Thoughts on MNHQ's response to the Spartacus thread

[OlennasWimple]

As the Spartacus thread is about to reach capacity, here's a new thread to discuss MNHQ's response to the issues raised on that thread and in a few other places over the last week or so.

is lesphobic to insist that a lesbian likes penis. Feck off with that shite.
Add message | Report | Message poster KateMumsnet (MNHQ) Tue 30-Aug-16 21:08:00
Hello all

Thanks for all your input on this - we've been listening and thinking hard.

Couple of quick points to clear up: it's actually not the case that people have been banned solely for misgendering - it will have been part of a broader discussion here about whether that poster is able to stick to the rules generally.

We must admit to being slightly taken aback at being cast, by some, as the evil slave-baiting Roman republic in this grin - as lots of you have pointed out, Mumsnet remains one of the few places where these issues can be discussed at all. It would have been much, much easier (both in terms of the resource and the toll on our moderators' sanity!) to shut down the debate as others have done, but instead we are working hard to find a realistic balance between free speech and being a space which welcomes everyone.

From our perspective, the whole issue is pretty much covered by our Talk Guidelines. If people are using sex-at-birth pronouns to provoke, inflame, or belittle, then that's against the rules and will usually have to go. If it happens as part of an otherwise broadly respectful (even if heated) discussion, we look at it in that context and take a view.

Some of you have pointed out a disjunct between allowing posts which mirror mainstream scientific thinking, while asking MNers not to describe a trans woman as 'he'. We can see your point on this,and also accept that there is a fair amount of dodgy stuff on the trans side that can rightly be described as anti-feminist and regressive - but what we'd ask you to think about is the impact on the parent who's not an activist, and likely isn't even posting, but whose adult child is transitioning, or who is doing so themselves. Would they feel belittled, mocked or attacked? Would they think Mumsnet was not for them? If so, we're going to have to remove it. It's a fudge, but it's the best we can do at this stage.

In all but the most extreme headline-grabbing cases, we do think it's possible to debate the core principles without referring to individuals in a way which will cause hurt. Most of you have said that when talking to a trans person face-to-face you wouldn't insist on using birth pronouns or names - and generally, on this and other issues, we encourage people to treat others with the same courtesy they'd use in real life. For every MNer who posts on a thread there are likely to be ten who are lurking - statistically, some of those will be trans or love someone who is, and we need to take account of them too.

We hope that makes our thinking a bit clearer overall. Do continue to tell us your thoughts - it's probably unrealistic to think that this issue will be quickly resolved here or across society as a whole, but it would be brilliant if MN could be part of the solution, we think.

MNHQ

The "but intersex..." argument is more than irrelevant to any discussion of transgender ideology. It's plain dishonest.

agreed prawn good blog that one! put simply for intersex people and those genetic sexual disorders they have physical markers/abnormalities that can be tested and/or observed.

For trans people it is, to put it bluntly, all in the mind.

Indeed. As are the people who try to appropriate the struggles of women with conditions like PCOS to try to lend credence to this dubious idea that sex is a spectrum.

One of my oldest friends has PCOS. She also has a child. Intersex my arse.

PCOS is a hormone imbalance. Women are still genetically female.

It's the same way men can have hormone imbalances, grow breast tissue and are genetically male.

Yeah, I've got a mate with hypospadias. Causes him great distress. He has issues urinating and can't have PIV sex because it hurts.

When he was little a doctor told his mum that nothing could be done. But that was 30 years ago. I've encouraged him to seek advice but he's too shy/humiliated. I only know about it because he got hog whimpering drunk and confided.

for your mate, Prawn. My DS has hypospadias. I agonised over whether to get it treated or not - treatment is essentially a cosmetic op, and who wants to put their child through that? On the other hand, the psychological knock-on effects can be immense. The sort of issues your friend has seem common. Every single man I talked to about it said "god yes, get the op done" because they all knew boys who'd been bullied mercilessly, who'd grown into men who felt too embarrassed to form relationships (or in some cases couldn't have PIV because of the severity of the condition). But I still wonder if I made the right decision - there's a thread on whether male circumcision should be re-named male genital mutilation at the moment, and I'm feeling really upset, because I do worry about loss of sensation when DS is an adult.

But the thing is, in no way is this "intersex". It's a birth defect of the penis. He's still a little boy. He still has testicles and presumably when grown will be able to father children. (Incidentally I have PCOS!) I get really upset and angry by having what's actually a problematic medical condition (in fact 2, counting my PCOS) appropriated for someone else's batshit political extremism.

Gonna I just looked up hypospadias. for you and your son. I'm sure you made the right decision, and you certainly made it in good faith. Circumcision is a hot button issue right now, but a lot of the time it's MRAs trying to make a false equivalence with FGM because they're so desperate to prove that men are really the oppressed ones. My dad and brother were both circumcised due to the same medical problem, and as far as I'm aware it's not caused either of them any problems.

Yes, my SIL has PCOS and the ordeal she went through trying to get pregnant was awful - first an MC, then Clomid for a year, which made her gain tons of weight and gave her terrible mood swings, then IVF which thankfully worked. She has suffered so much and it makes me furious to see TAs - usually male - appropriating her condition to use it as some kind of political football.

It's interesting to read up to date info about how a child with this condition is being treated, Gonna. So sorry you're both having to deal with this.

I suspect they've made great strides in dealing with this. Waiting to see how it affects your little boy is what I'd do too. He can always have surgery later, whereas you can't undo surgery.

My friend's problem has its roots in spina bifida, which from reading round is far from common. Not sure whether the pain during sex is due to his nervous system being a bit screwed (to use a technical term). Hypospadias isn't normally painful, is it?

He's hardly ever had sex, despite being in his 40s. Gets out of it by telling the other blokes that he only fancies women that everyone can see are way out of his league. So sad, because he'd make a lovely DH/DF.

Prawn - sadly DS has already had surgery (if I was doing it again, knowing what I do now, I think I'd hold off...) I did wait till he was old enough for surgery to be done by the plastic surgery team rather than the urologist, and insisted they try to save as much of the foreskin as possible.

In retrospect, I don't think it's well handled by the NHS. One thing I would change is the way they handle consultations. Consultations are always held with the child present - which I think on the whole is good medical practice for most conditions. But I wanted to ask detailed questions about future sexual function etc. which you can't do in front of your pre-school child and felt I was really hampered in this. It is something I worry about. There seems to be relatively little in the way of follow-up studies of sexual performance in the medical literature (and a horrendous number of scare-mongering sites out there - but it's one of those things I suspect where the internet functions as an amplifier for those who are really unhappy with their outcomes, and we don't hear from the men for whom everything is fine). It's a remarkably common birth defect - about 1 in 300 - which means there must be, what, 100,000 men/boys in the UK with it. I try to adopt the same attitude I do with circumcision - in the US until recently male circumcision was pretty much universal, and as far as I'm aware, most adult male Americans manage to have perfectly satisfactory sex lives.

Oh, and thanks, Micro for your kind words too.

Both my sons have been circumcised as young adults, oddly for completely different reasons, Gonna. They (and their sexual function) seem fine. I know it's not quite the same, but it's hopeful.

Have you tried ringing your consultant's secretary and booking a phone consultation to ask about the sexual angle? Would've thought that was a perfectly reasonable ask.

Just going back to the term 'Cis', I find it deeply offensive because it carries more than a nodding glance of reference to the word 'cissy'. Cissy refers to femininity in a negative way and links it to characteristics such as weakness, cowardlyness and feebleness. It seems like yet another way of suggesting that born women are doing femininity wrong and that it is only perfected in the hands of trans women rather than the weak pathetic 'Cis' woman.

I don't like "cis" but there's no connection between the term and the word "cissy".

Cis is a term used in science to mean on the same side of, and is used as the opposite of trans. An example might be cisalpine as opposed to transalpine, so this side of the alps versus across the alps.

Trans activists use "cis" to define men as well as women, and talk about cis people, though they seem to use it more often about women. I think this is because they know men are unlikely to give two shits, whereas trans allies, who are often women, will eagerly nod their heads along to this nonsense.

Telling women they're cis means telling us we totes go along with all the harm gender does women. Added to that is the manipulative head-fuckery of a group of men insisting that cis women are privileged over their entitled arses.

For these reasons nearly everyone I've seen commenting on MN hates cis, and there have been calls for it to be banned.

Oh boy, a man has probably arrived! Sounding quite like an MRA!

This is a quote from the fuckwad who 'invented' the autogynaephilia typology.
If you are hitching your wagons to him, then I'm happy to hitch mine to MNHQs and to transwomen, who are women, born into the wrong body.

Nobody is born in the wrong body. It's a psychological disorder.

Those of us born female and who identify as female don't have to be selfish with womanhood. The bile on this thread "the Y chromosome begs to differ, they aren't women" is just disgusting.

Oh noes! How many times are women called selfish by men who are entitled to sex? How many times are women called selfish by men in order to guilt trip them? So yeah. LOL at that lame attempt.

Guess what dude? We women are not buying this 'selfish' crap because we know it's based on gender training where females are taught to give and give and give at their own peril. Not exactly an argument dude. Nobody identifies as female. You ARE born female. And for the 12,385th time: males are not females.

"The analogous term autoandrophilia refers to a person assigned female at birth who is sexually aroused by the thought or image of being a man.[34] It was classified as a type of transvestic fetishism in a proposed revision to the DSM-5[35] but not included in the final version. Less work has been done on autoandrophilia,[36] and in an interview with Vicee^, Blanchard stated "I proposed it simply in order not to be accused of sexism, because there are all these women who want to say women can rape too, women can be pedophiles too, women can be exhibitionists too. It’s a perverse expression of feminism, and so, I thought, let me jump the gun on this. I don’t think the phenomenon even exists."[37]"

There we have it. Your buddy Blanchard says it's a sexual fetish and also that women, bless their little aprons can't be pedophiles (sic) or rape.

Women are rarely pedophiles. Women also don't rape because rape has a specific definition I suspect was the case when this was written. Rape is penile penetration and since females don't have penises, they can't legally rape.

Not complicated. Your tone is pathetic and I won't be told I'm selfish for wanting my rights and privacy respected.

Bloody hell....

www.slate.com/blogs/outward/2016/07/19/there_s_no_such_thing_as_a_male_body.html

"At birth, we classify infants as male or female based solely on the appearance of their external genitalia. Notably, this classification serves population control and surveillance and not medical purposes. The medical experts I have spoken with could not identify a single medical purpose for assigning sex at birth and explain that the components of sex are far more complex than just external genitalia and include, at least, chromosomes, genes, hormones, internal genitalia, gender identity, and secondary sex characteristics."

What a total load of bollocks! Well, 2 of them on most boy babies, anyway. Slate is a bit of a trans cheerleader, publisher of such gems as Is It Ever OK to Cast a Cisgender Actor in a Transgender Role? so we know where they're coming from. (Answer: of course not, you bigot!)

This reminds me of the very young SJWs who say no one can tell whether they're truly male or female because they haven't had medical tests... Trying to pull that shit on MN, where reproductive sex is something of a specialist subject, isn't going to get them anywhere fast.

God, Itsall, I've been reading that article and although I should be used to it by now, I still get totally slack jawed at the insane stuff they write:

"...when a transgender woman uses a women’s restroom there are still zero men — biological or otherwise — in that restroom. This is straightforward:  Transgender women are women; transgender men are men."

Thanks for the link, I raad half. If only there were a nice way of saying these people are nuts.

My dd wasn't 'classified' at birth - We already knew she was a girl because I'd had an amnio.

XX

I do sometimes wonder how much we are conflating two things: tw and pervs who use transgenderism for perv purposes, as it were. We shouldn't make laws or ordinances or whatever based on what pervs may do. I think a genuine tw is as safe a person as anyone, and I really don't mind a genuine tw - pre or post op, etc, no matter what stage they're in or intend to go for - coming into a female changing room or loo.

I do object to a perv doing so.

We already have laws which deal with pervs (well, purportedly we do). I do object to cis though. I'm not.

I think they are too memories BUT how can you tell a safe person from an unsafe perv? genuine question.

You can't. Before the law changed someone was only able to become legally female after they had SRS that is no longer the case. They can identify as female with an intact penis and go into ladies bathrooms and female only spaces. I posted a blog link further up that collated all attacks by men who identify as women on other women inc transmen in public bathrooms and female safe spaces. There was over 100 cases. 100 too many to even take the risk. One that really stuck out. The man who identified as female, accessed a women's shelter then went on to rape a woman and a child. Two females already vulnerable at the hands of men, assaulted in a space they should've been safe.

I would rather and a percentage of genuine transwomen and men (the majority of those I have spoken to personally) would rather the rules were strict. People born male use male facilities, people born female use female facilities so women, children and transmen are never put at risk of rape or serious sexual assault in a safe space.

It is unfair to put the burden of whether a transwoman is safe or not on those who are doing their damnedest to protect women especially in women's shelters. They could allow entry for all the right reasons but invite someone in who is less than genuine.

I am all for the creation of specialist trans facilities esp for transwomen who have been raped. They need care that is different from that of women. I am in favour of male prisons have specialist wings for transwomen and men. Born Male prisoners should remain in male prisons. Born female should remain in female prisons.

A transman in a male prison is at serious risk of rape and assault in a male prison. He will be seen as a she regardless of preferred pronouns, clothing or how they act.

There are so many other issues to consider before we say 'yes, we can allow them. Yes, they are safe'.

Memoire - How do you propose a lone female in a deserted changing room tells the difference at a glance? Or the room full of 15 yo girls changing for a swimming lesson with a physically intact male in the communal showers taking a loooong naked shower? Early transitioner or perv taking advantage of the (proposed) new self-identification laws? I doubt the new laws will stipulate forehead tattoos for "genuine TW" and "common or garden perv" so a woman or girl so women can assess their risk of harm at a glance. Will be the same old, same old, excet women will have no safe sex segregated spaces and no right to challenge men in these spaces.

Interestingly, I have just watched a series on Netflix where a character was "revealed" plot-wise to be a MTT in episode 2, but I wasn't 'reading' the character as female from the get-go, despite a fairly naturalistic presentation and dress. The "big reveal" in ep 2 came as no surprise. We are so used to assessing risk in situations, we pick up when something is off kilter.

Thinking about it, the sharing of spaces and having to override natural reservations or instincts will really harm women's latent observational skills, ability to read subtle cues and self preservation instincts, particularly younger women and girls growing up in the brave new world where up is down and men are women ("because we say so").

Yes, I know. But I do think that there has to be some way of keeping women safe without risking harm to genuine tw in early transition (or any stage actually). If a child is tw then, at school for instance, everyone knows. I imagine most children are OK with it - I know it was no big deal at dd's secondary, it was a minority of parents who were up in arms. OTOH, there was tm transitioning and he had to use the girls' rooms. I can understand that that's more to do with safeguarding him from male violence, but it's a different problem.

You can't tell who's a perv by looking, no, but that's always true.

Going to ignore the fact kids are being transitioned rather than given therapy here

Can you not see the irony in that though?

a female to male child is kept in the girls changing rooms to keep them safe from male violence but they readily allow a male to female in a female space and you mention male violence 'oh that wont happen!'

Is a ridiculous fucking double standard.