On Trans Issues, Wikipedia is a Bulwark Against Disinformation
In the wake of the anti-trans legislation by the Trump Administration, Wikipedia stands as a reliable source for information on trans topics.
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by Pax Ahimsa Gethen
A trans editor for Wikipedia rang the alarm immediately as the White House began to unleash a flood of bias-driven disinformation late last month. “Our honest coverage of transgender history, health care, and rights is more important than ever,” the editor posted on a talk page for fellow editors focusing on LGBTQ+ studies.
One of the most prominent places on the web for accurate information – on all topics – is the volunteer-run, nonprofit-hosted, collaboratively written encyclopedia that is available to all: Wikipedia. It draws on the expertise of trans and nonbinary editors in distilling unbiased and accurate entries.
And accurate information is of paramount importance at this moment. President Trump has wasted no time in trying to erase the rights and dignity of trans and nonbinary people, while his administration and its allies have tried to censor and rewrite history, purging entire government websites in the process.
Wikipedia has been a bulwark against the tide of disinformation, publishing numerous factual explanations of Trump’s executive orders.
Wikipedia articles on Trump’s anti-trans executive orders (as of February 7, 2025)
EO 14168, "Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government" (issued on inauguration day, January 20)
EO 14183, "Prioritizing Military Excellence and Readiness" (issued January 27)
EO 14187, "Protecting Children from Chemical and Surgical Mutilation" (issued January 28)
EO 14201, "Keeping Men Out of Women's Sports" (issued February 5)
Social media sites hosted by Meta and X now explicitly allow hate speech against queer people, but Wikipedia’s consensus-driven community of editors acts as a fact-based counter-balance. As noted by the queer Wikipedian and crypto critic Molly White in a recent CNN interview, “People who are trolling or expressing their own political beliefs are not tolerated on the site.”
Wikipedia itself has come under attack from powerful, unelected forces like the billionaire presidential advisor Elon Musk, who has disseminated misinformation and spread bias on his own platform. “Stop donating to Wokepedia,” he urged his followers on X.
At the same time, editors who are open about their trans or nonbinary gender identity on Wikipedia can face personal attacks and harassment. In 2016, I was stalked online by a transphobe for six months after an editing dispute escalated into repeated, deliberate deadnaming and graphic sexual references. When Trump was first elected president, this stalker expressed delight that I would now be sent to a concentration camp. In 2019, the harassment I and other marginalized Wikipedia editors experienced was the subject of an article in The New York Times.
Some Wikipedia editors have found these kinds of attacks, along with transphobic vandalism of articles, have escalated since Trump’s re-election. By vandalism, Wikipedians mean edits that clearly don't improve the article at all, and that are in effect just trolling.
I have seen several recent instances of such vandalism in which disruptive editors invoked Trump in editing summaries that misgendered trans subjects or made otherwise harmful edits to articles.
One person reported for vandalism had posted a transphobic statement that included a wish that “Trump boots this troll den masquerading as an encyclopedia off the internet.” The person was subsequently banned indefinitely from editing by the Wikipedia community.
The vandalism had been reported by the Wikipedia editor “Your Friendly Neighborhood Sociologist” (YFNS), a 21-year-old woman from New York City who transitioned at the age of 16.
YFNS told Assigned Media that she is determined to continue her volunteer work on trans-focused articles, which she started over three years ago. The barrage of false anti-trans attacks, she said, “is the start of a genocide: exclusion from public spaces, arguments we're a danger to children, making it harder to travel, describing us [as] an ideology and scrubbing the very fact we exist from every federal resource.”
It was YFNS who helped rally editors in the LGBTQ+ studies WikiProject, one of the many affinity groups that help guide editors, with her post stating their work is “more important than ever.”
Founded in 2001, Wikipedia is a crowd-sourced encyclopedia that now exists in over 300 languages. Most pages on the English-language Wikipedia can be edited by anyone, even anonymously, but a core policy is that all information must be verifiable and based on reliable sources. (This video tutorial by White shows how to get started.) Each Wikipedia language project has its own policies and guidelines. As related in a 2024 article in Le Monde, the French-language Wikipedia community has had particularly heated discussions over the deadnaming of trans subjects.
Coverage of trans people and topics on the English-language Wikipedia has evolved over time, particularly with regard to the language used to describe gender identity.
It’s grown much better, said Tamzin, a 28-year-old nonbinary New Jersey resident who has been editing Wikipedia since 2012 and now also serves as an administrator. “It's no longer particularly controversial (among established editors) to follow people's requested pronouns, so that's a big change from the past,” they said. “The community has also lost much patience for anything other than plausibly innocent mistakes, when it comes to misgendering among editors.”
But Tamzin has practical worries. As important as it is for trans and other marginalized editors to contribute to Wikipedia, the flood of worrying news coming out of the White House is taking a heavy toll on volunteers.
“A greater impact of Trump's re-election is probably editor-hours being lost to anxiety and contingency planning,” Tamzin said. “A lot of our best editors are members of marginalized groups that Trump targets, especially LGBTQ people. There are people who are now splitting their editing time with efforts to line up fallback plans to leave the country if needed, looking into personal defense options, or just spending more time away from the Internet because they don't want to see the constant drumbeat of doomcasting from legacy media and social media alike. If things get worse, we'll see even less of these people.
YFNS, who has been targeted by hate-inspired attacks outside of Wikipedia, is of course most concerned about her own safety. But she is worried that “Wikipedia's defense of the truth and trans history makes us an exceptional target” for people like Musk, Trump and powerful right-wing groups like the Heritage Foundation. Just last week, Slate reported on the Heritage Foundation’s plans to dox Wikipedia editors.
Still, Tamzin said they are cautiously optimistic about Wikipedia’s future, believing that the actions of Trump and Musk have actually shed light on the remarkable nature of the project and its global community of volunteers.
Myself? Having been a Wikipedia editor for over 16 years, as well as a contributor to Wikimedia Commons, I consider the work of volunteers on this project to be of paramount importance. In the face of ongoing threats from Washington, I plan to continue working with other editors on improving trans representation on the encyclopedia for the foreseeable future.
Pax Ahimsa Gethen (they/them) is a 55-year-old agender transmasculine blogger, editor, and curator. They were named 2023 Media Contributor of the Year by Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales. Pax lives in San Francisco with their spouse Ziggy.