Kids really do say the darndest things, don’t they?
A group of them recently mortified academics from Oregon State University with their responses to an online national questionnaire aimed at transgender and gender nonconforming (TGNC) students in undergraduate engineering and computer science programs.
For the LGBTQ+ survey, respondents to the “gender” question identified as everything from a “pansexual attack helicopter” to a “cis gender lizard king.”
Asked about their “Racial/Ethnic Identities,” one replied, “my skin is blue, I think I might be a smurf.”
Under disabilities were listed such ailments as having “hands where my feet are and feet where my hands are.”
Another respondent replied, “Like all transgenders, my disability is the inability to come to terms with biological reality. Madness, essentially.”
According to the researchers, 50 of the 349 total responses “contained slurs, hate speech, or direct targeting of the research team.”
“The responses contained homophobic, transphobic, ableist, anti-Black, antisemitic, and anti-Indigenous content,” they wrote. “Online memes associated with white nationalist and fascist movements were present throughout the data, alongside memes and content referencing gaming and ‘nerd’ culture.”
Their initial project went so off the rails, the team morphed it into an examination of how the snarky responses relate to “the rise of online fascism” and named their paper “Attack Helicopters and White Supremacy: Interpreting Malicious Responses to an Online Questionnaire about Transgender Undergraduate Engineering and Computer Science Student Experiences.”
“Of note is that 12 respondents (24%) indicated their gender as being related to a helicopter or aircraft and that 15 of the 30 reporting disabilities (50%) referred to transgender identity or sexuality as a disability,” the authors state.
Evidently, “Malicious responders accounted for about 15% of the questionnaire’s responses.”
Particularly “malicious,” one must assume, are those who answered the “Racial/Ethnic Identities” question with things like, “Come on man, these questions are stupid. Everyone is a grab bag of genetics from all over the world” and, “STILL A HUMAN … What else do you want to know? What I ate for breakfast?”
For at least one of the researchers, the experience was “traumatizing.”
“The malicious words and slurs directed towards our research team had a profound impact on morale and mental health, particularly for one of our graduate student researchers, who was the primary data analyst,” the team revealed. “As a transgender woman who was already in therapy for anxiety and depression regarding online anti-trans rhetoric, managing the study’s data collection caused significant personal distress, and time had to be taken off the project to heal from traumatic harm.”
“This paper interprets the online backlash against our research, particularly as it appeared in the questionnaire data, and relates the hate speech we received to larger trends of online radicalization into white supremacist and fascist conspiracy movements,” the team bravely wrote.
Despite the triggered meltdowns, the LGBTQ+ group decided the “malicious responses” couldn’t simply be disregarded — not when it reinforced their victim status.
“To quietly discard these responses due to their harmful intent is a disservice to a project aimed at transforming engineering culture, as such responses reflect the social and educational context in which traditionally excluded students and scholars experience oppression, silencing, and violence,” they concluded. “Our goal is to better understand how these responses relate to engineering culture by framing them within larger social contexts—namely, the rise of online fascism.”
“Before these events, it was disturbingly clear to our research team that the malicious responses could not be dismissed and indicated that discussions of gender and sexuality in STEM education are flashpoints for fascist ideologues living ‘inside the house’ of engineering and computer science,” the researchers stated.
However, it seemed even academic journals didn’t fully appreciate their hard work.
“Tellingly, earlier versions of this paper submitted to journals in engineering education were ultimately rejected, not because of the quality of the research itself, but because of ‘fit,'” they said. “We were left with the impression that our arguments concerning the necessity of addressing fascist ideologies within the cultural contexts that TGNC students endure was seen as irrelevant to engineering education, if not alarmist.”
Go figure.
Writers and editors can be contacted at [email protected] with feedback, tips, or corrections.
Melissa Fine is the former executive editor of Casino Player, Strictly Slots, and Poker
Digest magazines. She is a UCLA graduate, news junkie, and dedicated Stargate SG-
1 fan. Melissa currently lives with her dog and two cats in a tiny town in the Sierra
Nevada foothills.
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