes out her early life, pinpoints the date of her dramatic transformation and follows Barry’s career across the globe...Rachel Holmes made a plausible case for Margaret [Bulkley] being intersex...Du Preez and Dronfield dismiss this notion and argue Barry’s decision to live as a man was "motivated more by ambition than identity"." – "Dr James Barry: A Woman Ahead of Her Time review – an exquisite story of scandalous subterfuge".Wendy Moore, 10 November 2016, The Guardian. Pyxis Solitary (yak). L not Q. 13:04, 19 June 2021 (UTC)
• Oppose use of pronouns. This seems like a unique case as per the comments above where we should just avoid using pronouns altogether considering the complexity and uncertainity of the situation. It seems sources are not clear on this either. Regards  Spy-cicle💥  ^Talk? 00:22, 21 June 2021 (UTC)
• Support; and, more importantly, strenuously oppose avoiding the use of pronouns in this case as failing not just MOS:GENDERID but WP:V and WP:RS. MOS:GENDERID is clear, and there is sufficient sourcing using male pronouns that the argument that using he / him somehow fails WP:V or WP:RS doesn't pass a sniff test; using pronouns, in any case, carries no particular implication beyond the fact that they were his preferred pronouns, which is indisputable - people's speculation about why he preferred those pronouns is interesting (and can be covered in the article if we have appropriate sources) but has no relevance for which ones we use or for the fact that he did prefer them. But more importantly, writing around pronouns doesn't actually solve that issue - it carries the implication that he preferred no pronouns, which does flatly fail WP:V and WP:RS. We have sources indicating that he used male pronouns in life, and sufficient sources that use male pronouns for him today to satisfy RS and V for that option; but we have no sources whatsoever supporting the implication that he preferred to avoid pronouns entirely, which makes it an unacceptable solution. If people want to argue for using female pronouns for him (which is what the speculation above points to, ie. they speculate that it is possible that he actually, deep in his heart, preferred female pronouns), they must make that argument honestly - but suggesting that we could treat his pronouns as "none" is total nonsense unsupported by any sources. -- Aquillion ( talk) 05:11, 23 June 2021 (UTC)
  • The idea of having a preference for no pronouns would have been unheard of in the 19th century when Barry lived and indeed for most readers even today. Not using any carries no such implication because unstated things cannot ever be said to implied - in other words, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. The argument based on RS won't work because some RS use he/him and others use she/her, as explained above and below. Picking one set of pronouns means elevating some sources over others, which is clearly POV. Crossroads ^-talk- 05:29, 23 June 2021 (UTC)
  • That's some backwards logic, there. You said, "it [avoiding pronouns] carries the implication that he preferred no pronouns"  – No, it most certainly does not.

  You said, "we have no sources whatsoever supporting the implication that he preferred to avoid pronouns entirely, which makes it an unacceptable solution."  – We also have no sources whatsoever supporting the implication that Napoleon preferred to avoid use of Ming Dynasty china at his state dinners, and yet the Napoleon Bonaparte article avoids any mention of Ming Dynasty china; I guess it flatly fails WP:V and WP:RS, too. Mathglot ( talk) 08:12, 23 June 2021 (UTC)

• Support per MOS:GID and Tamzin below. GreenComputer ( talk) 07:47, 23 June 2021 (UTC)
• Oppose. This is PoV-based OR trying to retroactively "adopt" someone as transgender for having passed as a man in a then-male-gendered profession of military physician. This is just historical revisionism, and is not what we have MOS:GENDERID for. I had wondered if we needed to specify in it that it did not pertain to subjects that pre-date the concept "transgender", but I guess now we know that we need to be that specific. Anyway, the status quo of using the surname is perfectly adequate. PS: We should not be censoring pronouns in directly quoted historical writing, either.  —  SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  05:58, 5 July 2021 (UTC)

  @ SMcCandlish: Setting aside that there's been no serious consideration here of referring to Barry as transgender... Are you saying that GENDERID could never apply to someone who lived before the concept of transgender-ness? That means it would not cover, for instance, Lili Elbe. She died 20 years before even the term "transsexual" existed, but I don't think there's any dispute that she considered herself a woman. -- Tamzin (she/they) | o toki tawa mi. 08:13, 5 July 2021 (UTC)

  Every example that old should be handled on a case-by-case basis, not covered by an attempt at a one-size-fits-all rule that was explicitly created for modern TG/NB subjects (and until recently limited to still-living ones). Half the problem here is a rule-thumping mentality in a system that doesn't really have hard-and-fast rules (other than those legal ones imposed on us by WP:OFFICE, like the core elements of the WP:COPYVIO policy). We vastly prefer to come to a reasoned consensus that fits a particular topic. Here, there is very clearly not going to be a consensus to gender-ize this person one way or the other with pronouns. For Elbe, I am certain there would not be a consensus to use "he", but I'm not certain there will be a consensus to use "she" rather than the surname, for reasons similar to ones raised about this article. This isn't even the only sort of nomenclatural anachronism we have to deal with, it's just a highly politicized one right now.  —  SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  06:00, 7 July 2021 (UTC)

  Obviously it should be handled on a case-by-case basis. That's why we're having an RfC, to come to that "reasoned consensus." -- Tamzin (she/they) | o toki tawa mi. 06:12, 7 July 2021 (UTC)

• Support. The argument that we can't know how Barry identified because our modern framework of gender didn't exist then ignores the fact that, under that criteria, we wouldn't know how any historical figure identified, and we don't go excluding pronouns from the article of every person who happened to live before whenever gender identity was supposedly invented. Luckily, as Tamzin says, we don't need to know, because pronouns and identity are separate issues – Barry consistently used he/him pronouns throughout his adult life, so that is our baseline. The main arguments I've seen in favour of deviating from that are ultimately based on speculation about his identity, which, again, you could apply to anyone, including plenty of people for which there's much better justification. ─ ReconditeRodent «  talk · contribs » 00:27, 12 July 2021 (UTC)

  The assertion that "pronouns and identity are separate issues" is contradicted by the emphasis on identity appropriate pronouns in MOS:GENDERID as well as by how misgendering is considered a serious offense. If that assertion were true, there would be no such thing as misgendering; pronouns would be a meaningless stylistic choice. Also, a great many opposes do not even imply anything about being before an 'invention of gender identity'. We know what pronouns to use for historical figures based on what reliable sources use. There is no consensus among them in this case. Crossroads ^-talk- 01:21, 12 July 2021 (UTC)

Some participants are not reading sources, or else they would see that there is no definite consensus among them. (If I had been her, in the times she lived, I would have done everything I could to maintain the disguise and secret. It was either that or a public ass-kicking.) Pyxis Solitary (yak). L not Q. 10:10, 13 July 2021 (UTC)

• Support per MOS:GID and common sense. DoctorJoeE  ^Stalk/ _Talk 01:07, 12 July 2021 (UTC)
• Yes to both questions (i.e. the position people are expressing as "support" for some reason). As OP notes, the issue is more basic than a question of whether Barry was trans, which previous discussions have gotten bogged down in; the MOS is clear that MOS:GENDERID (rightly) applies to "any person whose gender might be questioned", and clearly Barry's "latest expressed gender self-identification" was as a man, so we are to refer to him accordingly. (In turn, WP:LOCALCONSENSUS to not follow general policies and guidelines is moot.) -sche ( talk) 17:22, 13 July 2021 (UTC)

Discussion

The letter and the spirit of MOS:GENDERID

Tl;dr: An overly strict dependence on the exact wording of the guideline MOS:GENDERID, to the exclusion of WP:COMMONSENSE and the requirements of policy such as WP:Verifiability, may lead good-faith editors astray in this case.

I wanted to address a point that I think is leading to some confusion, in some discussion taking place in the #Survey section above, regarding the meaning and application of MOS:GENDERID. I see a number of !votes or discussion that seem to rely on a very strict reading of the "last reported self-identification" portion of MOS:GENDERID, leading some to support male pronouns for that reason. Given the current wording of MOS:GENDERID, I think this is a defensible position, and I respect those that have come to their decision based on this reading, even if I don't agree with it. Further in support of their decision, might be the fact that transgender, although not coined till 1965, could be interpreted broadly enough to include anyone from Elagabalus to Chevalier d'Éon to James Barry.

However, I think it violates the spirit of MOS:GENDERID, and perhaps the letter of it as well, to require that male pronouns be used for Barry in this article, or for anyone, based solely on their last used reference, or even their stable, continuously used self-identification over a period of time, especially when the person in question pre-dates the modern concept of transgender individuals, and I wanted to explain my reasoning. Perhaps MOS:GENDERID should be expanded to clarify this point, so we don't have well-meaning editors coming up with opposite decisions based on their reading of the same guideline; but this is beyond our scope here.

It is worth pointing out that a "last identification" or "continuous, stable identification" as say, "male", does not *always* support an ascription of transgender; even if MOS:GENDERID seems to imply that it does. I wanted to raise some examples, as a possible explanation of what I mean, and as a point of comparison to what I think is going on in some of the reasoning above.

My examples concern women who served as soldiers in the American Civil War. It's a well-sourced fact that there were hundreds of such women; one sees the number "400" quoted a lot. Of these, there are very numerous examples of women who enlisted in order to remain with their husband, fiancé, or lover. Others enlisted for patriotic reasons. Mary Owens seems to be a little bit of both, having enlisted with her husband William disguised as his brother "John", and remaining in the regiment another eighteen months after William was killed in battle. After the war, she married and had four children. The article mentions this:

Local newspapers during the war delighted in stories such as Owens's, involving women soldiers inspired by patriotism or the love of their husbands. According to Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, Owens was "described as a woman of considerable beauty, and is said to be the heroine of the neighborhood."^{[ 2}

In this case, it's quite clear, even for the "strict constructionists", that Mary was "she/her", based on her remarriage and children. The case of Malinda Blalock is similar in this regard. So, I venture to say, that everybody would be in agreement on these and similar cases, that there is no opportunity for MOS:GENDERID to yield "he/his" even if the only pronoun or self-identification that Mary used for some years during the War was "he/his".

So far, so good. But it's not as clear in every case of women in battle in the Civil War; not all cases of women enlisting to stay with a man took this same course of post-war remarriage or reassumption of female name and identity. These other cases are analogous to TrueQuantum's hypothetical case of a trans service member who dies for his country before coming out, which TrueQuantum may not have realized is not as hypothetical as they had perhaps thought. Take the case of Florena Budwin, who enlisted in the Union Army with her husband in order to stay with him. Budwin was eventually captured and held as a POW, but maintained her male identity through the death of her husband, and her own sickness, which eventually killed her at age 20. A doctor treating her discovered her secret, and her decision to maintain it may have contributed to her death. Another striking case is that of Lizzie Compton, who enlisted in seven regiments and fought at Shiloh and Gettysburg; she was arrested in 1864 trying to enlist again, was told it was against the law to dress as a man, and replied that she could be a gentleman, but she would rather die than be a lady. The case of Fanny Wilson also seems unknowable. Or, what do we make of Elsa Jane Forest Guerin (a.k.a., " Mountain Charley"), who said,

I began to rather like the freedom of my new character. I could go where I chose, do many things, which while innocent in themselves, were debarred by propriety from association with the female sex. The change from the cumbersome, unhealthy attire of women to the more convenient, healthy habiliments of a man, was in itself almost sufficient to compensate for its unwomanly character.

— Elsa Guerin

Must we use male pronouns for Elsa/Charley, and is this a declaration of identity? To call Florena "male", because of what MOS:GENDERID says about her continuously maintained male identity until her death seems on very shaky ground, and in my view, violates the "common sense" provision stated at the very top of Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Biography, which is the page upon which MOS:GENDERID appears. To me, common sense dictates that Florena is no different than Mary, or Malinda; she just happened to die before she could resume her prewar life. We also have to remember that the MOS is only a guideline, and WP:Verifiability is a policy; even if a strict reading of MOS:GENDERID might seem to require "male" for Florena, both the "common sense" provision of the guideline, as well as the supervening authority of Verifiability would require stronger evidence than this, which we simply don't have. The evidence for Lizzie possibly being transgender is stronger, but we don't know. I find it more than a bit ironic that one of the main tenets of second-wave feminism is to broaden the scope of what is seen as a societally "permissible" role for women; must we now declare Lizzie a "man" because she's "not a lady" and liked soldiering, or Elsa "he/his" because of the emininently reasonable comments about freedom and clothing?

Each case is different, and the case of Barry is not the same of these women, because Barry maintained a male identity for much longer, and to the end. (So did Albert Cashier, for 53 years.) However, we simply don't have evidence for why this is. Was it more like Elsa? What evidence do we have? The cases of female American Civil War soldiers show that some resume a female identity, some don't, and we usually don't know why. Based on current statistics on trans prevalence, we can guess that there may have been over 10,000 soldiers during the course of the war, that we might have called "transgender" had they lived in our time. But we cannot know this, and in particular, in the individual cases, we rarely have direct evidence for it. James Barry seems much more likely to have been trans than the average soldier, but we know from the historical record that many women served disguised as men, that there were various reasons for this, and some resumed a female identity afterwards and others (fewer, but some) did not.

Finally, it's worth quoting The Gnome's closure of the Albert Cashier Rfc on pronoun usage, which was decided in favor of "exclud[ing] gendered pronouns", and which references this article:

"Avoiding gender-neutral pronouns" brings necessarily with it the demon of repetition: The article " James Barry (surgeon)," as already pointed out by an RfC contributor, offers the right prototype: The subject is referred throughout by name rather by a gender pronoun, which is precisely the road map for this article, too.

—  User:The Gnome, Request for Comment about pronoun usage (08:43, 9 October 2018)

From my point of view, the MOS:GENDERID guideline is a good one, but it must be used with WP:COMMONSENSE, and in particular, WP:Verifiability policy must trump the guideline. It should not be up to the opinion, or even a vote, of Wikipedia editors to declare that someone is transgender, if we don't have reliable sources that we can clearly cite to that effect. As to the argument made at the top, and then again in the Survey section, that regardless of gender identity, we can simply apply the words of MOS:GENDERID to "latest self-identification" without considering their gender identity at all, I find that unconvincing, and disingenuous; we all know why we have that guideline, and it's not for people who *don't* have gender id issues. Maybe the MOS:GENDERID guideline should be tightened up to clarify this situation (and I may open a discussion there about that) but if and until that happens, I'd just ask people looking into the situation here, to apply the GENDERID guideline, but with commmon sense, and to not put their own guesses or views of what Barry "could've" or "must've" been, over their allegiance to uphold WP:Verifiability. (Full disclosure: I think there's a pretty good chance Barry was trans.) Unless editors here can come up with reliable sourcing about Barry's status, one way or the other, I think we simply don't know, and it is unknowable. That argues for avoiding gendered pronouns, and that is what I would urge editors to do. Sorry this was so long; if you're still reading, you deserve a barnstar for indefatigable discussant; thanks! Mathglot ( talk) 23:25, 17 June 2021 (UTC)

I'll respond at greater length when I've had more time to think on this, but I just wanted to say, thank you for this serious discussion of my points about GENDERID. I didn't want this discussion to turn into a relitigation of "Was Barry trans?", and I've been disappointed by the extent to which it has. (I have my own guess of how he'd identify if you brought him to 2021 and gave him a few months to learn about modern gender norms, but that's not a reliable source, so it doesn't matter. We also run into the unresolved gap between "transgender"-as-identity and "transgender"-by-definition; see Michael D. Cohen (actor) for an example of a living person who is the latter but not the former. Our hands are tied on any of that until/unless RS make their mind up on how to bridge that gap.) -- Tamzin (she/they) | o toki tawa mi. 00:02, 18 June 2021 (UTC)

Forget MOS:GENDERID, how do reliable sources describe Dr. James Barry

It is unfortunate that this RfC is predicated on the belief that MOS:GENDERID should be interpreted and then applied to this article in order to use gendered pronouns for a 19th century historical figure. I can only speak for myself, but my !vote was not based on the MOS guideline, but rather on policy, and how reliable sources refer to Barry. And the unanimous consensus among all the sources is to use pronouns, whether it's male or female, when referring to Barry. There are a multitude of reliable sources that verify that gendered pronouns are preferred and used to describe Barry, so in my view, ignoring that unanimous consensus runs afoul of WP:NPOV, because we are deliberately choosing to discard the prevalent viewpoint of using pronouns when referring to Barry. Books, newspapers, journals, encyclopedias, LGBTQ authors and opinion pieces all take a firm stance and use pronouns, but it appears that Wikipedia is the outlier in refusing to acknowledge that gendered pronouns are acceptable, and there is a clear editorial bias against using them, which in turn implies that Wikipedia exclusively using "Barry" is a fringe view.

A small selection of sources that use gendered pronouns

• "The Mystery of Dr. James Barry". McGill University.
• "James Barry". The University of Edinburgh.
• "Dr James Barry: A Woman Ahead of Her Time review – an exquisite story of scandalous subterfuge". The Guardian.
• "Dr James Barry: the Irishwoman who fooled the British Empire". The Irish Times.
• "James Barry". The Canadian Encyclopedia. This article refers to James Barry with masculine pronouns, as this was how Barry referred to himself throughout his life.
• duPreez, Hm. "Dr James Barry (1789–1865): the Edinburgh years". The Journal of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. 42 (3): 258–265. doi: 10.4997/JRCPE.2012.315.
• Smith, KM. "Dr. James Barry: military man--or woman?" (PDF). Canadian Medical Association Journal. 126 (7): 854–7. PMID  7042061. (female pronouns)
• Royal College of Surgeons of England (1884). Doctors out of practice.

LGBTQ authors and opinion pieces arguing that a Trans identity is permissible

• "The National Archives - Dr James Barry: The importance of archival discoveries". The National Archives (United Kingdom).
• Jack Doyle, Oxford PhD historian. "The Trans Take: Towards a Transgender Public History".
• "Monstrous Regiment". History Today.
• Sara Westrop. "Dr James Barry and the erasure of LGBTQ+ history".
• EE Ottoman. "Dr. James Barry and the specter of trans and queer history".
• School Library Journal. "Were I Not A Girl: The Inspiring and True Story of Dr. James Barry". This accessible picture book biography spotlights a lesser-known part of LGBTQ+ history. Dr. James Barry, a white transgender man, accomplished great feats.

Yes, you can make the argument trans is a 20th-century construction that does not extend back into the 19th century, which is true. That being said a person who is assigned one gender at birth, but then lives for the vast majority of their life identifying as another, often including dressing as that gender, using the pronouns associated with that gender, referring to themselves as that gender, preferring the gendered language associated with that gender, choosing a name inline with that gender etc. Describes both our understanding of what it means to be binary transgender and the life Dr. James Barry.

Whether or not historians choose to represent Cashier or Barry in the same terms that they presented themselves to the world, their stories are only known today because they were put on display during or soon after their lifetimes. To be repeatedly, wrongly assumed to be the gender that society projects on to you...is one of the most painful experiences trans people have to contend with. Popular and academic history, unwittingly or not, has played its own part in trans ‘erasure’ by foreclosing the very possibility that some of these ‘cross-dressing’ histories might reveal trans lives in the past.

It is important to recognise that contemporary understandings of gender can complicate the ways in which we view and interpret the past, for we are reliant on the terminology that we are familiar with today. However, Barry lived consistently throughout his public and private life as a man, and it is important to respect that this is how he chose to identify.

Transgender identities in history receive the most debate and outright aggressive erasure of the LGBTQ community. The excuse used for this type of erasure is that none of these identities existed in those days. But here’s the thing- Not having the language to express an identity in a way that makes it palatable today doesn’t mean Trans people didn’t exist.

My argument for using gendered pronouns is straightforward, follow the sources that verify pronouns are acceptable and preferred, and not substitute our editorial bias against using them. Isaidnoway (talk) 10:20, 18 June 2021 (UTC)

• I think this is an important consideration, though I think it's odd to frame it as merely a question of how many sources use gendered pronouns vs. gender-neutral or no pronouns. To me, the relevant question is what proportion of RS use a) masculine pronouns, b) feminine pronouns, c) gender-neutral pronouns or no pronouns. If any one of these has a clear majority among RS (especially weighting sources that are recent, high quality, and in-depth), we should go with that. If it's more of a wash, then I think it's reasonable to go with option c) as a hedge. Colin M ( talk) 16:48, 18 June 2021 (UTC)

  I disagree with Isaidnoway's reasoning, since GENDERID is an explicit exception to following a majority of RS, but to the extent that it matters:

  • McGill: he/him for the James Barry persona (but once with scare quotes), she/her for the Margaret Bulkley persona
  • U Edinburgh: he/him, even in referring to him as a woman
  • The Guardian: she/her, after a brief period of he/him (once in scare quotes) pre-"reveal"
  • The Irish Times: she/her
  • Canadian Encyclopedia: he/him
  • J R Coll Physicians Edinb: he/him as Barry, she/her as Bulkley
  • Smith: she/her
  • R Coll Surgeons (1884): he/him

    I do think this one is significant for my own argument, because it shows that people were referring to Barry as "he" well after his death, providing evidence that it's departing from he/him that is in fact ahistorical/presentist.

  • All six pieces framing Barry as trans: he/him

  But again, in my view this doesn't matter. There's a reason that GENDERID says not to defer to what a majority of sources say. Otherwise we would have had to misgender Ellar Coltrane in the four months between when they first announced (in an ABOUTSELF primary source) that they take they/them pronouns and when it finally was reported in a secondary source; the vast majority of RS referring to Coltrane still uses he/him pronouns simply because they haven't been in the news much since changing their pronouns, which is the exact sort of scenario that that provision in GENDERID is for. -- Tamzin (she/they) | o toki tawa mi. 19:52, 18 June 2021 (UTC)

The Irish Times also uses male pronouns, the authors of that article are the same as the book this article primarily relies on. And I don't think Coltrane is a valid comparison, because this article has already settled on his identity, meaning it makes it clear that he identified as a male - entire adult life was lived as a man...lived as a man in both public and private life...a male identity...this identity, and in addition it uses his male name Barry, so there's no reason not to used gendered pronouns, especially in light of the fact that it's sourced and verifiable. And there is nothing wrong with using he/him/she/her either, that's also supported by sources. In my view, it's incredulous to think that this man, whose brilliance and intelligence is widely lauded, wasn't capable of declaring which gender he preferred to be identified by (for 56 years). This book also uses male pronouns. Isaidnoway (talk) 23:12, 18 June 2021 (UTC)

We are social creatures and our choices are not made in a vacuum or out of pure individualism. Choices also carry different meanings in different cultural contexts. There is no basis to think that Barry's choices in their time, to them, carried the same meaning about what they would consider their true inner gender as those choices would in our time. See these comments: [1] [2] Crossroads ^-talk- 23:21, 18 June 2021 (UTC)

Regardless of whether his motivations for living and identifying as a man were based in gender roles or gender identity, the evidence of the longevity of him living in the male gender in every way is definitive. The facts are that throughout his entire adult life, he identified as a man, he lived as a man, he dressed as a man, Barry himself used and wanted he/him pronouns, he died as a man, and wanted to be buried as a man. It was only after his death that people started gossiping, speculating, guessing and deliberately misgendering him after discovering that he was assigned female at birth, and to this day have disrespected his only known preference to be identified as a man, and erase him from history to their own preferred version of history. And the weight of the sources verify that using gendered pronouns is clearly acceptable. Isaidnoway (talk) 10:00, 19 June 2021 (UTC)

Agreed - the article shouldn't be using pronouns based off speculation of what could have been in some alternate history. Even if what Barry would consider his true inner gender might be different in the cultural context of today, there isn't much in the way of reliable evidence what that would've been and how he would've expressed it - and there's no evidence that he would've used a different set of pronouns (there is, after all, plenty of non-binary people and women who have he/him pronouns today). Barry pretty clearly used he/him pronouns during his life and wanted to be referred to as such after his death - that's not speculation, that's fact with reliable sources to back it up. NHCLS ( talk) 11:45, 19 June 2021 (UTC)

Editors can't have their cake and eat it too with MOS:GENDERID. One cannot argue based on the letter of the guideline to use he/him, while at the same time saying things like Regardless of whether his motivations for living and identifying as a man were based in gender roles or gender identity, against the clear spirit of GENDERID not to disregard the person's gender identity and to avoid misgendering, with "gender roles" disregarded. Then we have the claim that plenty of non-binary people and women who have he/him pronouns today; imagine if someone tried to use this argument on an article about a trans woman. The fact is that pronouns, like all words, are meant to communicate a meaning and be understood, and in line with that, GENDERID requires (in letter and spirit) that pronouns be compatible with the person's gender identity. What Barry wanted after their death, again, has to be understood in their immediate cultural context and the world as it was around the time they died. They had no way of knowing that 156 years later in 2021, women could be surgeons and serve in the military, and that certain statements meant that one was in fact a man regardless of body. Crossroads ^-talk- 23:24, 19 June 2021 (UTC)

imagine if someone tried to use this argument on an article about a trans woman - I'm not sure what you're trying to get at there, since the point of that argument was that the article should go with what pronouns Barry used (and was documented to have used) instead of speculating "what ifs" about Barry's gender. NHCLS ( talk) 12:35, 20 June 2021 (UTC)

You stated that it would be no big deal to use he/him for Barry even if they did identify as a woman deep down since some women supposedly use it.

Something I forgot to mention is that the argument that 'most sources use pronouns, so we have to use pronouns' is a very odd way of weighting the sources, since the sources use completely opposing sets of pronouns. We can't combine sources that say opposite things and use them as though they are somehow united in viewpoint. Crossroads ^-talk- 05:17, 23 June 2021 (UTC)

Is it in dispute that some women take he/him pronouns? I'm surprised to see that He/him lesbian is a redlink, but it's definitely a thing within the butch lesbian community. Leslie Feinberg was a butch transgender woman woman who sometimes took he/him pronouns. Jack Halberstam is a butch AFAB who primarily takes he/him pronouns and does not consider himself a man, nor has he explicitly referred to himself as nonbinary, to my knowledge. I'm sure there's more on-point examples; those are just the first two that come to mind. Going the other direction, there's cis male drag queens like RuPaul who are okay with female pronouns even when not in-character. Again, just examples for proof of concept. I'm not saying that any of these people's gender has much in common with Barry's. -- Tamzin (she/they) | o toki tawa mi. 05:40, 23 June 2021 (UTC)

Erm, Feinberg was not a transgender woman in the sense defined by that linked article... -- Equivamp - talk 05:43, 23 June 2021 (UTC)

Ah. My mistake. I was thrown by the quote about how he/him pronouns "render[ed] [hir] transgender expression invisible", but now I see ze meant it more in the sense of forced binarism/conformity (and, off-topic, I quite relate to that perspective). -- Tamzin (she/they) | o toki tawa mi. 06:04, 23 June 2021 (UTC)

it would be no big deal to use he/him for Barry even if they did identify as a woman deep down - that's entirely not what I'm saying though. What I'm saying is that there's no way for us to know if Barry did really identify as a woman deep down (or if Barry would've identified as anything else) and that we shouldn't be basing an article on speculation about that. NHCLS ( talk) 11:56, 23 June 2021 (UTC)

On the identities of the long-dead

I said from the outset that I wasn't trying to argue that Barry was trans, and I'd like to go into a little detail about that. Part of it is a philosophical objection, because even if we could be sure that Barry was something other than cisgender, it would still be binarist to say, "Ah, so he was a trans man."

But the larger issue is one of people's right to decide what to call themselves, a right that persists even after one's death. My support of he/him pronouns here is based on that: Barry chose to live a life where people called him "he", and we should respect that. But he also chose to identify in a certain way, and that was not as a "transgender man". Now, the word "transgender" was coined more than 100 years after his death, so he didn't get to choose not to call himself that. And thus it can be very tempting to look back at a historical figure and say, "Oh, it really seems like this word we have now for some identity would have really suited them." And who knows, maybe it would have. But I'd oppose referring to a historical figure as transgender even if there were no question that they really identified as what we would now call that.

And that's because, look, I've never found a word that adequately describes my gender identity. Perhaps someday I'll be the subject of a Wikipedia article. Perhaps someday I'll die. (Okay, that's more than a "perhaps.") And perhaps someday someone will popularize a word and some well-meaning future Wikipedian (or academic, even) will think "That word sounds like it would perfectly fit everything Tamzin's gender. Let's say they were that!" And who knows, maybe that person will be totally right. Maybe the trendiest xenogender of the 2220s will perfectly describe how I feel.

But I don't want someone to make that call for me after I die. Just like I can only work with the technology that exists in my lifetime and can only think thoughts about the ideas that exist within my lifetime, I can only identify (or not identify) with the gender identities that have been articulated within my lifetime. And the same was true of Barry. He died a <person born female who lived most of his adult life outwardly presenting as male, with unspecified internal feelings about his gender> at a time when there was no word for that. Which is sad. But we can't fix that by retroactively labeling him something he might not have identified as.

Why am I arguing at such length against a position on my own "side" that no one's even arguing for that strongly? Because it gives context to my strong opposition to the "Well maybe he would have lived as a woman if he could" argument. It's not our call. It just isn't. Not for someone currently alive, not for someone who died in living memory, not for someone who died 160 years ago. We're an encyclopedia. We repeat what's been reported in reliable sources, which is that someone who was born Margaret Bulkley later in life started living as James Barry, and that some scholars think this was a purely professional move, while others think it was also borne of personal preference. And we already say that. Good. So then there's the stylistic question of how we refer to this person. And our normal procedure—and I still don't understanding how it's "wikilawyering" to argue for a straightforward application of a guideline—is to refer to that person the way they asked to be referred to. And the only argument I've seen for why Barry should be an exception is that we don't know whether he really meant it when he asked (implicitly through his very presentation, every day for 56 years) to be treated as a man and thus referred to by he/him pronouns, masculine gendered terms, masculine titles, etc.

The other argument is, "Well let's err on the side of caution. We don't know what he wanted, and no-pronouns gets us around that." But there is no "not taking a side" with pronouns and gendered terms. English is a (weakly) gendered language. When an article doesn't use pronouns, that is a deliberate choice, and one that's very obvious to readers. I don't know about y'all, but when I read an article (on Wikipedia or elsewhere) about someone who does not neatly conform to the gender binary, in the back of my head I'm waiting for the first third-person pronoun or gendered term, because that's a basic biographical fact, and one I'll need to know if I want to tell anyone about what I've just learned. If we want to err on the side of caution here, if we want to not take a side, then the default status should always be using the pronouns someone went by in life. Maybe, maybe, if there were some diary entry saying that all those years he wished he could be Margaret again, then avoiding pronouns would be the least of all evils. But what we're doing here is taking "Refer to him the way he expected his peers to" and "Don't refer to him the way he expected his peers to" and "compromising" on "Don't". Which is just as much an ahistorical speculation as it would be to call Barry a trans man. -- Tamzin (she/they) | o toki tawa mi. 06:53, 23 June 2021 (UTC)

Very clear and well-written exposition of your PoV; brav@; made me think. A couple of points: you said,

But there is no "not taking a side" with pronouns and gendered terms.

Ah, but there is: avoid them. Difficult: yes; impossible: no. (More on this below.) And you added:

in the back of my head I'm waiting for the first third-person pronoun or gendered term...

That's exactly the same reaction most people have when faced with a baby not dressed in pink or blue, and if we don't get a straight answer to the first question everybody asks about a baby, then there's this gnawing discomfort and we feel uneasy, until we get an answer. It's the same unease of ours in that situation that the long-running SNL sketch It's Pat played upon. But in fact, although it may be difficult, you don't need to know Pat's gender or the baby's gender or Barry's gender; and although it may be difficult to write without pronouns, that can be done, too, and without endless repetition. All sorts of aspects of writing are difficult; Georges Perec wrote an entire French novel without the letter 'e', and then in an even more difficult feat, it was translated into English. Plus, several articles at Wikipedia already avoid the use of gendered pronouns; the fact that it's difficult, shouldn't sway us one way or the other. So, yeah, I agree with your devil's advocate quotation of "Well let's err on the side of caution. We don't know what he wanted, and no-pronouns gets us around that." Exactly. And as far as not retroactively deciding on their identity, that solution works well for that, too. Mathglot ( talk) 08:50, 23 June 2021 (UTC)

Just want to say that I really appreciate the thoughtful discussions and lively debate here. It's probably one of the best I have come across on Wikipedia so far. It's also very respectful and civil. I think it just means that both sides here have compelling arguments. I never heard of Dr. James Barry before this RfC, but through all of this talk and discussion I've really come to admire Dr. Barry's unique life. I feel like we should preserve this beautiful story and life history for what it is. TrueQuantum ( talk) 14:12, 23 June 2021 (UTC)