Hey everyone,
Thanks to all for your posts on this issue - we appreciate them, and have read through them all in order to take everyone’s views into account. We’ve had a lengthy discussion - several, in fact - at MNHQ on how to move forward re transphobia on Mumsnet, and this is where we’ve landed.
Firstly: we need to hold up our hands. Mumsnet is a general interest site; we moderate across a wide host of issues on a daily basis, and can’t claim to be experts in any one field. As a result, our policy in terms of Talk Guidelines and what we deem deletable has always been inclusive rather than exclusive: we find it more sustainable to operate under broad principles of mutual respect and courtesy, rather than specifying what users can and can’t say on any given topic.
Having thought about it, therefore, we’ve decided we want to apply those same broad principles when it comes to transphobia, rather than coming up with a “Mumsnet” definition of what transphobia is, or with a list of specific deletable transgressions. We realise that several of you have asked for just such a list, on the very reasonable grounds that transgenderism is, for some, an area about which they know little, and it would therefore be helpful to have a clear set of “you can say this/you can’t say that” guidelines. Our reasons for not wanting to go down that route are as follows:
- we don’t do this for any other type of deletable offence - racism, sexism, homophobia, disabilism or ageism
- we’re poorly placed to do it. We can’t claim to be experts in transgenderism; therefore, for us to come up with a definition of what we believe it to be would, we feel, be presumptuous
- part of the reason we haven’t done so for any other “ism” is because it’s impossible to make such a list definitive. For every ruling we make (“it’s transphobic to say X”) 3/10/a thousand more questions will arise (“what about if you say Y?”)
- such a list wouldn’t take any account of context. As I said above, many of the people who suggested a definition/list would be useful did so because of the lack of knowledge and clarity around the issue. Having given this some thought, and in particular, having read the recent thread on the subject in Chat, it seems to us that folk might very reasonably ask questions around transgenderism that are purely in the spirit of enquiry and in no way intended to give offence but which might, under specific guidelines on wording, be construed as transphobic. We’ve no wish at all to stifle discussion of an issue that is, rightly, gaining visibility - in fact, we think it’d be counterproductive.
Currently, we don’t specifically mention transphobia in the list of offences we delete for in the Talk Guidelines. We’ll amend that now, so it’s spelled out to anyone using the website that transphobia is not welcome on Mumsnet. We’ll also change the Lesbian and Gay Parents topic to LGBT Parents, as suggested, to make it consistent with our LGBT Children topic.
Ultimately, we think one of the real strengths of MN is that it allows users to have robust disagreements about difficult topics, but without hate speech, and without comments that are just plain mean or personally directed at other posters. If there are any posts that you think we need to look at please flag them up by hitting the 'Report' button and we'll always take a look.
Apols for the essay. Hope all of this makes sense, and you can follow our reasoning on it. Please let us know what you think and as ever, thanks for the input.
MNHQ
