Tom MacMaster

Five years after the biggest thing to happen in her life, she still can’t get over it. A lot of trans women could relate to that. She knows exactly how to get under the skin of a trans woman- it takes one to know one. And if you touch a nerve she reacts in rage and misery. She creeps about, hiding away, trying to achieve her goals by stealth and stratagem. And- she repeatedly expresses herself as a woman. There is no doubt: Tom MacMaster is trans.

Tom MacMaster is the hoaxer behind A Gay Girl in Damascus, a blog which achieved notoriety five years ago when he pretended to be a Syrian lesbian in Damascus, arrested by the Assad regime. Because he claimed “Amina” was an American citizen, the State Department was briefly involved. It soon emerged she was a hoax.

The blog is dreadfully written, but if you believe in the character it is very moving. MacMaster took it down, but it has been cached here (a zip file). On 12 April 2011, he posted about a demonstration at the University: I started getting nervous; I could see that the pro-government demonstration was almost all male and had a lot of ‘tough’ looking guys whom I’d guess had military training in it… I watched a young man, a good-looking guy who, one could imagine, had a promising future ahead of him as a doctor or an engineer and who, when he won a place at the university, had been the pride of his family. He fell to the ground. He twitched slightly and I knew he was dead, shot as a martyr to freedom. This reads as an account of real bravery and a description of seeing a man murdered. Who could not be moved? Yet, as it was written in safety in Edinburgh, it is very poor. MacMaster attempts to imagine a real life for the victim, perhaps because he is incapable of describing the scene, but can only produce tediously obvious details.

On 19 April, he posted his dreadful poetry.

Battles lost and battles won
yet nothing changes but the names
of martyred sons and widows newly made.

But what is this? A dream? Try to ignore the Mcgonagall scansion and excess of commas-

I learn her name, her age, her place
And, so knowing, become ever more bewitched
And, now, cannot let go of any chance
That dreams and life might yet be switched

He wants to be her!!

He has hung round here before, googling his own name. Why is he so fascinated by a trans woman’s blog? It can’t just be that I commented on him:  he kept coming back.

Professor MacMaster, now 45, has a moderate list of publications, and some good anonymous feedback from students- Great professor. Great lectures. TAKE HIM– though that could be him, playing his internet games again; but he behaves like a spoiled child. He tried to delete passages from the Wikipedia article he did not like, using the handle LothianLiz (another lesbian) in 2011, and again in 2016 he is at the same game. I reverted his edits both times. He damaged the cause of LGBT folk and Syrian rebels by his narcissistic, controlling actions.

So he misgendered me, using the pronoun “his” and projecting onto me his “vindictive tantrum”. When I objected, he set up another wikipedia account and wrote, Fuck Macmaster and his transphobic bullshit. Wikipedia is NOT a safe space for cishet whiteboys and their hatespeech. Fuck these nasty boys and stop the hate! Let’s show him for the transphobe he is! He also edited the article to accuse himself of transphobia. That edit was quickly reverted too, as Wikipedians watch out for that sort of vandalism. He knows exactly how to hurt most trans women- it would have hurt me very badly, two years ago- and immediately reacted, without thinking, to do that. He is so emotionally involved.

Posing as a lesbian, he flirted with a woman, a cruel, manipulative game now the subject of a documentary, and also with another man posing as a lesbian.

He is obsessed! He can’t let this go! He spends hours on line in his feminine persona, flirting, writing love poetry, talking about clothes-

He’s a trans woman! Hey Tom, when will you have the courage to transition? When will you have the balls to have an orchiectomy?

On 15 December, he posted to the Wikipedia Help desk, This is a plea for assistance made by a newly created anonymous account. My real identity appears in a wikipedia article that contains numerous factual errors and semi-slanderous things. A few years ago, I complained to the wiki foundation abt this and was told to create an account and correct it. Done. Anyway, one of the wikipedia editors has some sort of vendetta against me and is, I believe, mentally unstable. Having forced me to connect my wiki account to my real world identity, they have continued to attack me. Within the past 48 hours, that editor (who has been cyberstalking me) has posted on their non-wiki blog attacks on my person along with graphic Notsafeonwikipedia (talk) 15:16, 15 December 2016 (UTC)and explicit calls for violence against my person. I would like to know how to go about having this person banned from wikipedia but I would also like to learn that without revealing myself as I am concerned for my safety. Oh gosh! I think he means me, who else would bother blogging about him? Calls for violence? Er, where? Someone answered that he could go to the Arbitration committee, but I don’t think he has yet.