MNHQ Deletion Policy

Yet
Mass reporting, troll posting, posting obnoxious material then screenshotting it and putting it on twitter, MN being heavy handed with deletions.

To be fair, we have been here before. I daresay that MN had another blow to the stomach yesterday with the former employee trashing MN in an 'article' and reacted to it. As did the users. It's a shame.

I'm not reading 29 pages - is the gist of what is happening that TRAs (is there a better term to use, much like 'forced birther' for those otherwise known as right-to-lifers'?) are coming on here, like they always have, but in a more sustained fashion, and making the same kind of accusations they always have, but also posting deliberately goady threads and/or responses and/or reports posts (hell they could be reporting each others' posts) in the hope of creating so much ruckus that HQ deletes the thread - hence silencing women?

Have we had any kind of clarification on what 'no attacks on individuals' actually means, in terms of discussing people on here?

Too much sense to apply for the job.

Yes!

One of the most wonderful tweets I saw KIS make on twitter was exactly about the subject of misgendering - someone said something like "I agree with you, but you must call transwomen women."

It was:

"I am not going to participate in and/or help spread that mass gaslighting.
One of feminism’s key tenets is women’s right to say no.
We have the right to identify, name and desist malestream ideology and language."

And this is exactly the point - women have the right to say NO to this crap, this policing of our language, this mass gaslighting and erosion of women's boundaries and privacy.

I want female spaces for me, for my DD, for any woman that wants them - and want them on the basis of being born female. Biologically female. I want my daughter to have access to sports, scholarships or whatever, that have been set aside for women - and not have her place taken by someone born and raised male - but identifies as female. Like THIS

And now it seems MN is contributing to the mass gaslighting of women that is part and parcel of this new gender identity religion - and actually silencing us - to appease some of the most misogynistic, aggressive, men's rights activists.

And Red is right - the've come for feminism first, then it will move onto childbirth, pregnancy and so on. It's happening in the NHS right now. The word "mother" is even under attack. This is an attack on women, and on this (predominantly) women's forum.

What I see happening is that posters respond to a person on the basis of their behaviour rather than identity. If they feel threatened or silenced there lean towards disrespect and calling someone male because they feel they have been disrespect. If they feel their biological barriers are being belittled and ignored they err towards belittling and not knowledging others concerns

Exactly. So someone appearing here with an inflammatory username who then posts in a dictatorial style using repeated full stops, and makes deliberately goady statements about a male person's 'womanliness' is likely to be here to cause trouble rather than to engage in respectful debate. And responses will reflect that.

Why’s Datun not PM yet?

Too much sense to apply for the job.

As @thebewilderness said on a different thread, it is a male dominance display.

So for deletion policy and purpose, MN are not caught between a rock and a hard place at all.

They will try and take over MN if the line is not held. It will be feminism first. The childbirth and pregnancy. Then something else. Then something else.

When FB groups about PCOS etc are being deliberately targeted by TRAs in the name of an imaginary transman (noting the imaginary rape accusations this week) there is no other conclusion you can draw. The offence being caused that does not even exist.

If a person find themselves communicating entirely in cliches like "right side of history" then maybe it's because they don't have any actual arguments.

Anita - the original Pan, thank you. It's been a while..

And of course: the wrong side of history? Nope, the right side of sanity.

In 'real life' I would of course wish to be polite to any person and use preferred pronouns (although I'm never doing that 'ze' thing).

If we were discussing a transwoman's handbag, yes 'she' would be appropriate, but that of course is not likely to happen on the FWR board. Instead, we discuss the material reality of biology, and imposing the use of incorrect pronouns in that context is simply wrong and coercive.

And make no mistake about it, nothing but complete capitulation to the demands of the TRAs will suffice.

Which is why we need to say no. I learned a long time ago that the only way to stand up to threatening, bullying behaviour is to face it head on. Mumsnet is being targetted. We are being targetted. I can't see any other way of doing this but facing it head on, for the users or for mumsnet.

MNHQ, even if you continue to heavily moderate the FWR board, the trolls will keep coming. If you shut down FWR, the trolls will start to police AIBU and the other boards. If you give in to these bastards they will never stop coming for you. They are on twitter, plotting, rejoicing at what is going on here.

High profile TRAs are actively campaigning against Mumsnet.

That is quite an extrordinary statement.

It starts with pronouns and ends with no longer being allowed to talk about the reality of living in a sexist world with a female-sexed body. There is no half way "polite" language that will satisfy these people because it's not about "feeling offended" at all, it's about wanting women to shut the fuck up.

Exactly.

And what MrPan said (are you the pan of old? Or a different pan?)

And Datun of course, and well, everybody who is arguing on the side of sanity, and freedom of speech and expression, and the right to use language with meaning. The right to use biological terms to describe our own bodies, our own experiences of being women.

It's the exact same sort of creeping boundary violation where if you give ground on one thing then the person pushing moves on to the next boundary that every women has experienced in a sexual context from a man at some point in her life, which is part of why people respond in such an "oh no you fucking don't, mate" way.

If you respond to an attempted boundary violation by giving ground then the other person learns that you will give ground if they push hard enough, and how much pressure it takes to make that happen. We're seeing all kinds of examples of that in this thread.

This thread has moved on but I’ve just been browsing active threads and there is one definitely deliberately goady thread aimed at SAHMs not working and complaining about Mondays. Certainly not making parents lives easier as is so often stated as the criteria for deletion. It has been reported but yet it rolls on. So no SophieMNHQ, goady posts aren’t always deleted. Perhaps SAHMs should identify as something else? That seems to be the new criteria for getting HQ to acknowledge you.

The misgendering thing is particularly problematic on an annonymous web site. In the old netty saying "We can all be dogs on the internet." So 'call me her coz I am telling you I am such' has reduced credibility.

I am extremely polite in RL ( I am told) and would not insist on referring to any transgendered person by anything other than their preferred pronoun.

HOWEVER...that does not extend to redesigning my intelligence in a way to 1.accommodate the belief that people can change sex, or 2. that once that change is claimed, this comes with a right to override the protected rights of women, and sex segregation overall.

So for deletion policy and purpose, MN are not caught between a rock and a hard place at all. There is the shiny principle of free speech, which MN is courageously upholding, and deletions for 'possibly offending the beliefs of others' would be fantastically stupid. MN don't delete for debating religous/spiritual in a robust way. This is no different.

Why’s Datun not PM yet?

And as Datun says, even this sort of "malicious obedience" won't work, because we've already seen that it starts with pronouns, then goes on to the words "man" and "woman", then the words "female" and "male" and ends with creationist-style "intelligent design" type re-writes of biology itself (cf another thread on here where a poster claiming to have a biology degree is throwing around words like "epigenetics" and "RNA" and thinking we're not noticing we're being bullshitted - fortunately, there is a real, professional career research geneticist on the thread who is able to explain the real science).

I have seen posts on here get deleted for using the phrase "male privilege" of a famous transwoman who has said things in the public domain (radio 4 to be precise) about finding women's leg hair disgusting. It starts with pronouns and ends with no longer being allowed to talk about the reality of living in a sexist world with a female-sexed body. There is no half way "polite" language that will satisfy these people because it's not about "feeling offended" at all, it's about wanting women to shut the fuck up.

The posters who liken this to a form of society-wide coercive control are spot on.

Datun, brilliantly articulated

Where Cady said
**

Oh jeez, apologies then. Obviously not had enough caffeine yet.
To be fair, that can be read two ways.

MATE links arms to sing We Will Overcome

There is a type of behavior that psychologists call malicious obedience, and that's what you tend to get when you force people to say things they don't believe. Datun's statement above about Susan and Susan's male entitlement is a perfect example.

Cady

Misgendering seems to be the sticking point.

Say there was a transwoman called Susan Jones. Who demanded access to female spaces that I disagreed with.

"Susan Jones is biologically male, she is a man, with a penis. She is demanding access to my changing room, knowing that her penis and her testicles would be making me uncomfortable. She has tweeted some offensive tweets. Being a man, she has male entitlement, and a man's point of view about what she considers womanhood".

That is the kind of post that you think is acceptable.

My question would be why? What on earth is the effing difference when I'm saying the person is a man in the same sentence as calling them she?

Other than a relentless determination to use a tiny part of equality law that doesn't even say what you think it says, in order to keep pushing the preferred pronoun in the face of an entire paragraph asserting the opposite of that pronoun.

It's not even pedantry. It's a determination to force women, inch by inch, to comply.

It's not even that it doesn't make sense. It doesn't, but it also shows no demonstration of the 'respect' that is constantly demanded.

I don't respect somebody on the basis that they have a medical condition called gender dysphoria. I might feel sorry for them, but it doesn't engender respect.

And I certainly don't respect somebody who ignores female boundaries, along with reality.

Claiming preferred pronouns should be a mark of respect is clearly wrong and an abject failure to understand what respect means.

It's a mark of politeness at best, but on these boards, given that the person is not actually standing in front of us, 99% of the time, it's a mark of forced compliance.

I can see this, most other women can see this.

I won't accept internal coercive control either, which some mod messages have been veering awfully close to. Still waiting for the update that will supposedly clarify policy, but frankly the whole tone with which commenters are being addressed is inappropriate. The explanation for why Uterati's comment was removed was the prose equivalent of sending a toddler to sit on the naughty step. The way in which MNHQ seems to view its relationship with commenters (but only on the feminism board) is heading in a direction that I'm amazed more people aren't kicking off about.

I realize that MNHQ is no doubt coming under lots of pressure from TRAs, but responding to that by treating women who make simple, obvious statements like "male humans can't become female humans" as the problem that needs to be managed is a pretty significant reversal.

I realize that MN is on the receiving end of a high intensity male dominance display.
I appreciate the space being provided for FWR.
I am extremely angry and I am not going to go away.

Same here. And I will not say the wrong number of fingers. And I do not accept that FWR should be subject to different moderating standards to other areas of MN. And I do not accept capitulation to external coercive control.

Sorry, MNHQ. But as others have said, the path of least resistance will not work for you here. It will never be enough.