‘Fuck’ and emoticons

This quantitative study investigates gender variation online by focusing on two ‘gendered’ linguistic variables: the swear word fuck, which has often been associated with men, and emoticons, which have been shown to be used more frequently by women than men. It is based on a nineteen-million-word gender-diverse corpus, which includes comments posted in English on the community website Reddit by 372 cisgender women, 372 cisgender men, 100 transgender women, 100 transgender men and 100 nonbinary individuals (all according to self-identification). The statistical analyses take both the gender and age of the Redditors into account. Results show that in most cases transgender men do not align with cisgender men; that transgender women mostly align with cisgender women in their use of fuck, but the former produce more emoticons than the latter, and that the use of the variables did not differ between nonbinary individuals assigned male versus female at birth.