A certain name has cropped up from time to time on here, and I was looking into what everyone was saying about Gamergate and found this lovely paper back in 2016.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2056305116672484

Game developer Brianna Wu also receives dismissive attacks. Many on 8chan, for instance, target her appearance: “Stop calling that rotten f***** a she, you are insulting every real woman in existence comparing them to that creature” (“Fuck Her,” 2015, no. 640646). Gendered pronouns and phrases are changed from her to him, from “woman-splain” to “freak-splain,” because “you only get to be called She if you can pass, this one cannot, whats his real name again?” (“Fuck Her,” 2015, no. 640982). Here, #Gamergaters attempt to discredit Wu based on her self-presentation.

By not meeting their ideals of sexual attractiveness and availability, Wu must be lying about her gender; if Wu is lying about her gender, then anything else she says cannot be taken seriously.

These comments are meant to discipline critics, not only because Sarkeesian and Wu are vocal proponents of improving games and gaming environments but also because they are women. As Salter and Blodgett (2012) note, “Women within the hardcore gaming public are given tightly bound roles to play and punished for stepping outside them” (p. 411).

Women can only be one of three things: sex objects, invisible, or the enemy (Salter & Blodgett, 2012). Since Sarkeesian and Wu do not promote themselves as sex objects and refuse to remain silent or invisible, they must be the enemy.

For the uninitiated, Wu is a TIM whose transness has been an open secret until recently.

I don't know if the authors are supporters of genderism, or if they had absolutely no idea and were in good faith that the lack of information left on mainstream about Wu's transition meant this was all about "unattractive women", but there is shockingly zero mention explicit mention of trans, the most we get is "self-presentation" (note: the archived 8chan forums do include an explicit mention of trans).

This makes this entire paragraph absolutely hilarious because it's clear that 8chan knows what's up even if the paper authors are in complete denial.

What is not hilarious is how this completely damages the entire paper.

The problem with Wu isn't failing to perform femininity (Wu absolutely does), it's that Wu... is a male. Sure, one of them seems to have set the criteria for using "she" to be "passes," but that's sex passing, Wu isn't ugly. The long haired beautiful males who routinely make their way into women's fiction as love interests have to work very, very hard for a heterosexual male to have sexual fantasies about them.

Claiming "availability" is a reason to treat Wu as a male also makes no sense considering a) source?? b) Wu is attracted to males (as if men don't go after lesbians anyway) and c) "in a relationship" or "no relationship" doesn't change the womanness in the eyes of men (at most it just changes how appropriate the lewding is)

When it comes to women's research, one concern I have about TIP inclusion is that males will be included -- and the authors won't inform the reader. It's bad enough when the paper buries a little "nonbinary" section into a table that ultimately makes useless data (not enough of them in the study 😐) and you're stuck wondering how many TIPs are actually present total.

And while this specific paper is not scientific, there are plenty of situations where a TIM could sneak into the female data even if the authors are nonbelievers (e.g. safety, trying to cite another paper, trusting that others would have done the dirty work of sex verification), and then the issue only gets propagated as that paper is in turn cited.

Unfortunately, I don't think this issue is on the radar of anyone with actual influence over the state of things and will likely persist even if we do end up getting some sweet sweet double blind studies for vaccines or whatever in the US.

If one is completely unable to trust even the most robust of research because of this, how can that trust be regained?

I've already given up on mainstream media on this front, but mainstream media isn't directly responsible for creating safeguarding policies, designing safer vehicles, or improving our medical technology.