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

Mumsnet posters aren't lab rats

Squeak fur yurself!

@Weareallmadeofstardust

Have you never heard of the Overton Window?

I see your lab has been leaking their footage of you online again. You should have a word!

EP could very easily get a new topic by either contacting MNHQ and suggesting an online chat, or by posting an AMA thread.

My working assumption is that actual contact with actual GC women with, you know, opinions and arguments and facts and shit would be triggering.

I've seen it on google cache

Someone upthread made the very relevant point that this is a hatchet job on MN, the results of which will be used to bash it as 'a transphobic hate site' and posters as 'proven to be transphobes - there is scientific research which shows this!' This is 100% what I think will happen.

There will be academics out there who will give EP a PhD for this stuff. (You can tell by the quality of some of the work out there.) It's all well and good to think that PhD work stays within the ivory tower - but it doesn't. I know of several PhDs that went with minor tweaks straight to books. A lot of PhDs lead to academic papers, and there are journals that will publish any old crap (sample size of 4, anyone, with 2 lost to follow-up?).

Even if the journal's peer reviewers ask for caveats (pointing out that the sample size was tiny, or that correlation is not causation, for example), that will be ignored when people reference the paper to support their arguments.

And most people are not equipped to parse an academic paper. If it's an academic journal, they're happy to take it at face value, especially if it supports what they believe - I've had, um, discussions with people where I've pointed out that a paper has been heavily critiqued by other academics, but nope, that's not relevant, all that counts is that it was published in the first place. And eventually, when there are enough papers that you can reference half a dozen of them, you can use them to work on the public mood. Look at all our evidence! How you can deny what we have found? If you argue with this you are a science denier! Where is YOUR proof that we are wrong? Academics KNOW this! How can you be so stupid and arrogant?

And bingo, they have what they want.

So yep, stopping this bullshit is pretty important for more reasons than objecting to the fucking gall and lack of ethics of people who are prepared to use our words like this.

EP could very easily get a new topic by either contacting MNHQ and suggesting an online chat, or by posting an AMA thread.

Oh yes please and us lab rats could come and wiggle our noses and comb our whiskers with our sharp little claws, while having of course come prepared with cheese snacks!

Doubly delicious - cheese and chortles.

@mnhq - we need a cheese emoji

I been mulling over this bit “… Aston believe they have legitimate rights to use the data and there is/has been no intention to identify individual posters from their posts” all day.

When the Two Dodgy Doxxers scraped the data originally, the intention was to use it as a “sandbox”, ie a play thing to practice on. Leaving aside how questionable that is, it seems Aston believe it was perfectly legit to scrape the data for this innocent purpose.

Now another researcher has been given permission to use it, who initially declared her intent to analyse hate crimes being committed here. Even if that particular researcher has to change the wording, and probably will now inly demonstrate what she sees as moral, rather than legal, wrongdoings, if we give the Dodgy Doxxers the benefit of the doubt, this new purpose of using the data is radically different from their initial plaything.

If we give them the benefit of the doubt, they didn’t foresee the sinister-adjacent use it would be put to later. They are clearly demonstrating they have no idea how the data will be used in the future, and cannot guarantee it will not be misused, e.g to identify individual posters. How can the vice chancellor guarantee that will not happen? It that light, it is perhaps significant he only says there has been no intention to identify posters. Given their US intelligence sponsor, what promises for future use can he actually give? Who owns the FoLD data?

I can't believe I missed the first thread! That's what I get for spending too much time over in AIBU.

Mumsnet. Came for the transphobia, stayed for the neighbors behaving badly.

As an American, I'm not at risk, cause that ocean and our First Amendment.

I strongly suggest you vipers all identify as US citizens. I will vouch for you and offer my guest room.

Surely to God they have the proof now that we are not just the six of us. They have the entire site to "play with" the first thing I would have done from that side would be check the ridiculous supposition that there are a few with thousands of sock puppets and crow about it if true.

Or did they already do that, discover just how many we are and growing in number as more and more catch on to what's happening?

Or did they already do that, discover just how many we are and growing in number as more and more catch on to what's happening?

Mumsnet FWR is proving to be a pivotal force in the fight against gender ideology. We are an enigma and a thorn in MRAs and TRAs side! Praise be! 👏

I have just woken from a night of trying to put things into datasets assisted by a slightly mad lab rat that kept running around in a state of high anxiety.

There was a massive long winding line of cats, cheese, computers, tunnocks, dreamies, teabags, mumsnet posts, socks, beetroot, crisps.... Every time I looked up the line just seemed to get longer.

I felt like God at the gates of heaven checking the worthy off a list.

And I really need to give the AI drawings a swerve for a while as the whole bloody dream was in AI soothing not really real strangely coloured looks like a cartoon pretty settings.

I fear my online reading is seeping into my unconscious dream state.

Meanwhile, dream-me was tasked with picking items of clothing from a giant branch of M&S that JK Rowling would like. If I got it right she would be my friend.

FWR - the opiate of the gestating class....

I haven't read the whole thread, I am late to the party, so apologies if this has already been covered.

Foucault is/was a mayor player in discourse analysis (DA).

The assumption when using DA is that reality is created by meaning that is created by/within groups and changes over time and contexts. So what a 'woman' is or isn't is determined by the dominant ideas that a given society holds (and it could be different in different cultures and in different time periods).

DA suggests that the discourses that dominate in society determine reality for that society. The analysis can involve two different focus areas or combine them. One approach is to analyse the content of discourses (e.g what people that preserves the reality TWANW and shuts down arguments that TWAW). Another is to look at the techniques or strategies that influence and uphold the dominant narrative (e.g appeals to bring 'kind', claims for authority).

Either way, this approach is acknowledged to lack generalisability and to be biased. Those using DA would say that there is no objective reality to study and notions of being unbiased and having representative samples etc are flawed ideas.

Again, apologies if this interjection comes across as sea-lioning or covering ground already covered!

I don't think anyone here has got onto Foucault yet

What occurs to me is that the characterisation of one discourse as being the "dominant" one is in itself a piece of political discourse.

(Disappears up own backside, pursued by a bear)

@GCLabRat
ah feck
if that is a real film of you
I am
very
veri
...- . .-. -.--
verri
verrreeee
verry
très
worried
please send confirmation it is not troo

@AmaryllisNightAndDay
(Disappears up own backside, pursued by a bear)
Best laugh of the day so far.

Though - having just cruised through various PPs dreamscapes - I am wondering what kind of a bear, and what size...

Absolutely. This is not harmless research that will inevitably sink into obscurity. We’ve seen how even the Cass Review has been spun and maliciously misreported, and mud sticks. TRAs will seize on anything they can use to smear this site and discredit it in the eyes of both the public and advertisers.

I finks is deepfake - Azzton Younee not giv poor LabRat shampew

phew
happynow
but
need to confirm
you are in a safe space
justt
2B
shore

I always think it's the upside down.

Eden may think calling a man who feels like a woman a man is transphobic, I experience calling stating that biological fact as transphobic as a misogynistic and anti-child safeguarding hate crime and it makes me feel upset and unsafe (not keen on my kids sharing toilets with Katie Dolatowski or being told it's a fact you can change sex and encouraged down a medical pathway to sterilisation etc).

Given it's supposed to be about the perception of the person, the only way you're not going around in ever decreasing circles on this to the point of making society unworkable is if some people are considered non-human and their perception, their sense of safety (or actual safety) less important than others.

No prizes for guessing what categories based on fact (I can think of two) those people will fall into.

I dreamed someone important had come to see my houseplants but they'd all turned to wax and were melting 🫠

Oh, and here you go 🧀

I don't want to get into Foucault either, but isn't the problem that the people that attack FWR are completely Foucault Addled Grievance Gerbils and the women on FWR are 'ahem, no amount of Foucaultian gymnastics can ever make a male into a female because that, Sir, is reality'?

And as an aside, this whole situation interrupts QUEER THEORY which treats kids like adults and adults like kids and what FWR says, is 'treat kids like kids and adults like adults - we don't want her to lose her actual head [unlike the TRAs who want to decapitate us] we just want to know what, when, who, where and delete the damn data'