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!)

Only if Eden thinks that judges applying the law is transphobic.

Wait, they/them probably does think that judges applying the law is transphobic.

I'm up for contributing to an advisory group and a committee.

Maybe FoLD would like a public oversight group for its research given the potential impact on the public?

Medical research projects usually involve lived experience panels and advisory groups, so I look forward to Social Science adopting comparable standards.

Kellie - did you have transphobic judges applying the law on your list?

Transphobic judges applying transphobic law, justifying prison abolition and the "queering" of the institutionally-transphobic legal system.

Did I hit enough wokeism buzzwords?

Krysztof Kredens and Piotr Pezik spoke at this Forensic Linguistics round table in 2019 about the Mumsnet dataset as part of their corpus.

I've ploughed my way through the whole event. It's actually very interesting to understand what we're dealing with, but the talk which refers to Mumsnet starts at 3 hours 17 minutes. It looks like they set it up as an easily scraped "sandbox" model to play around with. They refer to the distinctive language of "women having fertility treatment" and "dieting".

It's also worth watching Tim Grant's section, he's on second, and the Q&A for that.

A loophole making this stuff not subject to regulation smells very Home Officey to me, never mind Aston being just up the road from Cheltenham.

They refer to the distinctive language of "women having fertility treatment"

An incredibly sensitive and potentially identifiable area.

YY @SaffronSpice

Yes. For them to play around with. The fucking creeps.

I am not going to continue to post on mumsnet if it continues to be a sandbox for dubious academics and for assessment of 'criminal activity'.

I'm not sure I believe MN did not know about this either - sorry

I don't think the 2 Polish men necessarily set it up for that purpose, they're just treating us like specimens, the bad faith application I feel is from Palmer and Macleod as her supervisor. I don't think an ethics department should have approved this non consensual use of sensitive information in this way.

Transphobic dogs who are afraid of men and don't agree that TWAW

Transphobic hospital bosses who don't keep a whole section of the hospital free for trans people to come and operate on each other whenever they feel like it without any medical training

I'm not sure I believe MN did not know about this either - sorry

They reacted pretty fast when they were told; and the corpus was down within hours. So I’m inclined to believe them.

But easily scraped data set? Distinctive language of fertility?? They can get to the far end of fuck. I’ll be watching the video later - thanks @Ereshkigalangcleg

It's a fascinating field of study when it relates to actual crime, but the scope creep here is concerning.

I can condense the research into one sentence for them. Women going through trauma alone use heightened emotional language in anonymous online settings while seeking support.

Fuck!

I'm so glad they think the language I used around my stillbirth is "distinctive"

Almost as distinctive as the language I use to describe them as dehumanising, thoughtless, inconsiderate, calllous, cunting wankers for thinking its okay to scrape womens words about fertility treatment off the Web without permission or ethical, moral, empathetic or compassionate consideration

I'm wondering how many of us have tickets and are going?

I thought about asking, but would that just give them a register of user names to scrape more viciously?

Oops...

Can anyone summarise in one post the findings on this (and the other) thread please?

Well.... I booked my ticket under the name Boiled Beetle so....

😱

We find Ashton Uni to be shifty arseholes

Ah, I just put my initials.

Had a bit of a worry that it will open up in my work MST account, displaying my full name and NHS Trust. Will do a practice run nearer the time, of just opening the link and continuing to browser.

I should wear something identifying.

Watching this now.

I'm childfree and autistic and even I can see that using forum posts about infertility, miscarriage, the Pregnancy Choices board, women's accounts of rape and DV, and women's battles with the SENCO and LEA to get their disabled children the care and schooling they need, without the consent of those women, is extremely unethical.

And to solve what problem? Ah yes, that a judge rightly refused to admit as evidence the output of a computational linguistic analysis tool when deciding whether a defendant had written what he was alleged to have written. The Horizon case has taught us to treat software outputs as unreliable. Your software is untrustworthy.

And that's before even considering that MN specifically allows changes of username as a privacy-enhancing feature so your claim of however-many-thousand authors is an overestimate. Plus you have people blockquoting other posters prior to the Quote button being introduced, so you can't assume that a given post contains only material written by that poster.

Ashton institute for forensic linguistics seeks to assist with 'justice'. This mostly means criminal justice, hence they use data sets to for example, identify blackmailers, spot untruths from domestic abusers, etc. They have funding from the US govt and large grants from UK gov. Forensic science is regulated by the Home Office, but linguistics appears not to be so, at least at the moment.

Years ago, AIFL 'scraped' Mumsnet for a large data set, apparently as a 'sandbox' to 'play with'. They stored this offline. This is against Mumsnet's TOC, and the Information Comissioner has stated it's Not A Good Thing to do.

Now, a PhD student has decided Mumsnet really Transphoooooobic, and is doing a PhD in how all the mummies are hate crimes. This is how the data scraping/storing came to light.

The two men who 'scraped' Mumsnet for data have also made software that attempts to identify people across different platforms, raising the issue of potential 'doxxing'.

That's roughly my understanding.

When they started talking about neural networks, my eyes rolled out of the back of my head.

Think of ChatGPT and how totally correct and sense-making its output isn't. That judge was right to dismiss the output of this software as evidence.