A corpus-assisted discourse analysis of linguistic transphobia on Mumsnet

[IwantToRetire]

By Aston Institute for Forensic Linguistics

It has been suggested that the forum-style parenting website Mumsnet is a hub for ‘gender-critical’ feminism, which directly opposes transgender rights, to be practised with little moderation (Livingston, 2018). This presentation reports on the initial stages of a project aiming to investigate that the potential intensification of linguistic transphobia on Mumsnet may lead to further marginalisation of transgender people offline (Powys Maurice, 2021). Though studies of non-linguistic transphobic rhetoric on Mumsnet (e.g., Pedersen, 2022; Mackenzie, 2019), and discourse analyses of other radical online communities (e.g., Krendel, 2020) have both occurred, this project is the first to analyse linguistic transphobia on Mumsnet. It also contributes to existing literature surrounding UK-based ‘gender-critical’ feminism; linguistic transphobia; and radical online community discourses.

The presentation explores the rise of potentially ‘gender-critical’ linguistic transphobia on Mumsnet over time through the corpus linguistic (CL) analysis of the ‘Feminism: Sex & Gender Discussions’ board, using three corpora comprising a fifteen-year timeframe: 2008-2013; 2013-2018; and 2018-2023. As the project is still ongoing, preliminary findings will be presented, namely a comparative overview of trends yielded in frequency analyses. Overall, this presentation provides insights into the growing commonality of potentially ‘gender-critical’ feminist rhetoric on Mumsnet and its effect on increasing transphobic discourse on the site.

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/a-corpus-assisted-discourse-analysis-of-linguistic-transphobia-on-mumsnet-tickets-880795271367?aff=ebdssbdestsearch

(I had just finished my favourite tea time treat of catching up on FWR and was going to get back to the grindstone when this popped up on my feed. So have come back as it is too good not to be shared. Enjoy!)

Justine commented on the thread about this posted in site stuff, don’t know if she’s reading this thread but the situation is definitely on her radar:
https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/site_stuff/5057903-mumsnet-corpus?reply=134655800

Hopefully we’ll hear something from MN staff once the office is open again.

Thanks @KellieJaysLapdog, I'd forgotten that there was that other thread.

The two people named there as data uploaders (Kredens and Pezik) are working on a group project where the task synopsis is:

Given two texts belonging to different Discourse Types (DT), determine if they are written by the same author (cross-DT authorship verification).

https://pan.webis.de/clef23/pan23-web/author-identification.html#task-committee

I think its probably worth saying on this thread that a lot of the things we've been saying on here for years, that this PhD student might well (wrongly) categorise as 'transphobic', have been resoundingly vindicated in the Cass report.

I.e. far from being transphobic, we were acting to try and protect children from sterilisation and unevidenced medical experimentation.

Unbelievable these very poorly informed academics are still trying to tar the safeguarding first women on here with the 'transphobia' brush post Cass.

There's a link to this thread on the one on Site Stuff about the data set, which they have responded to so I hope so.

The best way of getting MNHQ attention is to report a post and say that they should probably know about the content here. I did this on Friday, way upthread, so I imagine they will be looking at all of this over the next few days.

In that task, participating teams are asked to access and download the data set. No details given of whether/how the students presumably have consented for their own essays, emails presentations etc to be used.
The previous task referred to in the synopsis which proved ‘relatively feasible’ was authorship of fan fiction -ie written language.
Given that this is also what MN is, it comes back to my question on the other thread of whether they were trying to cross reference posts internally on MN or with external authors.

I also had another thought - that people who think they have deleted an account and all its contents at some point after this dataset was collected will be wrong about that because a copy exists in the form of the custom scraped dataset.

The question of whether PMs were also included is a good one. I presumed not as linked to account data, and not publically accessible, but I don’t know. The dataset and any work relating to it needs to be deleted, so hopefully Justine will come back with that news.

Hell, if the data is there may as well check.it for transphobia, eh?

Bearing in mind there will be considerable overlap between [rape victims] as a set and [mumsnet users].

Many threads on here are women talking about dv, abuse, etc.

Eden's X account and LinkedIn profile seem to have mysteriously vanished. Isn't that odd?

They went down Friday I think.

Strange isn’t it, that someone who sees no issue with scraping users’ data en masse to search for evidence of wrong think seems uncomfortable with having her own online data examined?

😂 Karma innit?

Or bypass them and contact the ICO and free speech union?

I look forward to hearing the University's response to MNHQ's email of last week.

Could be that we need to contact the ICO regardless of what they say, though.

I'm hoping that the Thursday event will go ahead regardless; I have questions.

Perfectly put. The double standards never fail to shock and amaze.

https://www.aston.ac.uk/bss/social-sciences-and-humanities/students-and-alumni/eden-palmer

Newcastle Under Lyme or Newcastle Upon Tyne?

Obviously Eden will have had to move to Birmingham to take up they-them's PhD because of the Mumsnet data scrape being on an airgapped PC.

Just curious as to whether they-them is from God's Country or not.

Newcastle upon Tyne.

Did they? I was looking at something last night (prelapsarian Eden—don't ask) and on the search result page, I realised that Chrome/Google had defaulted me to Eden Palmer because of this thread and the LI page was still there with the 'mumsnet transphobia' in the snippet.

Did anyone archive EP's LI page as an indication of her claims about MN and transphobia?

Also, as I linked on Friday, Aston has a database of "curated malicious communications" called "Text Crimes" created by the Beautiful Canoe software team for Prof Tim. I wonder what datasets are in that. I can't seem to be able to load that page. Maybe it's just me?

Text Crimess^ is an online database that Beautiful Canoe implemented for Professor Tim Grantt^ at the Centre for Forensic Linguisticss^, at Aston Universityy^. The Text Crimess^ website contains a database of curated malicious communications, designed to create a common set of corpora for forensic linguistic researchers. As well as storing the text of malicious communications, Text Crimess^ allows researchers to run a small number of common, automated, NLPP^algorithms over the curated corpora.

beautifulcanoe.com/research-software-engineering.html

Obviously Eden will have had to move to Birmingham to take up they-them's PhD because of the Mumsnet data scrape being on an airgapped PC.

I see your point, but she describes herself as a distance learner on the Aston website. Might be out of date though.

Try this for the dataset, their Textcrimes link makes no sense.

https://fold.aston.ac.uk/handle/123456789/13

ETA re: I see your point, but she describes herself as a distance learner on the Aston website. Might be out of date though.

Think EP studied the Masters in Forensic Linguistics by distance.

https://www.aston.ac.uk/bss/social-sciences-and-humanities/students-and-alumni/eden-palmer

Thank you!

Can a legal mind on here drum up a snappy sentence saying that anything I write on MN is mine, and mine alone so I don't give permission for it to be scraped for whatever purpose?

[Edit to add: sorry for grumpy tone but those fb things, and especially the way people share them without checking, really, really annoy me for some reason.]

No, please don't let's go that way (the way of post this on your fb page otherwise Zuckerberg will take your firstborn). You are bound by the Mumsnet Terms of Use, which you can read here:
https://www.mumsnet.com/i/terms-of-use
and which include
By submitting User Content to us, simultaneously with such posting you automatically grant to us a worldwide, fully-paid, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, fully sublicensable, and transferable right and license to use, record, sell, lease, reproduce, distribute, create derivative works based upon (including, without limitation, translations), publicly display, publicly perform, transmit, publish and otherwise exploit the User Content (in whole or in part) as Mumsnet, in its sole discretion, deems appropriate.

Don't like that, don't post.

By the way, now I've reflected more, I'm increasingly wondering what on earth Director (?) Tim Grant thought he was permitting to have EP's thesis topic signed off.

Did he just take it for granted that EP and Nicci MacLeod were correct? Has he not heard of Forstater, Bailey, Phoenix, Stock,Meade et al at all?

You don't need to. The ICO statement on data scraping is pretty clear.