GENDER-CRITICAL/ GENDERLESS? A CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS OF TRANS-EXCLUSIONARY RADICAL FEMINISM (TERF) IN FEMINIST CURRENT
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Feminist Current is a multi-author Canadian self-proclaimed feminist website which frequently publishes trans-exclusionary radical feminist (TERF) discourse via blogs, podcasts, and global news. This project is a critical discourse analysis of the ways in which Feminist Current communicatively constructs and deconstructs transgender identity in problematic and exclusionary ways. In this study, I consider significant definitions given through Feminist Current, entertain the question of whether TERF is a slur, and discuss the major themes. Based on twenty-three sampled essays published on Feminist Current, I find that Feminist Current authors use five major themes in their discourse: violence against women, strategic censorship, antimanipulation and pro-bodily autonomy, performances of humor and naivete, and calls for solidarity. This discourse functions to separate transwomen from women’s spaces and position transwomen as illegitimate and aggressive, while simultaneously repositioning radical feminism as a superior ideological framing.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.011 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.019 | 0.046 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".