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!)

Thinking about it I would agree with posters saying don't go after the no doubt young PhD student. The bigger issue is that senior academics at Aston have not picked up on the very obvious issues with this research and given the student appropriate guidance.

'Thank you for coming to this interview. We feel that it is very important to show our investment in staff and acquiring the highest quality of graduates; as such, all staff include the title, aim, methodologies and results of their qualification on the company website. Could you tell us about your PhD?'

<three hours later>

'OK, so your PhD is 'Some old might-have-had-a-uterus-once-people said stuff I didn't agree with on Mumsnet so I spent my loan and several years that could have been spent looking at political manipulation via social media in the light of the Russian-Ukraine War, the Trump Presidency and subsequent unrest in the period from 2015-2025 or the Middle East on copying and pasting bits of posts saying that Gender Identity and Biological Sex are two different things to support your conclusion that the website should be banned and their protected beliefs dismissed because you don't like what they think?'.

You'd get significantly more useful research from an analysis of Bluey, how the storylines reflected the stressors for the populace born from the latter end of the 20th and early 21st Centuries and their links with contemporaneous theories of early years education and the depiction of dynamics within families and Australian culture as a whole.

I'm guessing they/them might be identifying as someone working on a PhD.

Given how many women had their posting history deleted, and how many old theads are like swiss cheese, its going to be difficult to get a true picture of what feminist chat/FWR/whatever has changed. Also mn has changed its guidelines over the years, so language wont be a true reflection of womens 'transphobia'. It used to be polite to say TIM back in the day, or write TW without a space.

I would be interested to see how the discussion has evolved over the years. But from a feminist perspective, not a bonkers one.

re who has copyright of posts

I seem to remember reading a thread about this a while ago and from memory summarise as this

The words and how they are structured are the poster's

Mumsnet has no rights on those words, eg cant take something you have said and editorialise by for instance saying we think this should be on chat rather than FWR (as it alters the meaning of what the poster intended)

But mumsnet does have the right to say as the host / platform we will delete if we think what you have said breaches our guideline (which as the user of the platform you have agreed to by using the platform)

I’d be interested to know what Mnhq think

IF MUMSNET OFFENDS YOU - TUT AND LOOK AWAY!

Aren't you supposed to define your terms for something like this? Like in a glossary, so what transphobia is, etc?

I've registered 😁

Going on Prof Phoenix's tribunal and the parade of SJW academics the OU fielded, there’s every chance this student’s supervisor is in vehement agreement with them about how awful we all are. 🤷‍♀️

If that's what you think why haven't you reported to the Unvirsity.

It is there failure.

It could be (and I am saying this as the one who started the thread) that MNHQ might think the thread is a bit of a pile on on an individual.

But if anyone should be taking responsibility of standards and care then it is the university.

PS Does anyone know if thiere is a way of archiving a thread?

Well, I think the whole exercise is creepy.

And this advert for the uni is reinforcing that.

Me too.

I'm amazed that studying mumsnet for years hasn't peaked her. It only took me three weeks to do a full 180.

Yes, just cop and paste the url into one of the archive sites.

Tediously, you have to do each page of a thread individually.

Tbf there’s a few posters who argue against GC and I doubt that will change

You are posting on the Internet. How do you think the computer scientists made ChatGPT? All our wittering over the years have been scraped up and used to train computers.
When we post here, it's not our data. It's mumsnets, that they use to drive ad revenue. They drive ad revenue by driving traffic, which means making all their content available to advertising software so we can all get targeted ads.

"Ethics"? Ethics is for old school businesses, not the Internet.

Is that the dress code for the event?!

Yes, just cop and paste the url into one of the archive sites.

Tediously, you have to do each page of a thread individually.

Thanks - interesting that there isn't an app like thread reader for twitter / X .

Are people actually attending a rl event or zoom?

The part of the St Andrew's guidance that I thought was interesting was this:

"note that direct quotations scraped from social media sites (e.g. Twitter posts) cannot be considered as anonymous data and cannot be pseudonymised as they can always be linked back to their author via simple web searches. Special consideration therefore needs to be given to protecting the identity of social media users."

Do we think Eden's paper will use examples of direct quotes, a crude count of the number of instances specific trigger words or phrases are used (e.g. when a trans person is misgendered), or some other subjective analysis of what they constitute to be transphobic?

I wonder how Eden’s going to account for the variety in the level of moderation here. I think it’s changed quite a lot over the time periods Eden’s considering?

😱 The chapter on bigly letters will be interesting

I hope she’s analysed my posts and thought about the reasons I want single sex toilets. It’s not transphobia, it’s wanting medically vulnerable people to be safe. And girls/women to be safer.