Christel Trutmann
Writer · Researcher · MSW candidate
I study how the language of gender, sex, and ethics shapes what we notice, what we excuse, and what we can imagine. I come at it from three directions: essays for a public audience, computational analysis of gendered language, and clinical training in social work. Through Repaper Press, I build tools for gender literacy, the ability to see how stories and language normalize inequality.
Writing
Beyond Yes and No
The Cornell case shows how our framing of sexual ethics asks victims to prove what they didn’t want, instead of asking whether the people involved cared what they did want. An argument for solicitude.
“He Said, She Said”: The Rigged Language of Sex, Consent, and Rape
A series on the double standards built into our sexual vocabulary, and a proposal for a new, shared standard built on solicitude and consensus.
Research
I’m interested in how feeling accepted, or judged, in interpersonal relationships and by real and imagined audiences shapes mental health, social development, and moral behavior, and the implications of these processes for clinical practice.
NLP Analysis of Gendered Sexual Language
Using Python and natural language processing to study patterns in gendered sexual language, building on writing I began in 2021.
The study grew out of a 2016 exploration. I trained a word2vec model on 75,000 IMDB movie reviews and asked which words reviewers use in the most similar contexts to “man” and “woman.” The differences were striking:
Closest to “man”
- woman
- lady
- lad
- guy
- millionaire
- monk
- sailor
- soldier
- men
- person
- farmer
- chap
Closest to “woman”
- lady
- prostitute
- girl
- widow
- man
- heiress
- housewife
- waitress
- nun
- nurse
- maid
- whore
Projects
Repaper Press
A free reading site where readers choose the gender of every character in classic children’s books, from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz to Winnie-the-Pooh. Change only gender, and what the language assumes becomes visible.
Repaper’s gender literacy framework goes beyond the Bechdel Test, asking one question of any story: does it normalize inequality? It examines a work through its 1) world, 2) cast, 3) characterizations, 4) relationships, 5) plot goals, and 6) writing.
About
I’m a Master of Social Work candidate at the University at Albany School of Social Welfare (2027). My clinical training has included work with adolescent boys in residential treatment for sexually harmful behavior.
I live in Ithaca, NY, and studied development economics and governance at Cornell University. Before social work, I spent nearly six years on Cornell’s emergency services team and later worked as a full-stack software engineer, the skills behind Repaper Press.