This woman is all of us.

I'll just stick to LM or HWSNBN

Quite disappointing to see this. I thought the guidelines wer basically..you can 'misgender' (I call it accurate sexing tbh) UNLESS talking TO the transperson. In which case politeness should be used. I remember the whole Ada Wells thing, wasn't this part of the reason for the spartacus threads in the first place?

TSSDNCOP.

Not sure where it stands on divulging if an angry teenager has got its pro bono panties in a bunch.

See how I did 'its' - can I do 'its'??

I'm a long-term very gender-critical feminist and I don't agree with Mumsnet's misgendering policy but I'm still grateful to Mumsnet for facilitating the discussions around transgenderism.

That's pretty much my position too. I will not refer to them as she though. I will avoid pronouns entirely for trans people.

I am beginning to think that MN has been warned/threatened with legal action by TIMs/MRAs.

We live in a society of free speech. Not some Orwellian, dystopian nightmare.

This is what I think too. The timeline looks pretty obvious to me. That article by James Kirkup comes out, Mumsnet starts to get a bit of a name for itself as being a place where this is being debated, and almost immediately several threads pop up and there's a general influx of posters who seem to be sealioning. I notice the sealioning has pretty much stopped now, which doesn't surprise me at all, since it's a terrible tactic when you're facing a group of people with rational facts and reason, who are happy to call for rational debate and non-biased research, while pretty much the only argument the sealioners have boils down to: 'stop being mean'.

The sea-lioning's stopped, and I suspect their tactics have shifted to reporting posts and targeting the site itself. Has there been a massive uptick in complaints about posts/threads, MNHQ? And if you have been threatened with legal action or have legal concerns, then some transparency here would be appreciated, if only because knowing that's the case would go a long way towards clarifying how the law is already affecting our lives.

Seeing the way this issue has been treated in the media, and how effectively the gender critical viewpoint has been silenced is genuinely frightening. In particular the story that keeps sticking in my craw, and which gives me the fucking shivers, is the way the Guardian et all misrepresented Marie Dean's vile sexual crimes as 'a string of burglaries'. It's a misrepresentation of the facts that can only have been deliberately intended to mislead.

So can you understand why people are upset about what seems like an attempt to stifle free speech and expecting us to tow the ideological line? Language is important: it's only a short step from insisting we use 'correct' pronouns, to insisting that 'they' and 'them' isn't acceptable either, and then that we have to accept 'trans women are women'.

MNHQ - I can see you are in difficulties. I don't wish to add to them but, as AngryAttackKittens said on another thread, I think most of us here have reached the point where any capitulation is tantamount to negotiating with terrorists. I hope you can see that many of us aren't prepared to do this.

^Agree absolutely with this from @LangCleg. They've already proven if we give an inch, they'll take a mile.

I'll be sticking with 'they' and 'them' (actually think that's what I was doing anyway), but I suspect that won't be enough either soon.

See I’m seeing both side here. I see how some people have been saying he etc which has been goady. However I don’t like being told that I have to be polite to someone who wouldn’t show me the same respect.

Or royalty? Where kings and queens claimed to be the incarnate of God's word on earth.

Something like that seems relevant.....

I don't think so. The only analogy I can think of is sometimes with religious people (not all religious people, obvs) when they insist you accept their version of reality. So you nod politely instead of saying, "Oh, ffs, that's absolutely ridiculous."

Yes, religion was the only thing I could think of as well. However, religious indoctrination outside of the religion itself is generally frowned upon. Particularly by liberal types ironically!

*Thisusernamethingistricky: "Has there ever been a movement before that insists that you must refer to someone as something that they objectively are not?"

I don't think so. The only analogy I can think of is sometimes with religious people (not all religious people, obvs) when they insist you accept their version of reality. So you nod politely instead of saying, "Oh, ffs, that's absolutely ridiculous."

And I always used to be fine about using 'correct pronouns please' as they say. Because those people weren't harming anyone and deserved to be treated with respect.

This 'misgendering' thing is odd isn't it? Has there ever been a movement before that insists that you must refer to someone as something that they objectively are not? Otherwise it's 'hate speech'? And the whole thing is completely legitimate? I don't think I can think of any? It certainly didn't happen in the gay rights movement.

Well said Lang

And

Ive never minded using female pronouns for transwomen in the past. All this is making me feel a sense of huge unfairness and lack of trust in transwomen which I never had before. I would have fought for their rights to have the pronoun of their choice, but I don't feel I can now. I can't bear to use female pronouns for someone who has a Twitter account named for hating ('cis') women

I'm afraid to say that this is also how I now feel.

It is quite obvious to me that that this was never about these people joining us. It was only ever about 'replacing'.

The point is, stop telling other people what their experience is. You havent walked in her very young shoes.

But she and other TRA's are doungbexactly that: trying to tell us our innate female-ness is less valid. It must be hard to be trans. It's also hard being a natal woman. Lily hasn't walked in our shoes and whilst her experiences are unique to someone who is trans, I share a set of experiences that natal women understand instinctively - by virtue of our SEX. Not our gender. Lily Madigan does not nor cannot.

Spot on @LangCleg

Great post, LangCleg.

They/them doesn't sound right to me when referring to a person in the singular.

It just shows how mad this situation really is. Science, grammar, the definition of words - all meaningless. It's truly Orwellian.

I can't do it either.

Mumsnet is a business not a democracy. I see no recent shift in the administrators' application of their longstanding red line in the sand about not "misgendering" transgender male people. Their club, their rules, I suppose.

Mumsnet also have to operate within an allegedly democratic state in which all the main political parties support the Orwellian lie that "transwomen are women" and where all the main political parties also support the proposal that all barriers should be removed to allow male people to self-identify as women. In such a socio-political climate, I'm not surprised that Mumsnet feel they have to tread carefully around the feelings of male transgender people.

I'm a long-term very gender-critical feminist and I don't agree with Mumsnet's misgendering policy but I'm still grateful to Mumsnet for facilitating the discussions around transgenderism.

For what it's worth, here is my overall view.

Lily Madigan, on a personal level, seems to me to be a remarkably unpleasant person with an MRA agenda that LM attempts to conceal via a trans identity. There may, or may not, be underlying vulnerability there but, such is the harm LM is doing, this should take a back seat to analysis of LM's actions. As time goes on, the MRA agenda becomes more and more obvious as an emboldened LM becomes less and less cautious. This is my impression based on observing the furore around LM.

But more important is the way in which LM is emblematic of an aggressive faction within the Labour party, which comprises transactivists, sexist men, and pomo-brainwashed allies. The Labour leadership does not appear to recognise the damage this faction is doing. Or perhaps it does but believes it can be contained within a limited social media echo chamber, so won't affect its vote in any significant way.

These things seem to me to be considerably more significant than whether or not I rearrange my syntax to be somewhat awkward but to avoid what appears to be blasphemous use of pronouns to anyone following the gender identity religion.

MNHQ - I can see you are in difficulties. I don't wish to add to them but, as AngryAttackKittens said on another thread, I think most of us here have reached the point where any capitulation is tantamount to negotiating with terrorists. I hope you can see that many of us aren't prepared to do this.

Yep okay. No-one wishes to be banned but, it's still a strectch.

Let's just use 'they/ them' so that the discussion can move on?

Both of those qualities are evidentially correct. No goading or wrongness there. To ban/remove for stating plain facts has a very unpleasant history in the world.