Are we allowed to talk about women and/or lesbians?

Deleting the whole thread was a completely baffling decision. What does MNHQ think will happen if such threads stand? Is it paranoid of me to think that it's to do with advertisers or something?

MNHQ, this is one of the few sites that allows this type of discussion and I have admired your stance in doing so. Please don't follow the herd and stifle women's voices.

Women are being "othered" and it's time it stopped.

If we keep to the guidelines and use preferred pronouns (even if we think they are incorrect) please let these threads stand so debate can continue.

Trans rights are not more important then women's rights. Yet women's voices are being silenced.

"I'm getting pretty fed up of entire threads debating important women's issues being deleted wholesale because of individual posts which contravene talk guidelines. "

I agree with this.

I disagree with the approach minjaxx took in asking who had reported, but would've preferred the thread to be relocked rather than deleted.

I agree with Judy and Olenna. I was on the thread till the original deletion where the OP was bullying Ego and when I pointed that out I very much doubt special was deleted on the basis of one report by one poster; she essential said 'ok, if it wasn't her, who was it? demanding people come forward and say if they had and justify it. I'm pretty sure the thread was deleted at that point because it had descended into bullying.

I didn't see the thread after that so don't know what happened then.

And then other posters brought over the 'thread derailed by ONE poster, deleted because of ONE persons feelings' vibe on to the feminism thread and then to here.

Everyone knows who you're talking about it so that poster tries to defend themselves and gets told 'oh you're derailing again, it's not always about you!' when it's those posters who are in fact making it all about her.

There are important things to discuss. They can be discussed without accusing each other of anything.

I found this letter from the University of Chicago to its new intake very interesting.....

Can someone, anyone, explain to me how the use of 'they' was othering when that's precisely the term Ada themself requested?

Mumsnet

Why was special banned?

I have been out all day and didnt see the rest of the thread

It's extraordinary that people are so hotly denying the attacks directed against Ego on that thread. As Olenna said, the OP was "blaming" her for the fact that Special got banned and demanding repeatedly that she own up to reporting. We're not imagining it, and accusing Ego of lying is simply continuing the abuse.

Sorry, just realised that after getting annoyed at the last thread being derailed I'm not talking about the title of this one...

Are there any threads that have managed to stay specifically about the situation?

mjingaxx directly accuse Ego of reporting Special, and when Ego refused to say whether she had or not (correctly, IMO), demanded other pp to basically "own up" to reporting. It was out of order

EUSA have had quite a lot of problems this year too - there was a lot of trouble earlier in the year with space and bookings for clubs and societies and then later on there were issues with the Justice for Palestine group, so Ada probably wasn't near the top of their priority list! And they're known on campus as EUSAless

No one was talking about Edinburgh

Well, actually I was - just nobody was replying!

Basically Ada is a bit odd and too political and unfortunately was able to rise high enough in BLOGS to have enough backing to take a position as part of EUSA.

It seems unfair that Ada's brand of hate speech was seen as ok when other things were shut down due to 'safe space' rules, but it was all on personal social media rather than university turf so maybe people engaged actively with Ada rather than complaining to the university.

Marking place, need some z's...

Oh for goodness sake Ego, would you give over with the persecution complex.

No, replying to a post is not derailing. Lying about what has been said to you and wittering on about how you'll be accused of derailing if you dare to respond to a post is, though.

Now, are we allowed to discuss the topic of the post. Re women and lesbians?

I agree that the term MRA is accepted to refer to the group of men who generally behave in a misogynistic way. Even if there are a few cases of men who campaign for men's rights in certain areas where men genuinely don't have equality (sometimes men get fired for having long hair when a woman would not etc) and could legitimately complain.

I read the TRA suggestion but I also heard poster(s) complain about it in that it wasn't fair as not all trans activists are like that and to be fair I am inclined to agree. There are genuinely still big battles to be won by the trans population and there are trans people who campaign on things like employment issues who are not misogynists. Not very many in the public eye sadly but they do exist and so I think we could maybe do with a more specific term. I think TRA will be complained about if used and threads will be derailed.

Fucking hell, Special and mjingaxx got banned? Why? Special wrote some very important posts on that thread, and mjingaxx was right to bring it to chat.

And there was no 'personal abuse' that I saw. It really isn't all about you, ego.

Oh is that what special said that was deleted? :( Oh that makes me so sad. :( And now she's banned for it. It's fucking shameful

I quite like TRAs
Interesting that we don't get men turning up to object to the term MRA because it is understood to refer to a specific group of men and their ideology.

No, Ego, you are the one making stuff up here. I read every post on that thread up until page 12, and I saw no personal attacks on you.

You were asked to stop derailing the thread. You decided that this was you being told to 'STFU' although nobody had actually said that and you kept raising this and further derailing the thread.

The thing is, even though you condemned Ada, you were insisting that their (Ada's preferred pronoun) behaviour was a one-off and nothing to do with trans people. When other posters attempted to point out that actually Ada's peculiar line of vitriol was all too common amongst transactivists (and it was disgusting that it was only when they (see above re pronouns) tweeted about the police that action was taken), you seized on the use of 'they' and started going on about othering, thus preventing/trying to prevent a discussion about how an awful lot of transactivism is poisoning public discourse and how people are too scared to complain for being labelled transphobic bigots. And how that hurts vulnerable students.

You didn't seem to get the bigger picture at all - if you felt attacked personally by it, that's unfortunate but it really wasn't what the discussion was about and yet that's what you kept dragging it back to.

One particularly nasty thing was said, about trans women never passing or being wanted by men, and this was by one very distressed poster who was very upset about the issue, having had personal experience of LGBT help and advice at University and was very concerned about someone in her position coming across Ada or their (their = Ada's preferred pronoun) ilk and being harmed by their (ditto) bigoted misogynistic nonsense. I do not agree with what they posted and I can see that reading it was hurtful, but even that was not personally directed at Ego.

I agree with LRD - MN should not have deleted the thread and their reasoning for doing so is bollocks.

I suggested TRAs (usage like MRAs)

Not that anyone will know that now though, because the whole clusterfuck thread went poof

Why don't we choose a term to define the group of people (trans and certain sections of the left) that are causing the problems - I've heard "AFTAs" used before (Anti-Feminist Trans-Activists) which might be an option when referring specifically to trans people who hold these beliefs. Or what about just "genderists" to include all people, trans and non-trans who hold the set of beliefs that it's bigoted to use a word that means "adult person with a male reproductive system" to describe an adult person with a male reproductive system etc? Are we then allowed to refer to them as "they"?

One of the earliest posts on this thread was a statement clearly critical of Ego and, in my opinion, a misrepresentation of her participation on the other thread. She defended herself. I don't think that is making it about her. It's responding to a perceived unfair statement about her.

It would appear that MNHQ believed that the misgendering did continue, Maud, which kind of supports my recollection. In any event the bullying was inexcusable, and I am astonished people accuse Ego of derailing the thread when it was the OP who kept dragging it back to demands that Ego state whether she reported Special or not, or if not that the people who did report should reveal themselves. And, to be honest, a number of posts on this thread are perilously close to bullying again.