User:Tamzin/userpage/special

Userpage modules in the "special" banner slot (dynamic list):

/Ukraine, 13 March 2022 – 4 September 2022

Yevhenii Sakun Brent Renaud Pierre Zakrzewski Oleksandra Kuvshynova Oksana Baulina Maks Levin Mantas Kvedaravičius May their memories be for a blessing [I] am but History's courier  To bind the conquering years; A battle-ray, through ages gray  To light to deeds sublime, And flash the lustre of this day  Down all the aisles of Time! — "Army Correspondent's Last Ride", George Alfred Townsend, 1865. Excerpted on the National War Correspondents Memorial as "War Correspondent Ballad". Tyranny truly is a horror: an immense, endlessly bloody, endlessly painful, endlessly varied, endless crime against not humanity in the abstract but a lot of humans in the flesh. It is, as Orwell wrote, a jackboot forever stomping on a human face. — "Who Would Choose Tyranny?", Michael Kelly, 2003.

/Jew Trans Soul Rebel, 4 September 2022 – 11 October 2022

Tattoos are like userboxen except for real life! Title: "Jew Trans Soul Rebel" (with apologies to Against Me!) Components: Top rocker: For how can I endure to see the evil that shall come unto my people? Star of David, colored thusly: Downward triangle: Rainbow flag (LGBT) Upward triangle: Left: Transgender flag Right: Nonbinary flag Bottom: Agender flag Bottom rocker: Or how can I endure to see the destruction of my kindred?

/HATEDISRUPT, 11 October 2022 – 16 October 2022

“ Wikipedia adminship is not about joining political caucuses and ganging up on designated victims. ” — Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/Tamzin @ Special:Diff/1085339890 “ Expressing hateful views is a form of disruptive editing. ... There is nothing radical about blocking, topic-banning, site-banning, or removing user rights from disruptive editors. We do it all the time. ” — Wikipedia:Hate is disruptive @ Special:Diff/1115462866

/not just disappointed, 16 October 2022 – 24 October 2022

There's always the temptation, with these things, to compare to majority or plurality groups. "What if someone said this about cis people?" "What if someone said this about white people?" But it doesn't work that way. I could say "Ban all cis people from Wikipedia", and that would be disruptive and offensive, but it wouldn't put cis people in (reasonable) fear. There is no plausible future where Wikipedia imposes discriminatory policies against cis people, or even makes it permissible to advocate for such. (And if you think there is, put the computer down and step slowly away from whatever sites you've been on.) For trans people this fear exists, and its reasonableness is reënforced every time the community decides our persecutors and would-be persecutors are the real victims here. 51 out of 108 (plus 8 neutral). Remember that number, 51. Don't remember the names. Some reasons were better than others, and people change, and this isn't an individual problem. But remember the number. This is a collective problem. Our community still sees trans editors' right to edit in peace as lesser. As something negotiable, something to wikilawyer over. This is not a new problem. On the individual level, it's often not even one driven by malice. Since I became an admin, I've had to convince multiple experienced, reasonable, kind-hearted administrators that various transphobic attacks were worthy of administrative intervention, in contexts where I would not have had to for other groups. Much of the Anglosphere (in particular one culturally influential island) sees trans people as a political issue first and a group of people second—and thus using Wikipedia to agitate against us is the lesser offense of FORUM-ing, and not what it really is: hate speech and perversion of Wikipedia's purpose. I'm not just disappointed in our community. I'm disgusted with our community. Not any one editor of 51, not even the 51 collectively, but our community as a whole. A community that has seen fit to tell trans editors that our safety and wellbeing is, at best, an issue on par with making sure a single editor doesn't feel too called-out for engaging in hate speech against us. I want a way to make people understand. But I still don't know how to get past that issue that you either know what it's like to reasonably fear your own persecution, or you don't. And if you don't, yeah, maybe this seems overblown or a waste of time. But consider perhaps the precedent you tend toward setting when you say that someone editing with an overtly transphobic agenda is welcome here as long as they don't touch gender-related pages, or even, for some, without that requirement. Still free to drive away trans and nonbinary editors in any number of ways, so long as they can find a single admin to unblock them in a year or two once people have forgotten. Naïveté. I'd like to chalk a lot of it up to naïveté. But I'll close with a story: Some years ago (row 364 [.xlsx]), I was sitting in a bus shelter with my partner; this was before my transition but from attire we were both very obviously queer. A teenager biked up to us and started hurling slurs at us. When he failed to cow either of us, he threatened to shoot me, and reached behind his back. For an interminable moment I tracked his hands, matched his footwork, and waited to see if he'd reach the point where I would be forced to strike first. He made two half-steps backwards, found himself off-balance, and turned and fled with some parting slurs. I don't think his motive there was of profound hatred for queer people. He said he was 15, but to me looked about 13. I don't think he really had a gun. I think his motive was impressing a younger boy who was there with him, showing him he was tough. That doesn't change much, though. The harm was still done. Much greater harms were nearly done, to one or both of us. A less malevolent motive is some consolation, but the harm remains. So yes. Disgusted. And devoid of any confidence that I will stop feeling that way anytime soon. Anyways, back to writing articles and doing boring admin work. — Tamzin Hadasa

/Jew Trans Soul Rebel again, 24 October 2022 – 25 November 2022

/Jew Trans Soul Rebel/alt1, 25 November 2022 – 25 December 2022

monsuta li lawa ala e mi Title: "Jew Trans Soul Rebel" (with apologies to Against Me!) Components: Top rocker: For how can I endure to see the evil that shall come unto my people? Star of David, colored thusly: Downward triangle: Rainbow flag (LGBT) Upward triangle: Left: Transgender flag Right: Nonbinary flag Bottom: Agender flag Bottom rocker: Or how can I endure to see the destruction of my kindred?

/On the Death of One Biographized, 27 December 2022 – 17 January 2023

On the Death of One Biographized "Half of the women I looked up to a decade ago are either dead or struggling with SERIOUS chronic/terminal illnesses because that’s life for us. ... You should prepare to get people out of jail, defend friends getting hauled out of public restrooms, be ready to visit friends in the hospital, and to do more for each other in general than straight cis people your age or older." — Mira Bellwether (Z''L), tweet thread "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed". — Allen Ginsberg (Z''L), Howl I. I didn't know you. I just noticed one day we didn't have an article on your work and fixed that. O artist, you were dying already. I tried to put that out of mind as I wrote, to avoid too sentimental a tone. We enter into people's lives in this strange way, biographers but rarely interviewers, admirers sworn to neutrality, you part of our lives more than we part of yours. When one wakes up every day for several days in a row with the same person on one's mind, that usually means one is in love, or maybe at war. No, I'm writing a Wikipedia article— a temporary obsession with a stranger who is also temporary. Not quite a biography, but an exploration of a magnum opus so personal as to be inseparable from the self. II. You knew the context of your death, that our kind die young. You as the friends I worry about each night. You as each queer person I've talked down off a ledge or into therapy or onto medication or into a hospital bed or out of an unsafe home. You as my friend Ash, the genderfluid redneck sex shop owner, equally stylish, equally a fighter, equally not from a place where it's great to be trans, equally an apostle of trans people loving our bodies; Ash who I didn't save, couldn't save, never thought to save, who's smiling wide at the camera in the photo I have from when we parted ways. Maybe that's why I cried: I couldn't afford to when Ash killed themself, and so now, deferred... III. No. It is the context, yes; it is what's evoked, yes; but it is also the person, a person in whose world I lived for a time, chasing down articles and interviews and wrapping my head around artistry and philosophy, who is no longer here. That is enough to grieve.

/On Harassment, 17 January 2023 – 20 March 2023
On Harassment You cannot hate me more than I've hated myself. You cannot hurt me more than I've hurt myself. I survived me.

/RIPNBB, 1 September 2023 – 1 October 2023
This user misses Nosebagbear (Z''L), and will try their best—and almost certainly fail—to be as cool-headed, helpful, and friendly as he was.

/The Sight, 1 October 2023 – 13 October 2023

The Sight Fingers stained with ink red and black, I set off to add to the sum. The pen dried out atop an unfinished page as I swam to the siren, did her bidding, hunted and fought and vanquished, rewarded each time with rank and prestige and new weapons. I realized too late I was gaining the Sight. I could see dead men walking. I could spot a liar without knowing the lie. I could see the lattice of patterns beneath     every word     every action     every thought laid and flayed bare, electricity dancing from raw nerves, my chewed-off fingernail tracing the course of particles thought mere figments of Brownian motion. I could read minds. Awesome, I presided, wrought sense out of chaos and justice out of lies, my acquired prestige a currency to spend dismantling each new phantasm. The Sight whispered to me, "memento mori". I realized too late I was marked. I set off inland,     oar over shoulder,     pen in hand, and finally returned to the page, but red ink read as blood, black ink as soot. Even a thousand leagues from the sirens' shores, my prizes stalked me and I could not not see new ones, an innocent adversary only distinguished from a dogged pursuer through the same Sight I sought to forsake. I realized too late I was blinded to the surface of the world. In the mirror I saw my own tangled knot and tried reflexively to trace its path and solve a mystery I already knew. I broke away and saw others and saw their essences but could not see their faces. I looked back and I could not see my own.

/civilians, 13 October 2023 – 27 November 2023

This War of Mine is not my favorite boardgame, but it's the best I've ever played. Framed by Hemingway's words "In modern war ... you will die like a dog for no reason", it is a war game from the perspective of civilians, loosely inspired by the siege of Sarajevo. The first several times I played, I lost, sometimes for dumb mistakes like trying to salvage a seemingly-dud bomb, but more often due to the cruel, intentionally un-fun nature of the work—more interactive art than game—situations where one character gets shot just for stepping out the front door to look for people to talk to, and others get shot or stabbed looking for bandages for them at night, and everyone dies of infection. Eventually I won with a coldly calculating strategy, sacrificing one character and badly wounding two others in order to win. That felt wrong. It isn't how I would approach such a situation in real life. So I set out to win while playing compassionately. Over the course of two in-game weeks and most of a real-life day and night, I moved my characters about like real people trying to look out for each other. I was doing decently, but it could have gone either way, when I reached a critical moment: This War of Mine comes with a book of custom "scripts", over a thousand scenarios based on in-game decisions, only a small fraction of which will arise in a single play-through. One in-game night, as I sifted through goods in abandoned homes, I triggered a script that broke the fourth wall. It gave me a massive one-time bonus, if I agreed to read up on the siege of Sarajevo. I already knew a fair bit about Sarajevo, so I made a deal with myself: I had a copy of my father's book Martyrs' Day—a first-hand account of the Gulf War, including Kuwait under Iraqi occupation—and I would read that. I continued the play-through. Thanks to the bonus and continuing good luck, my characters prospered. On the last day, victory already guaranteed, I had one character step outside, spending one of three precious actions and risking sniper fire, to find someone else to shelter. I ended the game with each character in perfect health in every way. I won. I consulted the scoring rules. I had reached an impossible 30 out of 30, and had succeeded in other ways the scoring didn't even account for. I checked online. Every other person to ever claim a 30, let alone a 30-and-then-some, had gotten one of a few simple rules wrong; I hadn't. I had played, perhaps, the best ever campaign of This War of Mine. Except I still had a book to read. It sat on my desk for months, and then I and it wound up on opposite coasts for a bit. And so I didn't proclaim victory. And then two journalists named Pierre Zakrzewski and Oleksandra Kuvshynova were killed by Russian forces in Ukraine, and that stirred something in me, so I did something I'd only done once before: I wrote a Wikipedia article, about the two of them and all the other journalists killed in that war. (See previous userpage banner.) And around the time that I wrote about Yevhenii Bal, tortured to death at the age of 78 by men from a country he had defended while in the Soviet Navy, just for having photos of himself with Ukrainian marines, I felt I had finally satisfied the spirit of what the fourth-wall-breaking script had asked of me. I could finally say I had "beaten" This War of Mine, but by then that didn't feel like much of an accomplishment. And that was the point, wasn't it? War isn't a game. Killing civilians is bad. And if you read that and think I'm only calling out your side or only talking about one conflict, then take a step back and consider what that says about yourself.

/ACE2023, 27 November 2023 – 20 December 2023
The 2023 Arbitration Committee elections are upon us. If admin accountability and ArbCom transparency matter to you, check out my guide. If they don't, or they do but you think I have shitty judgment, then don't! Either way, your vote counts!