Discursive Decoys: The Legitimation of Homophobia and Transphobia, Educational Neutrality, and Teacher Deprofessionalization in Mainstream Media’s Coverage of the “Parental Rights” Movement in Manitoba
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the 2023 provincial election in Manitoba, the Progressive Conservative Party (PC) committed to enhancing “parental rights” in education if elected for a second term. This article examines the way the PCs’ campaign materials, surrounding media coverage, and responses from provincial public education partners legitimized the underlying discourses of the “parental rights” movement. This movement endorses the erasure and harm of 2SLGBTQIA+ students and community members, disregards and undermines children’s rights, and privileges the perspectives of particular parents. Using critical discourse analysis, we outline the way that homophobic and transphobic discourses are legitimized through the coverage of this campaign. We also outline the ways that neutrality is weaponized in order to secure heteronormativity in schools. Moreover, we reveal the ways that teachers are villainized (criminalized) in order to advance “parental rights” claims. By putting discursive tactics on display, this article reveals the way that power is operationalized and secured.
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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 | 0.016 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.024 | 0.054 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| 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".