By Alexandra Brodsky • @azbrodsky • 9 years ago

Who on the Hill is making transphobic Wikipedia edits?

The internet can do some cool things. For example: @CongressEdits automatically posts every time someone using a Capitol Hill IP addresses changes an entry. On the 18th, the bot posted about two changes to trans-related pages by someone on a House computer:

Unsurprisingly (unless you have a hell of a lot of misplaced faith in Congress), the edits were hateful. One added to the Gender Identity Disorder a note on “Species dysphoria, a similar disorder where people think they are a different species than they actually are rather than a different gender than they actually are.” And the other edited the  Transphobia page, writing that “Vice magazine cofounder Gavin McInnes desribes transphobia as a perfectly natural response to someone pretending to be something that they are not,” with a link to McInnes’ now-removed awful Thought Catalog piece. 

This, friends, is what our tax payer dollars are spent on.

Both additions have since been removed, but I wonder if any internet sleuths can track down from which representatives’ office these edits were made. If you find out, let us know.

AlexandraAlexandra Brodsky is a Feministing editor, student at Yale Law School, and founding co-director of Know Your IX.

Washington, DC

Alexandra Brodsky was a senior editor at Feministing.com. During her four years at the site, she wrote about gender violence, reproductive justice, and education equity and ran the site's book review column. She is now a Skadden Fellow at the National Women's Law Center and also serves as the Board Chair of Know Your IX, a national student-led movement to end gender violence, which she co-founded and previously co-directed. Alexandra has written for publications including the New York Times, the Atlantic, the Guardian, and the Nation, and she is the co-editor of The Feminist Utopia Project: 57 Visions of a Wildly Better Future. She has spoken about violence against women and reproductive justice at campuses across the country and on MSNBC, ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, FOX, ESPN, and NPR.

Alexandra Brodsky was a senior editor at Feministing.com.

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