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November 4th, 2020

Due to recent events, it has become clear to us that a quick clarifying statement needs to be put out. The message is as follows: our current policy is that the character page for June Egbert refer to the character as John, but this is NOT because the mspaintadventures wiki staff disagree with June's existence. There are multiple transfeminine individuals on our staff, including myself, and I think I speak for all of the staff when I say we look forward to what Homestuck can do for transgender representation in the future.

Our current stance stems from a commitment to journalistic standards, and an aversion to documenting facts that simply are not there.

The mspaintadventures wiki is intended as an encyclopaedia of the contents of Andrew Hussie's works, including Homestuck and its spinoffs from other authors. Statements made on personal social media accounts by authors usually do not reflect the actual content of these works, and as such are included on the wiki as exactly that: statements made on authors' personal social media accounts. You will note that the June Egbert acknowledgement is not exempt from this; it is included on the character's trivia section. If the wiki considered Andrew Hussie's twitter to be a high priority source, and changed the entire contents of the page to suit, how would this reflect on a new reader using the wiki as an accessory to their reading? Would it be fair for the page to refer to a character that this reader would not actually be able to enjoy in the comic or its spinoffs, only to be found in posts buried in rarely-used twitter accounts? Our current policy says no.

The fact is that it has been over a year since Andrew announced that June's addition to the comic 'will be done', and since then very little has actually been done. Since Homestuck's end, the author has delivered a sequel in which a prominent female character is given a penis as a joke and treated as an unhealthy sex addict and had one of the authors of said sequel create a story about one of Hiveswap's most highly anticipated transgender characters which fails to mention his transgenderness at all and instead focuses on his unhealthy sexuality. Since the June announcement on twitter, the character has appeared in multiple additional spinoffs, and yet still no explicit reference to her gender identity has been made. Instead this honor has been given to several more minor characters, including some who have speaking roles in less than two of the comic's Acts.

Frankly, what concerns us above all of this is giving credit where it is not due. To make major changes to June's character page merely due to Andrew's tweets would be to document that Andrew Hussie has included a transgender woman as the main character of his Homestuck franchise, which thus far he has not. This is not something that we are refusing to acknowledge or talk about; this conversation has taken place, both among wiki staff and with various parts of the community. Despite Andrew Hussie and What Pumpkin's insistence on deliberately obfuscating the 'canonicity' of all of Homestuck's sequels and spinoffs, we have made the commitment to properly change June's character pages (both canon and dubiously canon) when this change actually occurs within What Pumpkin's published media. All users who disagree with this commitment or actively try to invalidate June's existence in their edits have been turned away, and we plan to continue to do this. All we ask is that our userbase stick by us on this simple policy, and at the very least try not to make our jobs harder than they need to be or make the platform any harder to use for your fellow community members.

Thank you for your understanding.
Moderator JakeMorph

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