Beyond the Binary: Analysing Transphobic Hate and Harassment Online

Anna Talas, Alice Hutchings


Abstract
Online communities provide support and help to individuals transitioning gender. However, this point of transition also increases vulnerability, coupled with increased exposure to online harms. In this research, we analyse a popular hate and harassment site known for targeting minority groups, including transgender people. We analyse 17 million posts dating back to 2012 to gain insights into the types of information collected about targets. We find users commonly link to social media sites such as Twitter/X and meticulously archive links related to their targets. We scrape over 150,000 relevant links posted to Twitter/X and their archived versions and analyse the profiles and posts. We find targets often tweet about harassment, popculture, and queer and gender-related discussions. We develop and evaluate classifiers to detect calls for harassment, doxxing, mention of transgender individuals, and toxic/abusive speech within the forum posts. The results of our classifiers show that forum posts about transgender individuals are significantly more likely to contain other harmful content.
Anthology ID:
2025.woah-1.12
Volume:
Proceedings of the The 9th Workshop on Online Abuse and Harms (WOAH)
Month:
August
Year:
2025
Address:
Vienna, Austria
Editors:
Agostina Calabrese, Christine de Kock, Debora Nozza, Flor Miriam Plaza-del-Arco, Zeerak Talat, Francielle Vargas
Venues:
WOAH | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
136–152
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/acl25-workshop-ingestion/2025.woah-1.12/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Anna Talas and Alice Hutchings. 2025. Beyond the Binary: Analysing Transphobic Hate and Harassment Online. In Proceedings of the The 9th Workshop on Online Abuse and Harms (WOAH), pages 136–152, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Beyond the Binary: Analysing Transphobic Hate and Harassment Online (Talas & Hutchings, WOAH 2025)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/acl25-workshop-ingestion/2025.woah-1.12.pdf
Supplementarymaterial:
 2025.woah-1.12.SupplementaryMaterial.zip