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

@NonLinguisticRhetoricIsMyKryptonite

Crikey.

This is not so far off the subject that I'm currently researching with a view to applying to do a PhD at some stage. Of course, the idea of doing a PhD might become increasingly unattractive as I watch the shenanigans unfold at Aston.

Their probably regretting naming MN now. Still curious that they did. Makes you wonder how identifiable the other platform posters might have been?

I wanted to report your post so it can be flagged for Justine ahead of her meeting with Aston’s Vice Chancellor. You make some highly valid and important points here RTB. It might be safer if you do the reporting, though.

@NonLinguisticRhetoricIsMyKryptonite

ah feck
i could not resist
found a lovely site that translated all that waffle into pirate
https://funtranslations.com/
posting the changed text here just to increase
the light relief
confusion of random truncations
single inverted commas
and references to timbers and wenches
wimmin catchin' up on the thread can ignore this
it is jus' paddin'

Transmisia (also called Transphobia) be prejudice plus power; anyone o' any gender can have/exhibit gender-based prejudice, but in North New World (and really worldwide), cisgender people have th' institutional power, therefore Transmisia be a systemized discrimination or antagonism directed against transgender/nonbinary/genderqueer/agender persons. Transmisia and cissexism be rooted in a desire t' maintain th' gender binary (i.e. Fire the cannons! th' categories o' 'male' and 'female'), a social construction which seeks t' assign gender based on a person's declared sex at birth. Shiver me timbers! Walk the plank! Transmisia, as well as th' gender binary from which it extends, obscures th' reality o' th' spectrum and fluidity o' gender and marginalizes th' identities and experiences o' persons whose gender does not align with their birth-assigned sex and/or who dern't align with either category o' male or female. Trans folks can be agents o' transmisia as well (particularly when actin' as representatives o' cis-dominated systems, such as higher education) by perpetuatin' th' notion o' gender binary or "passin'" superiority and usin' it t' discriminate against other transgender people. For example, a trans wench at a company may refuse t' hire a genderqueer person because their gender presentation might "confuse" customers, or a trans male administrator at a traditionally women's college may deny th' application o' a non-passin' trans wench fer not "transitionin' enough."

I don’t think they have named it anywhere in print - I have been searching and failing to find it, although another poster on the site stuff thread has found a paper which refers to it as an open parenting forum. I think they named it in the 2019 presentation as that is what the analysis of the paper focused on. And because they were so gleefully proud of creating their sandbox from it that they could not help but show off their new plaything behind closed doors.

I'm sure many of them would love to be called "wenches"

I just want to give a big

thank you

to @IwantToRetire for noticing this (through some no doubt arcane magic thingy) and starting the original thread 👏

Does anyone know if this has been flagged up with Money Saving Expert? I don't know how involved Martin Lewis is any more but it's the kind of thing he might look into in relation to potential historic unlawful data extraction from the site when he still owned at least some of it. I'd heard MSE mentioned in the discussions somewhere on here and I can't remember where.

I’ve reported a few posts and MN have replied and said that they are following all the research.

It's on thread 1 and it's been reproduced in the site stuff thread.

2 papers about finance/debt and there's an identifiable thread from MN and analysis of DFW and WMF on MSE. - No response from MNHQ. I don't think anyone's flagged it to MSE or Martin Lewis.

It's particularly distressing because the OP in the MN Debt Drowning thread makes especial mention of being free to share because MN is an anonymous forum.

-----
References to Mumsnet data in papers about debt and social media. MNHQ, did you and MSE (Money Saving Expert) give permission for these researchers and topics, please?

Concerning these informal services, several studies have used qualitative investigations to uncover the discourses that form the basis of debt forums. For example, Stanley et al. (2015) draw on qualitative thematic analyses to examine discussions on three online forums, revealing that people turn to anecdotal information to understand debt-related issues (see also Montgomerie et al., 2015, who explore how groups use digital platforms to educate people about debt and coordinate action related to indebtedness). Focusing on selections of data from MSE, Consumer Action Group, and Mumsnet forums, they identify two main themes, including the idea of troubleshooting (or debtors’ responses to debt and money management queries) and journeying (or how posters navigate the challenge of living with indebtedness and their pursuit of a ‘debt free’ reality).

I'm posting accessible pdfs of the papers rather than links to the journals.

Stanley, L.M. orcid.org/0000-0003-3882-8682, Deville, J. and Montgomerie, J. (2016) Digital Debt Management The Everyday Life of Austerity. New Formations: A Journal of Culture, Theory, Politics, 87. pp. 64-82. ISSN 0950-2378

Rather than analyse a subforum of Mumsnet, we instead sampled a single, long thread. ‘The Debt Thread’ is a place ‘for those who feel they are drowning and want a way out’, to quote the thread title. It is used by many posters in a way not dissimilar from a (debt) diary, with posters regularly sharing news of the latest methods they have found for ‘cutting back’ – for example, by collecting and using coupons in a newspaper, or forgoing an activity now considered too luxurious.

https://doi.org/10.3898/NEWF.87.4.2016

https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/99917/4/DigitalDebtManagement_2016.pdf

Montgomerie, J., Deville, J., Packman, C. et al. (1 more author) (2015) Digital Technologies of Debt Resilience: Final Report (2014b). Working Papers of the Communities & Culture Network+, 5. ISSN 2052-7268 )

Mumsnet: This debt forum lies at the other end of the spectrum. The value-added for users is not necessarily tacit and technical knowledge of the finance industry, but centred more upon strategies for thrift and emotional support. A particular characteristic of the forum is that a small amount of users provide a large amount of the content.
…
For Mumsnet, in lieu of different sub-forums we sampled the latest Debt thread that contained 850 individual posts, and a total of around 65,000 words. The resulting data was coded in line with the research questions and aims of the project using NVivo ‒ a qualitative analysis research tool. We took a grounded theory approach to data analysis. We started by capturing the sample as PDFs via NCapture for NVivo ensuring that emoticons were retained this is important as members use these as an important way of expressing relief, frustration, anger, fear and sarcasm. Once the data corpus had been constructed, the entirety was read through in order to build some provisional themes.

https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/114790/1/Digital-Technologies-of-Debt-ResilienceFinal-Report.pdf

Trying to take it all in...l mean even the audacity to appropriate the MN logo...let alone the content and the casting of aspersions/ slander/libellous implications.

Are there any precedents for this?
Could MN sue? And on what specific transgression?
I don't think a phone call is going to cut it.

But neither do I think that the question is itself offensive. the question being? Is it transphobic to say TWANW? That question? But here we are. One group says yes. One says no. How is this an empirical question that can be investigated when a foundational definition is absent.

Except here is one definition used for transphobia. Given there are posters on FWR that shockingly and stubbornly continue to suggest that a biologically intact male calling himself a woman is not a woman thereby denying their existence, then that is the shortest PhD on record.

Really is a shame that the talk is cancelled. Would’ve been interesting to hear the details.

Anyone wonder if the Aston FL doxxers have set up AI to continually scrape FWR ie even now? The supervisor seemed suspiciously fast in responding to comments.

Personally, I'm assuming they are still taking data unlawfully all the time.

I. hope. MN. puts. some. official. info. out. about. this. on. other. boards. It. affects. everyone. but. it's. only. really. being .discussed. on. FWR.

The funny thing is it came up on one of my longstanding news feeds but cant remember which one. Without repeating myself as I wrote about this on thread one, Google now offers up strange, or maybe tainted politcal options for words that most of us thing have one meaning but it now means something else. From having been given pervy links in searching for women, yesterday I got drag queen underwear for "feminist".

Sort of relates to one aspect of this thread that in scrapping info its interpretation is bound to be distorted by the dominant culture, ie male, pornified and incel.

And on one level it is creeping into the public domain. Bing (which I dont use on principle) offer a "summarise" option that reads both pdf files and web pages.

Was tempted - but please not I did NOT do it - to ask it to summarise a page of a FWR thread.

If young people are doing this as a short cut to a school or university essay, I suspect in no time, reality will not longer be what we have lived but what the dominant virtual world culture tells us is real.

(edit ... that's embarrasing as it looks like I am promoting a thank you I recieved but cant work out how to undo it. And it got BIG letters. Cringe )

This came up on my facebook feed.

A way to get the word out is start an AIBU and let it get picked up by the press.

I don't get any weird ads. Probably DuckDuck clears them away for me.

That convoluted definition conflates something it calls cissexism with transmisia.
Is cissexism the same as sexism? Surely the whole start point of believing in gender is that you are sexist and have a sexist world view.

Knowing that sexes exist is not the same thing as being sexist, or as accepting that gendered presentation in the world is necessary, or as accepting that 'gender' as a thing exists at all.

That convoluted definition conflates something it calls cissexism with transmisia.
Is cissexism the same as sexism?

I'm going to have a go at parsing that.

One definition of 'sexism" is "prejudice, stereotyping, or discrimination by one sex against the other, typically by men against women, on the basis of sex".

I reckon they're using :cissexism' to mean prejudice, stereotyping, or discrimination by "cis" people against "trans" people, on the basis of gender identity.

Which is nonsense, of course, because sex and gender identity are entirely different things. It can't be any kind of sexism if it's not based on sex.

If I could be bothered, I'd google to see whether I'm anywhere near. Autocarrot didn't jib at 'cissexism' so the word must be either fairly widely used or in the techbros' lexicon.

Here's a handy list from the glory days of Everyday "Feminism":

everydayfeminism.com/2015/11/common-examples-cissexism/

But if you’re a trans person that feels forced to decide or proclaim a set of pronouns so that the cis people surrounding you will feel better, that’s just not a good place to be.

Not only can the pressure be overwhelming, the act gives power to cis people to decide whether or not you look masculine/feminine/genderqueer/whatever enough, and consequently if they’ll feel like honoring your pronoun request regardless.

In the end, it’s the act of making such a process mandatory that becomes its downfall. And if you can’t see that, we have a cissexism problem.

So there you go. No pronoun rounds please.

Thanks for that. So cissexism is believing in biology. Guilty as charged.

@DeanElderberry

So I’ll reiterate what I said earlier: Just because you’ve done cissexist things doesn’t mean you’re an inherently bad person. You just didn’t know any better.

But good news! Now you know better! And you can take your shiny, new knowledge and spread it around like dandelions. Make it infectious. Make it awesome. Help us make people care.

Go, little dandelion, go!

God these people are so patronising and awful.

Ereshkigalangcleg · Today 08:16

Here's a handy list from the glory days of Everyday "Feminism":

Goodness me! What a lot of pish that is!