Talk:Gwen Benaway

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment
This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 7 September 2018 and 28 December 2018. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Brad Rains. Peer reviewers: LastSemester2018.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 22:03, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

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Everything is relevant to the topic and includes neutral sources, but some of the wording/grammar was a little distracting and could be edited to flow better. Annaalgate (talk) 20:00, 24 February 2020 (UTC)

I wonder what the name Benaway means in Anishinaabemowin. [Sentence here removed by Celynn when making the comment below of 20:07, 21 May 2020 (UTC)] And we have lost touch. She cut me off (I guess after I created a storm of information overload by pushing one too many poetry books on her -- I really don't know the why.) She will be tickled I bet at my imitation of her confessional style being open in public as much as one can (which can be quite a lot). I maintain a good distance: peek once in a while at her Twitter feed to see if she is okay -- sometimes she get supernova angry and forgets to pat the dog. I also buy her books either from her new publisher Book*hug or from Glad Day Bookshop. I get to hear her voice through the pages. She is remembered as a fine, passionate if irascible colleague. I miss her. Benaway for me is an echo of "been away" and a reminder that as Ursula K. LeGuin entitles one of her books we are Always Coming Home and I hope that the world will grow to be a home for her and her trans sisters. Francois Lachance --Scholar-at-Large (talk) 02:06, 12 April 2020 (UTC)
 * — Scholar-at-Large (talk&#32;• contribs) has made few or no other edits outside this topic.
 * You do know that not all Anishinaabe people have conventionally Anishinaabe names, right? So the fact that her name isn't obviously Anishinaabe in origin doesn't prove anything in and of itself. Bearcat (talk) 14:02, 20 June 2020 (UTC)

Deadnaming someone is never okay. It should not be allowed to stand on a talk page. It's also completely irrelevant to this wiki article. This whole contribution should be deleted. Celynn (talk) 20:07, 21 May 2020 (UTC)
 * Added bracketed comment above to note that part of the comment by Scholar-at-Large was removed by Celynn. —⁠ ⁠BarrelProof (talk) 20:24, 14 June 2023 (UTC)

New statements have been issued by members of the Indigenous literary community recently with unanswered concerns about the validity of Benaway's Indigeneity. Apparently they have been long-standing concerns, but were silenced by some prominent voices based on a combination of friendship and anti-transphobia.2620:22:4000:1201:1FF3:2EC9:5CC1:F411 (talk) 16:42, 17 June 2020 (UTC)
 * Are you referring to the letter by Alicia Elliot, Terese Mailhot, Nazbah Tom, Joshua Whitehead and Tyler Pennock? It would be best if it were published on a more official twitter account, or in a stable publication. I guess we can wait and see if the authors do so. - CorbieVreccan ☊ ☼ 22:27, 26 June 2020 (UTC)


 * I'm not seeing anything here about the BLP subject having stated which community she claims heritage from. When this is the case on WP, we have no way of confirming the claim. I'm also seeing her "about" on her website stating that she is now saying she is only a descendant. This wording is also coming up in other bio statements. This is a different status than being a First Nations person: "Gwen Benaway is a trans girl of Anishinaabe and Métis descent." Barring any more recent statements, it looks to me like the article needs to be edited to reflect this status. I am also not seeing a source for the subject speaking the language of any of these communities (again, hard to say, as which community has not been stated, that I can see.) - CorbieVreccan ☊ ☼ 22:11, 26 June 2020 (UTC)

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It seems that she is not in fact Indigenous. See https://twitter.com/GB20209/status/1272608805034000385 — Preceding unsigned comment added by 172.97.186.63 (talk) 19:09, 16 June 2020 (UTC)


 * Feedback: Twitter is not a reliable source. Until real journalists investigate and report on this as news in real media on the order of the CBC or The Globe and Mail, absolutely nothing anybody says on Twitter counts for jack shit. Bearcat (talk) 13:50, 20 June 2020 (UTC)


 * Feedback: So basically you are saying that because no "quote" real journalists "quote" have documented this, it can't be mentioned here? Is that the same with MeToo stories - someone "quote" objective "quote" needs to affirm that the person said they were sexually violated? On this instance, what about the fact that Alicia Elliot is in fact a published journalist, as well as book author - "She has written for The Globe and Mail, CBC, Hazlitt and many others." - and is one of the five signers of the statement, plus put out her own individual statement documenting the situation? 137.122.64.48 (talk) 15:32, 4 July 2020 (UTC)

Semi-protected edit request on 18 June 2020
Gwen Beneway has been called out with receipts and letters in Twitter including family input about not being of Metis heritage. Having it as her nationality is harmful for indigenous youth. 24.72.128.144 (talk) 20:29, 18 June 2020 (UTC)
 * ❌ - Please use the template as instructed, i.e. please change x to y. Thanks! Ed6767  talk!  20:31, 18 June 2020 (UTC)
 * Please note that Twitter is not a reliable source for anything — nothing anybody says on Twitter ever counts for squat around here until real media pick up and investigate and report on the claims as journalism in media of record. Accordingly, her ethnic description in this article — which is supported by a citation to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, a gold standard source that cannot and will not be dismissed as "unreliable" just because you disagree with what it says — will not be changed until somebody shows a reliable source which contradicts it. Even when information in our articles does turn out to be wrong, we still require reliable sources to show that it's wrong, not just things people have claimed on Twitter, before we can contradict or dismiss existing sources which say otherwise. Like it or not, it is not our job or our role or our mandate to be the originating publisher of any claims about any of our article subjects that haven't already been verified and published by real journalists — our role begins and ends at summarizing the journalism, and we are not a platform for the publication of "breaking exclusive" new revelations as a bypass of any difficulties you're having in getting your claims reported by real media. Regardless of what's true and what isn't, reliable sources have to verify the claims before we can include them in our article.
 * And for an example of why we can't source stuff like this to tweets, some of the retweet discussion about this on Twitter has claimed, without evidence, that she is also falsifying her gender identity, and is actually a cis man pretending to be transgender. In reality there's absolutely no evidence of that whatsoever, and it's certainly not claimed anywhere in the original letter — but the fact that people are saying that on Twitter is exactly why we can't source any of the rest of this to Twitter either. For something like this, the sources have to pass a journalistic standard of reliability before we can say anything about it in Wikipedia. If you can't get a journalist to bite, then that's simply not our problem — it's not our job to WP:RIGHTGREATWRONGS, so it's still not our responsibility to waive our requirement for solidly reliable sourcing just because you think it's unfair. Bearcat (talk) 13:48, 20 June 2020 (UTC)

Requested move 14 June 2023

 * The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review after discussing it on the closer's talk page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

The result of the move request was: not moved. No evidence on the applicability of MOS:GENDERID here and of a shift in usage by RS. (non-admin closure) Captain Jack Sparrow (talk) 14:41, 21 June 2023 (UTC)

Gwen Benaway → Faye Cook – Please see MOS:GENDERID. The subject appears to have adopted a new name. gnu 57 14:14, 14 June 2023 (UTC) The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
 * Oppose pending independent confirmation: Do any independent reliable sources use "Faye Cook" (especially without also using "Gwen Benaway")? That seems like basically a self-published source (and not particularly new, since the "Program" field says "PhD 2018"). Also, as far as I can tell, both names would ordinarily be female, so this doesn't appear to involve a gendering issue (see Gwen (given name) and Faye (given name)), although WP:NAMECHANGES applies. —⁠ ⁠BarrelProof (talk) 20:05, 14 June 2023 (UTC)
 * Oppose pending other confirmation. This isn't a GENDERID issue, as the names "Gwen" and "Faye" are both consistent with the same gender identification — and the subject was already out as transgender anyway, so that doesn't represent any new information that our article doesn't already address about her gender. Accordingly, what we would need to see is reliable sources that actually use the name Faye Cook in reference to her poetry. In fact, with her literary career already pretty much imploded due to the events of three years ago, it seems quite plausible that the name change may have been an attempt to distance herself from those events so that she can move through her private life in some peace and quiet, because it's highly unlikely that she's going to get any new literary work published, or win any more noteworthy literary awards, in the foreseeable future. (I won't say never, but I will say not anytime soon, because no publishing company on earth would touch her with a ten-foot pole right now.) So we would need to see evidence of third-party sources writing about her as "Faye Cook", which hasn't happened yet at all. Bearcat (talk) 18:44, 15 June 2023 (UTC)

Name for Ceremonies for the Dead
I was confused when reading this article due to the name give for the author of Ceremonies for the Dead, in particular because it won on award and featured in a number of press articles and video talks. I realised then Gwen Benaway has changed her name since then. However, that book was published with a different name therefore Wikipedia should accurately reflect that name to assist research and the reader. I have edited the page to bring in the original name whilst being sensitive to the change. This has been done with Canadian artists such as Alec Butler, Lara Rae and T. Thomason. Seaweed (talk) 20:31, 28 March 2024 (UTC)