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!)

Nice little graphic there with the 40+ million mumsnet posts

Ooh. So I've been thanked for this and wondered if the thanker was letting me know she was attending.

Then I had a frisson of excitement that felt like having found a way to bypass open channels of communication with the French resistance and wondered if anyone else wanted to thank the quoted post to give an idea of numbers (in case there's good reason for you not to say so on the board). But then, I may be getting overstimulated and, if so, it's likely the gin.

(Or maybe I don't get out much.)

I'm still trying to process the idea of linguistics science in Birmingham. A couple of Brummie accent jokes:

I was fishing in the cut the other day and I caught a whale. I threw it back through 'cos it never had no spokes in it.

What's the difference between a bison and a buffalo? You can't wash your hands in a buffalo.

Your latter point - the quoting, whether the 'new' version or by reproducing an excerpt (never mind just putting bits 'between quotation marks' "or between double quotations" or «between guillemets» or

on separate lines)

invalidates all calculations and conclusions reached on the basis of word usage and frequency.

So they're producing junk data and reaching junk conclusions.

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.

That's an excellent point.

Apologies to any Brummie or Birmingham adjacent mumsnetters. I have a wurzel accent so I'm used to being treated as mentally deficient.

Quote feature is relatively recent, before that it was simple formatting of a portion of text.

As you can see, I still do this regularly! Plus you can't use the quote feature for quotes of quotes.

Good summary @RealFeminist

Asking annoying questions about other people's science to poke holes in what we considering doing is a small part of my day-job.

Speaking of that: the "recentsy primer" (my spelling might be wrong) might well be an artifact of posters quoting PPs. It's the most plausible explanation I can think of to explain a user adopting a phrase for only one thread and never using it again.

Pro-tip, Aston researchers: when A quotes B, that's B's words, not A's, not even "A's for the duration of the thread".

'Then I had a frisson of excitement that felt like having found a way to bypass open channels of communication with the French resistance.'

Listen very carefully, I shall say this only once... 🤐

'Think of ChatGPT and how totally correct and sense-making its output isn't.'

So true. I have far more to do with AI generated content than I would like and the bollocks it comes up with is quite stunning.

I've been discussing this IRL & had just come to the same conclusion: that people quote in a variety of ways, including just pasting the words of someone else's post into their own post, so how does the lingustic tool spot whether what's in a post was actually written by that poster?

I did wonder whether one could outsmart the tool by putting every post in quotation marks, if the tool has been programmed to ignore anything in quotes. Nothing one writes would then be included in the analysis.

Reading the KNN pros and cons, posters with idiosyncratic word choices (e.g. my Northumbrian/Scots "outwith") or who repeat phrases ("first rule of misogyny, innit") are easier to recognise.

Results slide: Mumsnet posts were half as reliably attributed compared to Forum X. I suspect MN's name-changing feature contributes to that, as will ad-hoc manual quoting.

The men in the photo all seem to be wearing formal shirts and suits (with some jackets over the chairs). This strikes me as a bit unusual for a student setting...

Do they say how they know how accurate they are?

This is an academic setting and there's a bloke in a t-shirt. This isn't for undergraduates, it's for postdocs and academic-path researchers.

So we will all be sending in freedom of information requests about the data they are holding for each user name, right?

We need to give them time to respond but we need to hit them with thousands of FoI requests in response to their illegal activities. This is quite disgusting and the senior management should have planned for this.

There’s a similar joke that plays on kipper tie and cup of tea sounding the same with a Brummie or Black Country accent (not the same but I can’t remember the detail of the joke).

In that slide, why is Mumsnet named but the other sources of text are not?

Maybe the reason for all those strange vowels in Allo Allo was that they were trying to bypass the word recognition. They were ahead of their time.

I wondered that, too.

I do a lot of data work. Most of it is interrogating the requesters as to their needs, intentions and purposes so I can give them what they actually need, rather than what they think they want. The rest is pulling apart external data and conclusions to show that what we are dealing with is people that are easily impressed by a table in a Word document or aren't actually interested unless the data is made to reflect the conclusions they had already reached.

Another mumsnet slide

Did you mean FOI or Subject Access Request (SAR)?

Yes I’d like them to fottfsofafosm….as if these real women’s real experiences and real emotions is just a convenient database for them to play around with.

That "engram"-sounding word that they keep using: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/N-gram