@logsonlogsoff
‘I do fear for the journalist who wrote the piece, she's had to close down her Twitter’
It’s a poor piece of journalism, maybe that’s whe she’s gone off SM for a while. That’s a big art like to write, and a lot to claim of the back of hearsay and a really dodgy ‘poll’.
It wasn't a poll. It's qualitative research done by the author in the context of a degree in women's study.
Here is what she says about the experience:
Writing about such a topic as part of my degree has been challenging: finding a supervisor prepared to work with me but also confronting my own self-censorship. We have all internalised patriarchy, we all know almost instinctively what we are allowed and not allowed to say when working within the structures of patriarchy. How would this pressure to conform influence the words I used, or affect the clarity of my analysis?
The challenge has been to confront potential attempts by the university itself to silence me or dilute my work. I was relieved that the Ethics Committee reviewing my application had approved it, allowing me to proceed with the project. Their insistence on my use of the term “transwoman” within the survey and on the importance of remaining “objective” and asking non-leading questions was problematic. In agreement with the feminist tradition, I do not consider that there is such a thing as “objectivity” or that “objectivity” is desirable, necessary or ethical in order to produce a valid piece of work (Stanley & Wise 1993). I reflect below on the response I had from a respondent about the use of the term “transwomen” within the survey, a point I wholeheartedly agree with. Overall I was grateful, though conflicted as I knew my politics were in direct confrontation with academia and yet I had no intention of toning them down.
On methodology she says:
The survey comprised of 30 questions about lesbians’ experience. It had sections relating to the following subjects: respondent identity, their experiences in LGBT groups and on lesbian dating sites, their experiences interacting with men who identify as transwomen as potential sexual partners. For the purpose of the survey, I used the queer terminology “transwomen” as advised by the Ethics Committee. The Ethics Committee believed that the survey should be “objective” but did not consider that the term “transwomen” is not an objective term and is far less widely accepted than they claimed, a point noted by a respondent who complained that the term was incorrect and misleading as “transwomen” are biologically male, therefore “not a subset of women”.
The survey was sent to women-only and lesbian-only groups on social media, as well as to individual lesbians in my own networks. As such the sample does not claim to be a representative sample of the lesbian community. However, the research was to capture the points of view and stories of many, until now, silenced lesbians. [emphasis in the original]
Let me repeat: The purpose of this study was to capture the voices of lesbians who have previously been silenced. It was not to quantify how common their experience is.
This is a standard approach in many fields in social sciences: first capture an issue via qualitative research, then find out how prevalent the issue is in quantitative research, then back to qualitative research for possible solutions. And so on.
Not every topic uses all of those methods, and often qualitative and quantitative studies are carried out by different researchers, but to dismiss these findings because they arise from a piece of qualitative instead of quantitative research betrays your ignorance of how research works in this field.
(This is not her Master's thesis btw, Angela did that on a different subject.)
You'll find the report here: www.gettheloutuk.com/attachments/lesbiansatgroundzero.pdf
It's only 16 pages. Might be worth reading before commenting again?