Questions and doubts in online trans communities
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis explores narrative identity development in online communities, with a focus on the ways community members handle questions and doubts about gender dysphoria, trans identification, and the decision to transition and/or detransition.Drawing on keyword search data for two key terms, internalized transphobia and imposter syndrome, I conducted a discourse analysis of the meanings and uses of these two terms in the online trans communities.Results suggest that internalized transphobia and imposter syndrome function as socially acceptable ways to express and minimize or dismiss personal doubts about gender dysphoria, trans identity, and transition.These terms are applied by members of online communities to explain and manage doubts of all kinds, emerging at all stages of questioning, transitioning, and detransitioning, in ways that keep collective bonds, as well as personal narratives, intact.Overall, these accounts may be understood as personal and collective attempts to construct a narrative identity, to tell a compelling story about the self-a story that provides meaning, explanation, belonging, purpose, and direction, and taps into powerful-but unrecognized-symbols of affliction and transformation.La prsente thse explore le dveloppement des identits narratives dans les communauts virtuelles, en mettant l'accent sur les faons dont les membres de ces communauts composent avec les questions et les doutes lis la dysphorie de genre, l'identification trans, et la dcision de transitionner ou de dtransitionner.Puisant dans les rsultats de recherches par mots cls pour deux termes, internalized transphobia et imposter syndrome, j'ai conduit une analyse discursive des sens et des usages de ces deux termes dans les communauts trans virtuelles.Les rsultats suggrent que la transphobie intriorise et le syndrome de l'imposteur fonctionnent comme des faons socialement acceptables d'exprimer et de minimiser ou encore d'carter des doutes propos de la dysphorie de genre, de l'identit trans et de la transition.Ces termes sont employs par certains membres de ces communauts virtuelles afin d'expliquer et de grer des doutes de toutes sortes, mergeants tous les stages du questionnement, de la transition et de la dtransition, de manire maintenir les liens collectifs, ainsi que les rcits personnels, intacts.Dans l'ensemble, ces rcits peuvent tre compris comme des tentatives personnelles et collectives de construire une identit narrative, de raconter une histoire convaincante sur soi-mme -une histoire qui offre du sens, une explication, un sentiment d'appartenance, un but et une direction, et qui mobilise des symboles, puissants mais mconnus, d'affliction et de transformation.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".