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

I’m still catching up (as I have to admit it’s frying my brain trying to follow everything) but I was reading the posts about Eden being too young to blame for her choices, inexperienced at phd level and just learning her craft and thinking how we are constantly told CHILDREN are capable of knowing they need irreversible intervention to their puberty but that a student 6/7 yrs into their studies on this subject is too uneducated than to know better.

This being Mumsnet of course we are told once our children turn 18 they are adults and we should never give them a lift/ cook their dinner etc etc.

edited to add an apology for pre coffee poor clarity of what the hell I'm trying to say

Imagine writing that and not cringing so hard you turn inside out?

I was looking at dandelions with a UV lamp the other day, the MALE pollen particles light up splendidly with a pinky-purple glow. Any insect visiting a dandelion patch can see at a glance which ones are splashing their boy gamete parcels around.

Silly cissexist insects.

I’ve kept up with this racing thread not too badly so far but I've got to make a long motorway journey this morning and now I'm afraid of how many more posts there'll be when I come back in 5 hours' time 🫣

It's not yet 9am and I've already learnt my new thing for the day. Thank you. 😀

Wow, that's cool!

Well said.

Also, as a PhD student myself, I am totally in charge of my topic and research material - subject to the ethics approval I obtained during my first year. If what I produce is offensive, it’s all on me and not the institution. My supervisors should (and do) suggest broader or narrower approaches at certain points to ensure my project has validity at the end, but this is only guidance. My annual appraisals check in on whether I am adhering to the ethics rules as well as checking that I am being balanced in my approach and I have to pass this to continue to the next year.

Of course, if my final dissertation/project is offensive, biased, poorly researched or even reliant on data where there is any question mark over consent or validity, I’d expect the institution to fail me and/or ask me to redraft. Aston may do, this of course.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UV_coloration_in_flowers

I'd known about UV colouration in plants for ages (possibly from one of those Time-Life science books that shaped so many a geeky childhood) but had never observed it myself. However, a while back I bought a little UV torch so that I could check a glass vase I'd bought for uranium colouring (another story, another obsession) and suddenly decided to try it on the dandelions - wowsers. I did need to put them into a dark place (a box in this case) first.

All that pollen that has been making us sneeze and cough for months is male, never forget!

If only I had paid more attention at school in my biology class.

I could have been marvelling at dandelion pollen under a UV lamp this morning, instead of gloomily pondering newspeak words such as cissexism.

Self-absorbed ninnies who think sex is something made up to oppress them, rather than an ever-present essential aspect of all life are boring as well as irritating.

cissexism doesn't even look like a proper word, so why choose that when you could have had ciscrimination?

Why all the cissys?

Hmm.

Yes good points. Given the student's ability to label all the women on MN as 'transphobic' the student obviously agrees with an ideology that says 4 year olds know if they're trans and children can consent to serious and reversible medical treatment without a robust evidence base.

You can't have it both ways. If you're pro-trans 'healthcare' then that means you think children have competence to make life altering decisions. This means that if you're an adult you don't get to be mollycoddled if you make the decision to use stolen data in breach of ICO guidelines (freely available and accessible to all) and defame women on MN.

I'm sick of the double standards.

The biggest double standard of course is that Aston has oodles of money and they've stolen the data of many poor women (I know not all women on MN are poor, but the most vulnerable often are) without their consent, and no consideration of the possible harms of their actions. Then gone on to defame hundreds if not thousands of women based on the stolen data.

Aston has plenty of resource to safeguard this student - the same is not true of the women on here who may have serious mental health consequences from knowing their data has been stolen in this way and used to summarily denounce them for hate speech.

If women had unlimited money they could ask lawyers to ensure their data is removed from Aston's data scrapes, whilst preserving anonymity.

It's only the poorer women who won't have this legal option available to them.

If it comes to that, which I hope it won’t need to, can’t a group of us share a lawyer?

My previous employer issued projects for funded PhDs. Maybe it's a per-institution or even per-department thing.

Re Eden being too young to hold accountable. I'm not sure how old Eden is, but I'm willing to bet around the same age as me (mid 20s)

I know the extension of adolescence has become a thing, and I know that PhD students in this age group likely have very little experience of the real world... but if someone of full brain maturity can't be considered responsible, then when can they be?

I don't think it does Gen Z any favours when we're babied.

Agree.
To put it another way, if you’re not mature enough to take responsibility you’re not mature enough to do research.

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.

Slight derail. Its been mentioned before but Openai’s deliberate training of chatgpt is definitely of a particular aesthetic. Corporate. Cheery. Always a solution. Always #bekind. Including respect of pronouns etc. No doubt the male developers do so with the best of intentions. I tend to believe in chaos rather than conspiracy but students using it to write essays will eventually impact what and how they think. And this is definitely not the direction of - - > more critically evaluative of <men’s> normative claims.

Edited to take out some formatting

Apparently we could: www.theregister.com/2024/04/22/class_action_suit_data_protection_uk_grindr/

It's not like student will be warned not to travel in public transport or have death threats like feminists are. She'll be held to account for her terminology.

I'm happy to join my name to this

And lack of academic ability.
She's build a reputation by doing a PhD which can be used going forward.
But if the PhD is such utter drivel to render it nothing more than an exercise in activism rather than academia, this shouldn't just be brushed under the carpet and the PhD just handed out. They are supposed to have value.

I'm sure LLMs have an influence. You know those lists of words that ChatGPT overuses? There are students who I suspect of using ChatGPT but they talk like that too.

They are forever "delving" into different topics in their reports and if that only consists of two sentences they lose marks for failing to deliver what they promised.