“Women don’t have penises.”: The discourse of transphobia on the online parenting forum Mumsnet

This presentation will take a discourse analytic approach to investigate linguistic practices of transphobia. Specifically, the analysis will focus on transphobic comments posted on the online parenting forum Mumsnet. The data consist of 50 comments which are responses to the initial post of a thread entitled ‘disgusted by all the transphobia here’. The comments that will be analysed employ linguistic strategies from three frameworks used to analyse discrimination: Potter and Wetherell (1988), Van Dijk (1992) and Van Dijk (2006). While these frameworks have previously been used in discussions of racist and anti-immigrant discourse, they can also be used to investigate other forms of discrimination, including transphobia. This presentation will highlight some of the linguistic strategies individuals use when posting transphobic comments online and how these strategies can serve as a way for individuals to minimise the likelihood that they will be viewed negatively by others despite employing discriminatory linguistic choices. The analysis will uncover two major themes of transphobia: the notion that transgender people are a ‘threat’ to women and their rights, and the exaggeration of gender differences by biological sex.
Potter, J. and Wetherell, M. (1988) Accomplishing attitudes: Fact and evaluation in racist discourse. Text-Interdisciplinary journal for the study of discourse, 8 (1-2), pp. 51-68. Van Dijk, T.A. (1992) Discourse and the denial of racism. Discourse & Society, 3 (1), pp. 87- 118.
Van Dijk, T.A. (2006) Politics, ideology and discourse. In: Brown, K. ed. The Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, Vol 9, Oxford, Pergamon Press, pp. 728-740.