Feminism Boards

[Superlambaanana]

Whats the difference between the Feminism Chat board and the Feminism Sex and Gender board?

There's a thread on the Chat board about the Girl Guides' trans policy- surely that should be on the Sex and Gender board? And I see threads about discrimination against women on the Sex and Gender board which aren't related to gender (in the trans sense).

Maybe it doesn't matter.

Or maybe the Sex and Gender board isn't intended to be exclusively about trans issues as feminism is obviously a sex based issue.

Or maybe the trans issue is now so entangled that it's impossible to have a discussion about feminism without referring to it, but I do hope that's not the case!

Wouldn't it make more sense to have a board for trans related discussions and a separate one for all other feminist discussions?

The trans issue takes up a lot of airtime here and seems to be drowning out other discussions about feminism- discrimination, women's rights, women's history, feminist literature etc etc. I'd welcome a break from the constant head fuck of the trans debate which I believe is, in itself, a form of discrimination against women as it is forcing us to spend so much time talking about men's desired rights!

Not sure how you can talk about feminism and women's rights if you can't accurately define the term women. There's no reason to have two boards as far as I can tell.

Chat is aimed at non 'gender' issues, so probably any that focus primarily on this could be reported and moved to the sex and gender discussions if you reported them.

If you want more discussion of other topics, just start a thread.

Well I think that most of the people commenting on the feminist boards on MN are quite clear about what a woman is, and that a woman is definitely not a man.

So a separate board for feminist topics would assume that base position and allow discussions to get beyond the ridiculous diversion of pondering what a woman is or isn't. That discussion could be isolated on a separate board. I would welcome that as I could avoid that board some of the time to reduce my level of anger about the trans debate!

Well Chat currently has discussions on the Tavistock, Girl Guides' trans policy, a detransition AMA and a thread on women being called 'gestational carriers' to name just a few from near the top. It's clearly not being used for non gender discussions!

Well, if you want, report them and see if MN will move them.
Feminism Chat will become quieter though.

Threads are often in the wrong place, look at all the ones in AIBU or the main Chat that would be better under specific boards.

You could otherwise just ignore threads you aren't interested in, or as I said before, start your own if you have things to discuss.

I believe the person who campaigned for and requested that the 'trans' [whatever that is] issue was sidelined to a seperate board, because they were sick of the 'trans' [whatever that is] issue being discussed could do with someone to talk to as their utopia of a non 'trans' [whatever that is] board never materialised and they spend all their time banging on about how women are all doing it wrong and not to their standards so maybe hit them up directly?

Back in the days when us Wumben/Wimpund/Woomuds (take your pick) we’re told we couldn’t discuss our womanly things on the main board, we were siphoned off to a naughty step - hence the split in two - but we don’t always do as we’re told, see?

This.

I think Sex and Gender (also known as the naughty corner) was created as a separate place for those pesky trans discussions but MNHQ didn’t want to label it as the ‘anti-trans board’. So they called it ‘Sex and Gender’ instead.

But some/most/all of us pesky feminists think that sex and gender is the reason we need feminism. Therefore sex and gender is relevant to and informs all feminism discussions.

Also, there MNHQ has a history of splitting the FWR boards. We used to have Feminist Theory and, I think, Feminist Chat(?) before they were merged and Sex and Gender was created. One board is always quieter than the other.

It is almost like someone is trying to police what the feminists can and should be allowed to talk about.

The Sex & Gender section was created because people were getting tired of the number of trans threads. Not that it's not an important discussion, but it felt like people were deliberately spamming the forum with new trans threads to get people's attention. At one point every single thread aside from two was about trans stuff.

So they created a new section but some people still create trans thread in Feminism Chat and AIBU to try and draw people's attention.

I think the gender issue is quite a polarising one. There are plenty of women that understand it's importance, but also recognise that it doesn't really feature so prominently in their day to day life so much as things like plain old sexism - workplace discrimination/men not pulling their weight with the chores etc/thinking women are the default domestic servants.

And then you have the feminists who think they're the last bastion of defence fighting back the transpocalypse and humbly refer to themselves as spartans.

I think part of the issue was that it was becoming difficult to have a discussion without somebody trying their level best to somehow shoehorn the gender debate into it, often to the collapse of the original discussion. Most often the derailers were entirely unrepentant as they were unilaterally focused on the trans issue.

Posters were told to 'create threads to discuss the issues you want', but these threads would then end up pushed off the first page in record time due to all the people intentially creating trans threads. You had no chance if you were just posting organically.

And if you did create a thread it would then be derailed into a trans discussion a lot of the time. So mumsnet created a separate section where posters could declare themselves Spartacus to their heart's content.

So if I'm understanding this correctly (I'm relatively new to MN - less than a year) the Feminist Chat board was getting taken over with trans threads so a separate board was created for trans threads. But it has ended up being about all types of feminist topics, including trans discussions. While the original Chat board is still being taken over by trans threads.

Hmmm. Seems eerily reminiscent of the whole trans thing and its determination to take over just about bloody everything.

Frankly, trans informs everything feminism.

I've had a look in chat occasionally, things like maternity discrimination, workplace sexism, like that.

While all these things are relevant and important and awful to go through, what is going to happen when inevitably a transwoman takes on your role and other roles like yours. They wont need maternity, so we will slowly lose any maternity benefits, they wont suffer sexism, so slowly sexism won't exist.
Employers will see the wonders of hiring more and more trans women. They will get there quota of women, maybe even more women than men, brownie points galore, yet not have to find maternity cover or maternity pay.

Some women think it's just about toilets. Its not.

If woman includes men and women then it's pretty hard to be specific about any other rights.

It's pretty hard to be specific about for example cervical cancer when the charities and the NHS who get funds to deal with cervical cancer cannot say the word 'woman'.

It is all related and interwoven and I'd happily never hear the word 'trans', whatever it actually means, ever again.

MN got lobbied to remove all trans discussions to a separate board so that the issue of sex and gender wouldn't detract from the REAL issues of feminism (should I take my husband's name / shave my legs / knit a pink pussy hat).

None / very few of the FWR regulars wanted this but it was forced on us. The idea was we would creep into a corner and then die.

It didn't, because the fact is that the discussion of sex and gender ideology turned out to be much more engaging and popular because it impacts on women's day to day lives and is a current political hot potato. It's quite hard to generate many discussions about abortion, contraception, women's representation in politics etc (ie the Proper Feminist Issues that the scolds tell us we should be discussing) when we have those things in the UK and they aren't really very controversial.

People post non-trans issues to the Sex and Gender thread because Sex and Gender is the work of feminism shock horror.

I'm a bit depressed to hear MNers push the idea that feminism's only modern purpose in the UK is to fight the trans lobby. Yes, it's an important and immediate facet of women's rights, but there are plenty of men out there who don't identify as women who are perpetrating violence against women; indirectly perpetuating inequality; and directly conspiring to keep women down.

Trans definitely does not 'inform everything feminism' and to suggest so implies the trans lobby have far more power than they actually do. Most serious, right thinking people are not taken in by the inane ranting of cartoon profiled, multi hair coloured man babies with a weird sexual fetish.

I also don't believe trans women will eventually take over from women in the workplace because employers will want to save on maternity cover. To suggest nonsense like this does a disservice to the genuine concerns about single sex spaces and women's sports, and gives non-feminists a reason to ridicule feminism and perpetuate the hysterical trope.

Maybe MN's disproportionate level of debate on trans issues is the problem here. MN is giving airtime to an issue which might be better dealt with another way - for example, at the collective level through legislation, and at the individual level through shunning those who exhibit unacceptable behaviour.

Then you are naive.

We all thought sports would be sacrosanct, umm no.
We all thought rape counselling would be sacrosanct, nope.
We all thought hospital wards would be single sex for obvious reasons, nah.
Not a one of us imagined prisons would end up mixed sex, yet here we are.

Ohhhhh OP. Sweet, innocent child of spring.

Come back when you’ve been around the feminist block a few times.

Currently observing my daughters U13 girls cricket team select a boy named Matilda, thus pushing a girl out of the squad.

I know, I know tHIs nEVeR hAPpEns.

You might want to let Anneleise Dodds know that!

As that's exactly where she was yesterday.

If you don't think that men's rights obliterating every inch of modern day 'feminism' then you are seriously in need of more time on the Sex and Gender board.

I'm a bit depressed to hear MNers push the idea that feminism's only modern purpose in the UK is to fight the trans lobby.

Where did you hear that?
Every feminist I know is campaigning against porn and surrogacy, raising awareness of women's rights in Afghanistan / Iran / Latin America etc, pushing for more rape convictions, campaigning for DV and rape shelters, fighting MVAWG, supporting women in the workplace - yes GC feminists. We don't spend all our waking hours raging about Drag Race you know.

The interests you outlined in the OP 'feminist literature, feminist history' sound like you don't really have a handle on contemporary feminist battlegrounds.

Maybe MN's disproportionate level of debate on trans issues is the problem here. MN is giving airtime to an issue which might be better dealt with another way - for example, at the collective level through legislation, and at the individual level through shunning those who exhibit unacceptable behaviour.

Firstly MN doesn't post anything - it hosts a site and the users decide what to discuss - and trans issues are discussed because users want to have that conversation. MN was for many years the only space on the internet where it could be debated.

I'm not even going to give the second part of that paragraph the dignity of a response. But maybe you want to reflect on throwing around the term 'hysterical' and scolding us about how we're not feministing right.

@FKAT what an utterly patronising response! I'm asking a genuine question, to which I'm told the trans debate is basically all there is for feminists ("trans informs everything feminism"), then I'm chastised for suggesting that perhaps trans is not the only issue relevant to women.

You accuse me of scolding you about not "feminising right" while your entire post is scolding me for not feminising right! Are you for real?!

OP, you have come onto a board and started scolding posters who have been discussing a range of issues, including but not only trans, for years! Perhaps you should have spent more time reading some threads first?

Can you reference exactly where I have been 'scolding' anyone? Are you inferring that from me saying I find it depressing that some people have said trans is the only feminist issue worth talking about?

I wouldn't say Feminism Chat is overrun with trans stuff tbh. A lot of posters left or hid the Feminism section (you can hide topics so you won't see them) as they felt it had become a bit monotonous. Hence, it's now a shadow of what it once was.

People always say this isn't the case but if you read the threads from the time discussing it you'll see it very much was.

I'm sort of in the middle in that I lean towards GC views but day to day it's barely on my radar. A lot of GC feminists seem to think that the trans lobby are going to take over the world but I don't really see this happening. Men competing in women's sports is a joke but if you look at the article comments they are literally always 99% against it.

When it becomes more widespread than the odd bloke competing as a woman then I think there will be increasing backlash. However, I'm not convinced there are all that many blokes that want to compete as women tbh. It's shocking that any have been allowed but largely they seem to be lone weirdos.

People are not going to let a small minority of nutters take over the world. It's just that the general public haven't really addressed it yet because in day to day life it's a fringe concern, especially in comparison to things like the COL increase and the financial fallout from Covid etc.

Aside from the sports lunacy it's mainly just twitter squabbling.

Not all that many blokes...

https://womenssportspolicy.org/253-male-victories-in-female-sports/

Problem is that most of the people supporting the trans lobby and advocating for general wokeness are also female. Aside from a few woke beardy blokes the vast majority of men couldn't care less about the gender debate.

And feminists have made it very clear that men's issues are for men to sort out, so men similarly don't seem to be rushing to help in this instance as it doesn't really affect them - for obvious reasons, there's no influx of biological women wanting to take on male boxing champs etc.