Another breastfeeding one

I don’t think you understand. Your group is not regulated. You should probably stop thinking it is. You are giving advice in a personal capacity not a professional one, you’re not at work. Therefore your advice on the group is not regulated, no matter how many HCPs are admin. If you give wrong advice in the group, there’s no fallback because nobody will pick up on it through governance and safeguarding procedures

We aren't employed by them but we are insured by them and if we don't abide by their policies we lose our insurance and can't use the titles we trained for.

Whoever told you that?!
Law overrides policy. By law, being gender critical is protected. You absolutely don’t have to pretend women are men.

So then if we lose our title we then wouldn't be a group where all admin are trained and regulated

You aren’t regulated on the group now 🤣

Not everyone in the group identifies as female that I am very aware of, a lot of females also don't like or align with the word ladies and feel it's very classist and again a lot of grown adults don't want other adults to call them by their parental status or to be reduced solely down to their parental status..

I know I for one don't feel comfortable with other adults calling me mama.

Every single admin is trained and regulated by the organisation they trained with so yes the group as a whole needs to follow the rules and regulation set out by the organisations we all trained with 🤦🏼‍♀️

We aren't employed by them but we are insured by them and if we don't abide by their policies we lose our insurance and can't use the titles we trained for.

So then if we lose our title we then wouldn't be a group where all admin are trained and regulated 🤦🏼‍♀️

So you don’t even know if anyone wants this?

Whats wrong with saying “Hey ladies” or “Hey mamas?”

Language is important. Many of us refuse to erase women out of language, for good reason

So women, then

So the group itself isn’t professionally regulated?

Again all we have is your word for it. Nobody has to believe you. And frankly they’d be fools to take advice from Dr Facebook rather than professional advice in the appropriate setting.

Your workplaces can decide to be “inclusive in language”. They can’t make staff do it and they most certainly can’t make patients use inclusive language to others patients.

See the difference between a professional setting and a social media group?

We have to abide by that or we lose our status as a peer supporter

Actually workplaces cannot discriminate against staff who are gender critical and therefore would refuse to use gender neutral language. Sacking you would be illegal.

You most CERTAINLY don’t have to use it in your personal lives. Whatever made you think your peer support role was on the line if you didn’t toe the misogynistic line of “inclusive language” (aka inclusive unless you’re actually a woman who recognises sex not gender)

It requires the group as a whole to be inclusive or for us not to allow excluding of any minority groups including trans people.
The rules are there to see before anyone joins and it's not hard to write hey all instead of hey ladies to allow everyone to feel included and welcome.
When talking to someone on a 1:1 basis we absolutely use preferred pronouns for said individual and if a member is talking about themselves in a post they can use language that they wish for themselves. It's only on posts that address the whole group as a collective as over 57,000 members we won't assume every single person's gender identity and to use gendered language will exclude some people.

I already answered with no.

This is shockingly Orwellian but not surprising with recent TRA ideology pushes.

Does that actually require you to require all users of the group to use so called inclusive language?

Or that you should be okay with using preferred pronouns as a medical practitioner?

I also asked if any transmen had actually requested it?

Can you not see the utter nonsense inherent in having a baby whilst claiming to be a man?
And to appease these people, we have to stop calling ourselves women.
No fucking way.

It’s deliberate attempts at erosion of all sex based language. Once we don’t have the language then our sex based rights can more easily be removed. Some people might feel righteous about their attempts to #bekind but all they are doing is imposing their beliefs onto others and ultimately inadvertently undermining women’s rights. It’s not just about one FB group.

they aren't trying to include men. they're trying to include women who identify as men.

No. We are all regulated by the organisations we work with, we are insured by them and several years ago they all made the change to be inclusive in language. We have to abide by that or we lose our status as a peer supporter, we'd invalidate our insurance and not be allowed to practice.
So as an entire admin team trained by the organisations who govern us we had to be an inclusive group in order to remain open and to allow us to continue giving support.

You're wrong though, we've been open 8 years we've had this rule for many of them and we don't lose members in high amounts sorry to burst your bubble. The vast majority of members are inclusive.

For the love of God, nobody wants to “erase the existence” of trans people, stop your nonsense🙄
Refusing to call women and mothers women and mothers because someone in a breastfeeding group claims they’re not either of those things is not erasing anything, except perhaps women’s right to call themselves women.
You can champion that if you please, I certainly won’t.

Can I ask @STMWBec did transmen request these rules specifically - i.e. that general female forms of address weren't used?

Only if you believe in ‘gender’. I personally do not have a gender identity so I use sexed based language.

Cruelty is exactly right.

And it’s all very well saying “Our group our rulez bbz” but this treatment of women who don’t fall in line and obey is nothing short of misogynistic. Just own it, rather than claiming you care about women and just want to help.

The power trip is something else to be noted. A Facebook group is these people’s kingdoms and they like to lord over the peasants and put anyone in the stocks who falls out of line. Pathetic

Indeed.
Good to see so many women speaking up against the intolerant who police the language of others and do so much to dehumanise women.

There's a particular cruelty in demanding that woman stop using the language of women and motherhood - especially at a time when women are exhausted and vulnerable post birth and are then confronted with self important "experts" claiming that their newly acquired status of being a mother, mummy, mum, mom, mama is somehow phobic and exclusionary.

Apologies if this has already been linked but just in case it hasn't , there's a new women centred breast feeding support group set up by women who left the La Leche League after it started centring men with a fetish. It doesn't police women's language and is unashamedly women centred as opposed to political activist centred:

www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5343994-moma-breastfeeding

This is my thinking exactly. Its not something that's come up as an issue in my group and if it did there would need to be discussion amongst the facilitators as to how best to approach it but ultimately its then up to women whether or not they continue to engage as with anything else in life. I know women who wouldn't engage with groups that aren't inclusive as that's their viewpoint and that's what they look for from forums they engage with. People should be able to choose provided the information is laid out clearly at the very start which is has been so no surprises for anybody as to what to expect from the group.

Yes exactly

Being a new and/or breastfeeding mum is SUCH an emotional and difficult time. I remember it as just a total brain fog 24/7. The last thing new mums need is to mind their language and not refer to women as women in case it jaspers one random person who has mental health issues. I couldn’t think of anything less supportive.

I mean it’s their FB group, they can Stasi it all they want, but don’t complain and moan when you’re criticised and people are outraged by outrageous actions.

I'm not sure why this is causing such a heated debate.

If I was in such a breastfeeding group, I would just leave.

I don't agree with the de-feminising of language around such very female experiences, BUT it's not my Facebook group and the admins are within their rights to moderate it as they see fit.

It's Facebook, the number of groups around is pretty large. Surely there is enough room for all kinds of breastfeeding support groups, even ones that use dubious language.

It's important to be able to assume people are mums in a breastfeeding support group because these groups are designed for mutual emotional and practical support, fostering a shared experience of motherhood and breastfeeding challenges.

I think it’s shortsightedness not to see the damage of banning ‘hi mums’. Yes, this may be just one of many bf groups and people can choose to leave but imagine if they all made you feel like you don’t belong and it’s not a safe space, exclusive to mothers?! Where is this going? How many people are suddenly feeling less distressed, having given a birth as transmen, from these talk bans, while so many women are being undermined and denied an exclusive, safe space for mums.

It must be SO odd to be offended at being referred to as a female, and then go be pregnant, give birth and breastfeed. How do these women square those feelings?!

Much like I don’t tell an anorexic person that they are fat like they think, I don’t lie to someone with gender dysphoria. Those people need support, not lies.

It's so exclusionary and authoritarian.

People are free to use their own language, what they can't do is police everyone else's. Absolutely INSANE that they think it's ok to try and police a completely normal casual form of address!

This group will quickly become irrelevant and only a hanging out place for fetishists. Because they're excluding most women.

You might.
i don’t.

I won’t be gaslit into thinking using the term “woman” for women causes so much distress that it’s ME who needs to change.

Being told to change my language to pander to men triggers ME.

My question is why you want to make that harder for them than it necessarily needs to be and why you'd want to isolate them because it's more important to you to be right and to see your own view point enforced and to enact your own right to call someone something even when it distresses them, than it is to see people access support in a way they can engage with it.

Because I don’t tell lies. I won’t call women men, and I won’t call men women. I won’t be bullied by the #BeKind crowd into changing the language of fact. Of that distressed people it’s for them to deal with, not me.