Researchers Claim There’s a ‘Rise of Online Fascism’ After University Students Send Mocking Responses to Transgender Survey

Academics from Oregon State University are claiming there is a “rise of online fascism” after students sent mocking responses to their LGBTQ survey.
The academics wrote about their shock and disgust in an article titled “Attack Helicopters and White Supremacy: Interpreting Malicious Responses to an Online Questionnaire about Transgender Undergraduate Engineering and Computer Science Student Experiences” for the Bulletin of Applied Transgender Studies.
According to the article, 50 of the 349 responses to their online questionnaire about “Transgender Undergraduate Engineering and Computer Science Student Experiences” contained “slurs, hate speech, or direct targeting of the research team.”
“The data was coded inductively and discursively interpreted through social justice frameworks,” the researchers wrote. “The responses contained homophobic, transphobic, ableist, anti-Black, antisemitic, and anti-Indigenous content. Online memes associated with white nationalist and fascist movements were present throughout the data, alongside memes and content referencing gaming and ‘nerd’ culture.”
The academics called for researchers to “critically analyze, rather than discard, malicious data to shed light on these phenomena and generate empowering ‘counterspeech’ to confront hate and reclaim agency.”
“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,” the article continued.
The academics provided examples of the mocking responses, including “12 respondents (24%) indicated their gender as being related to a helicopter or aircraft” ranging from an “Apache Attack Helicopter” to a “V22 osprey.”
The New York Post noted, “In the section declaring one’s disabilities, responses ranged from claiming to be ‘illiterate’ to lamenting ‘My country is run by communists,’ or even declaring that identifying as transgender is a disability in itself due to ‘the inability to come to terms with biological reality.’”
One of the students said that their gender is “gift card.” For their race or ethnic identity, the same student wrote, “I am an ethnic gift card.” They also wrote that their disability is that they “don’t have enough gift cards.”
In what should probably be considered a conflict, one of the researchers wrote that they are “already in therapy for anxiety and depression regarding online anti-trans rhetoric” and that the mockery “had a profound impact on morale and mental health.”
The researcher said that “managing the study’s data collection caused significant personal distress, and time had to be taken off the project to heal from traumatic harm.”
“The university at its most ideal can be envisioned as ‘a central site for revolutionary struggle, a site where we can work to educate for critical consciousness’ using ‘a pedagogy of liberation,’” the researchers suggested.
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