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Anti-trans advocacy on Wikipedia: ARBCOM and Sexology

Case studies of misuse of Wikipedia for anti-trans advocacy.

This is a draft of a potential Signpost article, and should not be interpreted as a finished piece. Its content is subject to review by the editorial team and ultimately by JPxG, the editor in chief. Please do not link to this draft as it is unfinished and the URL will change upon publication. If you would like to contribute and are familiar with the requirements of a Signpost article, feel free to be bold in making improvements!

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Case studies of misuse of Wikipedia for anti-trans advocacy.
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Disinformation report

Anti-trans advocacy on Wikipedia: ARBCOM and Sexology

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By Your Friendly Neighborhood Sociologist

James Cantor, a sexologist, has been in the news lately for anti-trans advocacy across the United States - serving as an expert witness while promoting misinformation for the Alliance Defending Freedom.^[1]^[2] Less well known is the fact User:James Cantor also edited Wikipedia between 2008 and 2021 to promote anti-trans pseudoscience, defend his colleagues, and attack their critics in violation of Wikipedia's policies on conflicts of interest. His editing was scrutinized by the Arbitration Committee in the Sexology case (2013) - but he received no significant sanctions and was allowed to continue editing for years, until found to be abusing sockpuppet accounts. Here, I demonstrate that the committee's failure to act caused years of damage to the Wikipedia's coverage of transgender topics and editing environment for transgender contributors.

Context

Note: When used on their own, 'Cantor' refers to James Cantor/User:James Cantor and 'James' refers to Andrea James/User:Jokestress.

James Cantor was recently described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as part of an "old guard" of sexology researchers which advocated treating trans identity as mental illness with associated conversion therapy-style “cures”^[1] - he worked at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) with Ray Blanchard, and Kenneth Zucker.^[3]^[2] CAMH's gender identity clinic was led by Zucker and later shut down following allegations of conversion therapy^[2]^[4] Cantor's professional focus was the research of paraphilias (an experience of recurring or intense sexual arousal to atypical objects, places, situations, fantasies, behaviors, or individuals.) He was an avid proponent of Blanchard's transsexualism typology; the typology was created in the 1980s and argues that all transgender women fall into one of two categories: "homosexual transsexuals" (straight transgender women, posited to be extremely feminine gay men who desire heterosexual men) and "autogynophilic transsexuals" (all lesbian, bisexual, and asexual transgender women, posited to have a "paraphilic"/fetishistic sexual desire to be a woman) - this is unsurprisingly generally considered stigmatizing, incorrect, or both by the transgender community.^[2]^[5] In 2003, J. Michael Bailey (another part of the "old guard"^[1]) published The Man Who Would Be Queen, a book promoting Blanchard's typology. There was a large backlash from the LGBT community and transgender healthcare researchers. Cantor positively reviewed it, describing it as a sympathetic portrayal of "autogynephilic transsexuals" that explored the roots of their development.^[6]

In 2008, Alice Dreger wrote an article in the Archives of Sexual Behavior (whose editorial board contained Zucker, Bailey, Blanchard, and Cantor^[7]) that accused Andrea James (who also edited Wikipedia as User:Jokestress), Lynn Conway, and Deirdre McCloskey of attempting to ruin Bailey over the book and censor scientific inquiry.^[8] Dreger's account received a dozen critiques from a range of disciplines within the same issue for 1) downplaying how offensive the book was to transgender people, 2) attributing the backlash against the book to three individuals, and 3) partisan promotion of Bailey.^[9]

That same year, Cantor pseudonymously joined Wikipedia as User:MarionTheLibrarian, making 1,000 contributions aiming to edit articles he had conflicts of interest (COI) on (ones relating to his colleagues at CAMH, his opponents, and spillover at Blanchard's typology and conversion therapy).^[10] As Marion, a mediation case was opened due to his POV editing of the articles for James, McCloskey, and Conway through citations to Dreger's piece.^[11] Afterwards, a user discovered his identity and took him to the COI Noticeboard for attacking Conway and James, at which point he began to go by User:James Cantor.

Transgender scholars began to take note of the behavior. In 2009, a paper was presented at the International Foundation for Gender Education Conference which stated Cantor apparently spends a great deal of time trolling on Wikipedia and seemed to the author to be obsessed with trying to spin every entry that concerns transgender people and especially theories of trans etiology to conform to Blanchardian and Zuckerian ideology.^[12] Shortly after, Lynn Conway wrote a report published on their university profile site arguing the same and stating Cantor has left permanent tracks all over Wikipedia, tracks that reveal just how far Zucker's operatives will go to suppress any criticism of their leader's work.^[13]

In 2009, Cantor wrote an article on the Feminine essence concept of transsexuality. An editor tried to delete it on the grounds of WP:SYNTH, WP:OR, and WP:COI - but it was kept as editors argued there was enough sourcing - we'll revisit it later. In 2011 he tendentiously tried to delete Androphilia and gynephilia, making 55 edits disagreeing with the near unanimous opposition. The same year, he was blocked for COI editing.^[14] In 2012 he was the only one to call for the deletion of the Benjamin scale, a famous typology of transgender women which predated his own. Also in 2012, James attempted to delete the article gynandromorphophilia as a POVFORK of attraction to transgender people, but the discussion found no consensus. It was re-opened in 2013 on the same grounds but deferred due to ARBCOM case. We shall also revisit this. The precipitating moment for the Arbitration committee case was an a 2013 discussion at the Administrators Noticeboard proposing topic bans and sanctions for Cantor, James, and a number of involved parties.

The Arbitration Committee and ARBSEX

As The Signpost reported at the time, the dispute between James and Cantor that started Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Sexology (2013) began on the hebephilia article but included articles on paraphilias and "transgenderism" - Cantor was accused of excessive self-citation and negatively editing James's article, James was accused of promoting WP:FRINGE theories.^[15] The Arbitration Committee found Jokestress and James Cantor are involved in off-wiki advocacy or activities relating to human sexuality; the topic is a primary area that the two edit. The committee found James imported aspects of the controversy into the English Wikipedia to the detriment of the editing environment on sexuality-related articles. No findings of fact were proposed for Cantor.^[15]

The Arbitration Committee enabled discretionary sanctions for all pages dealing with transgender issues and paraphilia classification (e.g., hebephilia). This case would soon be folded into GENSEX after a meander through the Chelsea Manning Naming Dispute shortly afterward clarifying it applied to pronouns and names. James and Cantor were given a mutual interaction ban; though unlike Cantor, the arbitrators banned James from human sexuality (later expanded to include gender in 2019). During the evidence gathering phase of the case, multiple editors during the case that Cantor had COI issues.^[16]^[17]^[18]^[19]^[19] The committee proposed indefinitely prohibiting Cantor from editing Hebephilia, biographies of sexology researchers, and related advocates while allowing him to edit talk pages, but it didn't pass as there 3 supports, 3 opposes, and 2 abstentions - the latter 5 saying his misbehavior could be covered by the discretionary sanctions.^[15]^[20]

During the case an arbitrator had wisely noted the decision in no way implies a side is "right", hence the reason for the "limits of arbitration" principle. There are issues here with discussions over what constitutes reliable sources and fringe theories that are not addressed by the decision.^[20] And thus, the can was kicked down the road. At least, right after the case, the 3rd attempt to delete Gynandromorphophilia was successful.

The aftermath

Cantor continued editing until 2021 and made a total of approximately 8000 edits across multiple accounts - most if not all containing major conflicts of interest.^[21]^[22]^[23]^[24] He created at least two new accounts^[25] to continue his COI editing, particularly to skirt the IBAN with James, in 2013^[23] and 2015.^[24]

In 2013, Cantor attempted to delete Margaret Nichols and failed, being the sole proponent of deletion with 6 editors disagreeing - he bludgeoned almost all of them. For context, in one of the 2008 same-issue reviews of Dreger's piece, Nichols had sharply criticized Bailey, his book, Blanchard's typology, and CAMH, not to mention Cantor himself (of whom she said many would consider their pathology-paradigm perspectives unenlightened).^[26] In 2016 he used a sock to try deleting it again, agreed with himself, and two real editors agreed and thus the article was deleted. In 2015 he unsuccessfully attempted to delete the biography of sexologist David Oliver Cauldwell, arguing he wasn't notable.

In 2015, he reported User:Sceptre, a transgender editor who'd participated in the sexology case, for referring to Zucker as a child-abuser for his conversion practices after the clinic closed - they were blocked.^[27] The same year he bragged in an interview that when he started writing on Wikipedia, I started hearing those very same sentences getting quoted almost verbatim by major media outlets. I can’t help but think that if we, meaning the topic experts who are around (and could be around) didn’t put that information in there, what would these media outlets be saying then?^[28]

In 2019, he was taken to ANI for accusing all critics of the Blanchard typology of being "autogynephilic mtfs" - it was found to be an acceptable way to refer to people.^[29]^[30]^[31] One wonders how explicit his insults would need to be to receive sanction: would all the people who oppose the theory I support are people who get off on being women have been enough? That year, he also removed his non-binding pledge to avoid a subset of COI articles from his userpage.^[32]

At the same time, Cantor was active in the real world. In 2018 the Alliance Defending Freedom hired him to help ban transgender girls from girls' school sports teams.^[33] In 2020, he was temporarily banned from the listserv of Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality for what the president described as a pattern of harassment against several other members – even after those other members had repeatedly asked him to stop, at which point he resigned.^[34] That same year, he argued on his blog that conversion therapy has never been practiced on transgender people so shouldn't be made illegal in Canada.[1]

Finally, in 2021, two of his sockpuppets, User:Starburst9 and User:Banglange, were discovered and he was blocked for violation of sockpuppeting policies and his IBAN with James.^[25] The top edited articles for Starburst9? Those include Sexual addiction, James Cantor, and Andrea James. For Banglange? The top three are literally Kenneth Zucker, James Cantor, and Andrea James. In 2024 I successfully nominated Feminine essence concept of transsexuality for deletion on the grounds it was a clear POV fork where half the citations never discussed the concept and the other half was letters to the editor from Cantor, Blanchard, and Bailey.

Take-aways from sexology

A WP:FRINGE sexologist known for his pathologizing views on transgender people edited Wikipedia's articles - on trans topics, his critics, and the researchers he worked with - for over a decade. Like organized crime boss Al Capone getting got on tax evasion rather than organizing crime - Cantor was not banned for years of COI editing, offensive comments, and civil POV pushing, but for doing so with sockpuppets. Since 2021, the same year as his block, he testified in 25 cases seeking to restrict transgender rights in the U.S. after being asked to do so by the Alliance Defending Freedom.^[2] He estimates he's doubled his income through this testimony and says he closed clinical practice to handle the case-load, often citing the work of his colleagues at CAMH.^[2] What should we make of this?

Some I've spoken to have suggested it belies a shift in what is WP:FRINGE: his views, while deeply offensive, were in vogue in 2008, or even 2013 during the sexology case. But reliable sources were clear, even then, that the majority of the LGBT community found those views offensive. Perhaps in 2008, his views were slightly more notable, but he was editing until 2021, when his work was considered FRINGE for a decade.

Others chalked it up to early Wikipedia's deference to experts and greater rein given to them in their topic areas. But that doesn't explain how he got away with the WP:COI - he didn't only write about his theories citing himself and his colleagues, he wrote about his colleagues, his critics, and crossed the line between personal and professional all to often. And it doesn't explain why he was considered an expert.

I think the take-away is clear, the Arbitration Committee prioritized a small clique of sexologists and their thoughts on a minority demographic over the demographic itself, who overwhelmingly said their work was pathologizing and didn't represent the community accurately.^[35] It does not matter if Wikipedia lagged behind the times in allowing their FRINGE nonsense, or kept up with the times which allowed their offensive nonsense, the point still stands such advocacy was allowed and went unsanctioned. As Sceptre put it in WP:ARBSEX, a facet of the case was encyclopedic treatment of a maligned minority, especially when said maligning comes from otherwise reliable sources - regrettably the Committee never considered it.^[36]

Wikipedia's editors are undoing his damage to our coverage of transgender topics to this day. Hopefully, we won't repeat the same mistakes. - YFNS