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Ina Fried, the veteran technology reporter and a regular source of good Microsoft dish, is very open about her status as a transgender woman — her CNET blog is titled "Beyond Binary." She knows she's female. But some users of Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia any bigot can edit, aren't convinced. An anonymous Wikipedia user in Knoxville, Tenn. however, refuses to accept hers as the last word on the subject, and has been changing pronouns from "she" to "he" on Fried's listing with repeated edits in the last six weeks. The justification offered:

I am a med student with an additional major in Clinical Psychology. Ina's self-proclaimed gender is debatable (and any debatable factoids should be left out of an encyclopedic entry).

This particular Wikipedia editor must not have gotten to the chapter on gender identity disorder in doctorin' reference texts like the DSM or ICD. For everyone's sake, I hope this Wikipedia editor goes into podiatry. As Fried rightly points out, for reference materials, it's a matter of style. The National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association, for which Fried serves as a vice president, has a handy stylebook supplement that might help. But Fried now has a bigger problem with Wikipedia: Her entry has been deemed insufficiently "notable" for the online encyclopedia.