WASHINGTON — An anonymous user with an IP address originating from the U.S. House of Representatives has repeatedly made edits to Wikipedia articles on topics related to the transgender community.
Business Insider reports that the edits generally are critical of transgender individuals, and other users have called the changes “hate speech.”
Since Monday, the user has made over a half dozen such edits, according to the tracking tool @congressedits. On edit to an article on Camp Trans, an annual event that protests the exclusion of transgender women from a music festival, noted that the music festival was hosted by “real women.”
Since the IP address is shared among many U.S. House users, it’s impossible to know whether the edits are coming from one or more persons users, but in the “talk” discussion section of one article, an individual making the changes has claimed to be a staffer on Capitol Hill.
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“An obvious transphobe is using this IP to edit the article on transphobia, justifying it with rhetoric commonly used by transphobes,” alleges one Wikipedia editor.
Wikipedia has since blocked edits from U.S. House IP addresses, the third time this summer the site has done so.
