Thread 2: A corpus-assisted discourse analysis of linguistic transphobia on Mumsnet

[VitoCorleoneOfMNMafia]

At fewer than 20 posts left, time for part two.

Thread 1: https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5057460-a-corpus-assisted-discourse-analysis-of-linguistic-transphobia-on-mumsnet

Site Stuff thread that tipped off MNHQ: https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/site_stuff/5057903-mumsnet-corpus

Do you tend to break academic ethics with an unlawful biased attempt at smearing MN?

Sorry. Not sorry.

Being kind is how we got into this mess. The people involved are all adults, with privileged educations. They should do better and don't deserve sympathy

As I said on the site thread:

The more I think about this the angrier I get.

What has happened with Cass was a whistleblowing scandal which continues to be a whistleblowing scandal.

MN allowed free speech when everyone else was saying women and childrens rights don't matter here, you are all being transphobic.

And now we are seeing what is an effect a chilling attempt to railroad women's rights to free speech again because women WILL disengage from MN if this is allowed to stand.

MN was targeted because it was women speaking. There isn't research anywhere else.

This is institutionalised sexism.

Where the VC thinks he can sweet talk his way around the law and get women to be nice because it's for the greater good of 'research'.

'Research' that has such predetermined prejudice that it's under forensic criminal science!

What has been said on MN over the last 6 years and beyond has been able palpable anger of women to have their rights and the wellbeing and safeguarding of children being trampled over.

It is now beyond doubt this is a whistleblowing issue.

Yet the entire premise of the paper being about 'transphobia' totally neglects this.

It is APPALLING.

The context is HIGHLY important here.

Why isnt it being considered that this is a social injustice response and that women simply are angry at the undermining of the law.

And then this seems to be YET ANOTHER undermining of the law at the expense of women.

This isn't research. It's an attempt to vilify and tarnish the commercial reputation of MN and to silence women on it.

And if MN do say ok then it leaves MN vulnerable in future and it definitely leaves users vulnerable.

This is not ok.

Howay wims. Following. I'm proper radgie like. Nee scousers here.

What's interesting about it?

Acting as if what someone says isn't what they mean but hides some kind of deeper terrible motive is one of the tactics used by abusers who coercively control their victims. Also tactics used in situations like McCarthyism, the cultural revolution, witch trials etc. Where people are judged to be bad based on no evidence just because the accuser says so.

E.g. you may have SAID 'Do you want tea/ there are two sexes in all mammals' but what you MEANT (you WITCH!) was 'I hate you / I hate all transpeople'. This false equivalence is an attempt to apply coercive control and to shame, undermine and hurt the victim and categorise them as worthy of punishment (even if they've really done nothing wrong).

Claiming there is widespread transphobia on Mumsnet is abusive to the women being accused. I personally experience this as abusive and harassing.

Given this is a forum where there are many women trying to escape abusive relationships, this is particularly unethical. It may also constitute bullying and harassment - baselessly accusing Jo Phoenix of 'transphobia' was found to constitute harassment in a court of law.

It is interesting that 'linguistic transphobia' is not defined in the event that was cancelled. You'd think that would be step one.

And let's remember that eminent paediatrician Hiliary Cass has been accused of 'transphobia' for doing her job. And has received threats that mean she's been advised not to use public transport. I.e. suffered real harm and danger.

This abuse of language is not ok, particularly in one studying linguistics for chrissake. The casual application of the term 'transphobia' to women who are advocating for women's rights is not ok. It is abusive.

I think it's important in this context to remember in particular transwidows and the transwidows threads on here. It's bad enough just tarring all women on here with the same slur, but blanket accusing transwidows of 'transphobia' is really really terrible behaviour.

The assumption that what'shername's topic title was not an unfounded and unchallenged accusation against all of us.

If she'd called it 'Discussions on gender on Mumsnet; criticism, phobia or hatred? - a linguistic analysis' the issues around data scraping would remain, but she herself could be seen as an innocent victim of bad practice by her supervisor and department. As it is, she has chosen to make herself a big part of the problem.

Now, studying the social media reaction and misinformation about the Cass Review is something that I could get behind as a PhD topic.

'Who decides?'
Was pretty much the title of one of the lectures I had as an undergraduate (the module was also taught to masters students) regarding censorship.

Who decides what the definition of transphobia is?
Is it a PhD student? No it should not be.
In which case, where does this definition orginate from? On whose authority?

Remember this is now shaping up as a whistleblowing issue with Cass and numerous court cases outlining how women have been harassed and unlawfully stripped of their rights to hold beliefs and have free speech.

Since this was authorised by the university, we are talking institutional level sexism.

There is a complete failure in so many basic practices and standards which should be being used by a reputable high class academic establishment.

I seemed to have missed this thread and am only posting here as a place marker… I have no effing idea what the thread is about despite trying to read it from the start! My FOMO is kicking in.

No, my point is simply that it's not the student's fault and in my opinion they shouldn't be named, have their profile examined or even their event gate crashed (I see it's cancelled now anyway).

I am not saying anything positive about the rest. The people who collected our data and are using it as a training ground for their LLM without telling us or MNHQ, the people who approved the PhD student to use the database for the purpose of their PhD, the people who approved the funding of the entire endeavour, the VC for not apologising and deleting at once. All of these people are to blame. What they have done is ethically dubious, and perhaps (hopefully), actually illegal. It's against all good research practice and against human decency. It's also targeted, misogynistic, exploitative of everyone who uses these forums. No arguments there.

My point is simply that the student should be kept out of it. They have been poorly advised and poorly trained (by Aston as well, where they did their MA). The problem is the dataset and that it exists, not this particular student's talk or PhD project. Whether or not MN posts are transphobic is an empirical question and (bracketing the ethical fuckery) a corpus study is a sensible way of answering that question. In principle I'd welcome a study on whether MN is transphobic. I know that we're not, as a group, particularly transphobic and I'd welcome any attempts to empirically investigate this really annoying claim about us that constantly gets thrown around the academy and society in general. The problem is that there is not an ethical way of conducting this study - or perhaps there is, but this sure as hell ain't it. Again though, not the student's fault.

This seems to be a specific project with a defined remit - so not that different from other defined research projects which have used MN as a source. Whereas the doxy dudes have scraped the entire forum, as I understand it, and updated that scraping, and then used it for whatever projects they want to do and whoever asks to access it (under certain conditions). And called it their sandbox to play in, basically acknowledging the lack of limits.

Did you start with this thread, or did you start with the thread that led to this thread.

If you missed the first thread the second wont make much sense.

But on the other hand to read both may need you to be up all night to catch up.

(If AI was any good it could create a synopsis for those just finding it. But AI - product of patriarchy - might find it triggering!)

Yeah, I mean, obviously that's a better title and a far more interesting project. But that isn't what the student was investigating. They were investigating the "transphobic" language on MN. I don't think that denying that TWAW is transphobic. But neither do I think that the question is itself offensive. Whatever, so they want to spend four years investigating transphobia on a forum that they obviously hate. I can't relate, I spent my own PhD writing on something I'm obsessed with and find really interesting, and it was still a challenge and occasionally felt like a slog - I cannot imagine doing it on something I felt so negatively about.
And using the term "hate crime" is stupid, but that's bad supervision, the supervisor should have pointed that out. I think the student has been let down and the problem here is this data scraping and the uses to which it is put.

Re: your latest post, I don't think it's anything to do with age, it's more a lack of experience, training and supervision. We've not seen evidence of them accusing anyone of a hate crime in final published written work, they're a first year PhD student, all sorts of unrefined crap stays in at this stage. It doesn't necessarily represent the wording of the finished article. It wouldn't pass peer review, for a start, given that none of the examples would actually be a hate crime.

Can't tell which poster you usually are. At all!

Do as @IwantToRetire suggests and go back to the start of the first thread, but first of all make sure the children are asleep, tuck yourself up in bed and have a nice big bag of crisps, and/or tub of ice cream, and/or low/no alcohol drink of choice (you'll need your brain) with you. If you have a partner, either get them to read this with you, or banish them to the spare room for the night. It's a long read that is seriously rambling with an awful lot of distracting side-shoots to follow up but you can do it.

Personally, I wish there was a index so that I can find 'that post that I should have replied to several hours ago or was it yesterday?'

Its a PhD student. Its not an undergraduate.

A PhD student should be identifying their own bias as a matter of course. They should be using technical definitions for 'transphobia' rather than just using their own measures. Indeed, the default point should not be to assume transphobia at all, but to see if there were other motivations and context at play (the fact its a womans forum from a women's point of view and there is much discussion of womens rights might be a right be stinking giveaway).

Frankly, I don't expect this level of poor technical ability from a PhD student.

The thread started about a presentation online by a first year PhD student at Aston University. The student intended to track the patterns of ‘transphobic rhetoric’ on MN since 2008.

In looking at what the student’s sources were, it came to light that researchers in forensic linguistics at Aston University had ‘scraped’ the contents of the MN talk forums to create a dataset for research (‘a sandbox to play in’) into language attribution to train a model on (i.e to identify authors). Whilst there is no evidence that they were linking anonymous posters to real life people, this is the end goal of their research and model (so they were/are using MN to see what could be done). I caveat that with the point that the only presentation and publication so far found using this data is five years old so not sure what they have done with it since (this is where the sandbox metaphor was used). Also not sure who else has accessed it.

Aston University is also part of a project funded by the US government since 2021 so there is money and interest in the models and tools to attribute authorship that they are creating.

JustineMN is now meeting with the VC of Aston University to discuss what Aston University are doing with MN content.

Fantastic summary! @BusyMummy001 here is your answer.

Also I found starting on the corpus site stuff thread easier https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/site_stuff/5057903-mumsnet-corpus?reply=134751159&

Personally it doesn't feel good to have a young PhD student at the core of this.

But it's not our fault that she's there. Firstly, she is an adult, albeit a young and inexperienced one, who should be able to clock her own biases and start to frame a decent research question. Secondly, her mentors at Aston bear enormous responsibility - WTF have they been thinking?

And thirdly, this is a really important issue about ethics and whether posters can be identified and so on, so the fact that a young adult is at the eye of the storm has to be accepted: we cant ignore this issue because of her age.

I hope the student welfare people at Aston have got involved and someone is calling people to task about safeguarding.

PS. I still have no flipping idea what transphobia is meant to be.

It is not a young PhD student at the core of it, it is now the Vice Chancellor of the university who wants to say ‘there, there dear’ and pat Justine on the head.

Vice Chancellors don’t sit and read through all the PhD proposals and research questions connected to their university. It’s not their job.

Please can we all take a moment to appreciate this beautifully formed FOI?

https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/ethics_and_data_protection_for_t