Why is Mumsnet so GC?

Yep

Yes! Absolutely. They have more freedoms than MN too in that they keep up a running Trans Cringe thread that shines a lot of sunlight on some of the worst male offensive behavior.

But the best part of it, I believe, is they examine a lot from a Black woman's perspective and they are fine with robust debate. Like MN, Lipstick Alley has many other topics from current events, music, style, politics, finance, hair, celebrity interest, etc. which shows that women are full humans who can take an interest in GC issues as well as what is a good 30 minute dinner recipe.

Most people in the world are gc imo. Lots of places on the internet are just dominated by the extremely woke.

I agree with all your main points, but the history geek in me feels compelled to point out that the English Civil War was a far more radical overthrow of the established order than the American revolution. Light on feminism though 😉

I also would say, and maybe some would disagree but I will stand by it, that the UK has a very strong root in a kind of small c conservatism. The same reasons there was never a revolution as France or the US, or that there has long been a tendency to a kind of soft practical empiricism, the influence of a legal system based on a common law approach, the tendency to euro-skepticism. Even some of the leftist movements have tended to be very grass-roots. Localism has always had a strong hold, more than anarchism.

Countries like Canada and NZ have been very affected by the different style of constitution and legal thinking which gives more power to documents, and tend to give the judiciary power over Parliamentary structures. It's more like a European kind of top down system.

I would say that radical feminism takes a traditional Marxist structural analysis where men are considered the oppressor class, and women the oppressed class, and posits this is on the basis of the material fact of their female bodies. In the most strict or classical versions, it calls this set of material disadvantages for women, or advantages for male bodied people, "the patriarchy." That's a set of materially identifiable causes.

Intersectional feminism is to radical feminism as neo-Marxism is to classical Marxism. In neo-Marxism it is no longer class that is the important category - and class understood as a description as a material relation rather than some kind of social construct. Instead it's immaterial, culturally constructed identity groupings, like race or "queerness" or whatever else you can come up with.

Similarly in intersectional feminism, instead of the physicality of the female body compared to the male body being the cause of the oppression of women, it is the identity/social construct of gender.

I do think there is a linking idea between these, because you will find many many people who are not intersectional or neo-Marxists, and may indeed see themselves as radical feminists, who have adopted an immaterial and almost spiritualized concept of "the patriarchy". It's become a kind of cause in itself rather than a description of a set of material causes. (It's a bit like the concept of the Invisible Hand in capitalism or the Treasury of Merit - concepts meant to describe a chain of causation are used as causative.)

You can see a similar change in the way the word racism is used that also is a mediator between what used to be called the civil rights discourse and modern "antiracist" discourse.

I think it's a very easy thing to do when you adopt these kinds of designations for disparate material causes, or brain tends to begin to think of them as a thing. I increasingly think this is a link between these kinds of traditional Marxist material analysis and the neo-versions which use that concept to create further, often completely imaginary, intellectual structures.

👆also massively agree with above. Gender bending has always been common in Uk even when a kid. On tv and in music. One of my kids has always been very GNC but do I think that makes them the opposite sex? No I don't!

I have been on Mumsnet since 2006 ish but only started reading the FWR boards about 4 years ago. It is an amazing space. I work in construction industry and pretty much all the people I meet in day to day life are GC. Most won't say anything out loud - esp the men. I know a few older trans people who are all GC but they don't do online forums. I know people on the 'be kind' camp but many have changed their minds as the demands become more extreme. Nobody I know cares what people wear but they care if you say it makes you something you are not. If you have children at school, especially teens, you realise that the gender identity issue is everywhere amongst young people and being hard pushed online. They seem to be slowly rejecting it - thank goodness

Agree and possibly our cultural context too- the fact that our media stars (David Bowie, Boy George, Annie Lennox etc) as well as our fashion was more gender non-confirming back in the 70s and 80s- I’m not sure that was necessarily going on to the same degree in the US at that time. Gender bending was cool and groovy without anyone having to pretend they were the opposite sex. We’ve completely regressed from that now, but us older TERF islanders remember a time when the UK felt quite progressive and free in terms of ‘gender’.

Thank you! Yes! Sorry, should have Googled the title before posting.

Great post. Never really expected to read the phrase ‘shoehorn penises’ but if made me guffaw so thank you for that!

You might be thinking of "The politicisation of Mumsnet" by Sarah Pedersen.

https://rgu-repository.worktribe.com/preview/957922/PEDERSEN%202020%20The%20politicization%20of%20Mumsnet.pdf

This section was always full of radical feminists, which is really all GC Feminism is.

This is such bollocks. I don't consider myself a radical feminist but I know that it's incredibly unfair to allow women and girls to compete in sport against biological males, and that it's totally unacceptable to allow biological males into spaces for vulnerable women and girls like rape crisis services. It's not effing rocket science.

(In the context of online content)

Because many male TRAs are also very IT literate. For example iirc Aimee challenor worked for? Was a regular mod on? Reddit. They've often been transed due to online interactions and are heavily invested in the online world.

Timing. My ds was born early in 2004 and I came to MN a few weeks later struggling with breastfeeding. So my son is the same age as the Gender Recognition Act.

I was one of a big surge of new users who arrived that year partly due to the publicity about SWMNBN (a popular childcare guru sued MN for ?libel I think because some posters were extremely uncomplimentary about her methods. I'm so socialised by the financial risk to the site I still don't want to name her!)

MN still felt small then. It was British and practical and you could find a range of views. The site and users overall were robustly pro-vaccination (it was the early days of Wakefield's mission to destroy measles immunity) but there were users here who were certain their children had been vaccine damaged, and on the whole we all coexisted.

Also it was quite lefty then. Soft left, but it was born out of metropolitan New Labour circles and it showed.

So there we all were, dealing with the shitshow of early parenthood and the fun if what felt at times a bit Iike a group of friends. There were live birth threads and physical meetups and present swaps and sharing in joys and sorrows, and it was feminist in a very simple uncomplicated way. We discussed whether it was a mistake to name it Mumsnet because it's important for men to participate in parenthood. And we kept on sharing and consciousness raising and it got both bigger and more commercial, and feminist in more detail as our children got older and we got grumpier

Then when my son was a teenager I went to work in a specialist service which was partly for trans people, and like a lot of parents of teenagers at that time encountered men telling me they were completely female and expecting me to teach them how to be feminine - the idea that I could or would do that just because I'm a woman made me so angry. Then the daughters of friends identifying as men, alongside neurodiversity, bullying and eating disorders, and we saw the data showing an explosion in numbers among girls nationwide. And the same year my husband's health finally collapsed and he died, there was going to be a law change that made being a woman something men could just say they were. A total elimination of any concept that being a woman was an objective reality that meant something. And I, for one, had had enough.

It's unfortunate for trans people that activists have diluted the term 'transphobia' to such an extent that many will now assume it means 'accidental misgendering' rather than active discrimination, and dismiss it.

Yes, I have had quite a few trans patients, and some describe really disturbing encounters. A certain type of bloke seems to be driven crazy by anyone gender non-conforming.

The saddest patients are the ones who don't understand why they have been singled, out because they have convinced themselves they pass. (I'm mainly talking about naive teens/early 20s)

My kids go to school in a predominantly working class area and I agree with you and PP.

I imagine it is usually the same 'white van man' who might shout comments out of the car window at women, or others, on the street.

I once saw a young man wearing a long skirt walking up the street towards the university and a car honked its horn at him, for example. Other people did 'double takes', looking back at him as he walked past.

When I see someone who is presenting as the opposite sex, that is what I think ( "That is a man presenting in women's clothing". "That is a young woman presenting in stereotypical male ways, or who has facial hair") I don't tend to think of them as 'trans'; because to my mind 'trans' is a contemporary social construct not a 'real thing'.

Obviously I never comment that a man is obviously a man, or say loudly " my god, look at the size of his feet in those silver Birkenstocks" - but that is certainly what I'm thinking. And I'm sure everyone else is too. You can't help but notice the incongruences - that is just human nature.

Reasonable. I feel the same way about abuse shouted at women at bus stations and stage whispered sneers about our appearance.

Do you think it is solely people with a declared GC perspective who engage in the behaviour you describe? Or are they the sort of people whom my mother would have described as "pass remarkers" and always have something negative to say rather than keeping it to themselves?

What I think is a real credit to the many many intelligent women particularly on the sex and gender (previously FWR) boards is how they anticipated a lot of what has actually now happened.

The it will never happen thread is particularly instructive - https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/3348290-It-will-never-happen-resource-thread

I think Mumsnet is reflective of most of the nations views. It was, and this is a credit to Mumsnet, the only place that women could really talk about this online (but our speech was heavily monitored before the Forstater case).

The TRAs really did a great job with the 'no debate - you bigot' theme that was going for many years.

By unpleasant, I’ve seen abuse shouted at TW at bus stations or sneering about what they look like in stage whispers so they hear. That’s what I was thinking of.

I know there are other aspects that TRAs may think is “unpleasant” like not allowing a TW to attend a women only refuge and in that I’d prefer that person to receive suitable help elsewhere as a TW isn’t a woman.

Even before the trans issue became a big deal the MN feminist board leant more towards radical feminism and the idea that gender was an oppressive construct. So it was a natural progression for this to become a predominately GC space (helped by the fact that MNHQ resisted the pressure to shut down GC voices).

This speaks to a broader pattern which is that, for reasons I don't fully understand, a strand of feminism rooted in the radicalism of the second wave survived on into the 21st century in the UK despite apparently dying out everywhere else.