Hi again,
There's a lot been raised on this thread - thanks for taking the time - and so the response is inevitably quite lengthy. I've broken it down into chunks for ease of reading I hope.
Are Mumsnet’s guidelines for moderating the sex and gender identity debate illegal, following the Forstater judgement?
As a host of user-generated comment, we provide guidelines that set out the kinds of comments we do and do not allow and the kind of community we want to be. On FWR, as in all topics on Mumsnet, our aim is to host constructive and inclusive debate, and we put rules in place to try to ensure that that happens. When you register with Mumsnet users agree to abide by our Terms of Use, Talk Guidelines and Privacy Policy.
We don’t think anything about this constitutes illegal discrimination; we completely reject the accusation that we treat gender-critical feminists differently to our other users. If anything we tend to spend much more time explaining why things have been deleted on FWR than elsewhere and trying to help users avoid deletions and strikes.
Mumsnet is an inherently female-centred and feminist space and we have an honourable history of supporting and promoting feminist viewpoints. We think it’s pretty clear to fair-minded observers that Mumsnet has bent over backwards to allow the respectful expression of gender-critical viewpoints, often at considerable expense. Like others we’ve come under enormous pressure to shut the conversation down. Unlike many others we’ve resisted.
Is Mumsnet hiving gender-critical feminists off into a ghetto? Are we ashamed of them?
Just to be clear, there’s no hiving off of the debate - we intend to streamline the topics in the FWR category from five down to two: one ‘Sex/Gender debate’ topic, and one Feminism Chat topic. This doesn’t mean that every thread mentioning sex or biology will be moved to the ‘Sex/Gender debate’ topic, which would as many of you have pointed out be unworkable and odd. It’s not about pushing gender-critical feminists into a ghetto, but it is about clearly signposting where people can find conversations - between all kinds of feminists - of the ‘what does it mean to be a woman, are trans women women, is trans-inclusive feminism/activism/language impacting on women’ variety, and providing a separate topic without conversations of that kind.
It won’t be news to anyone here that there are feminists who are intersectional/fourth wave/transinclusive/liberal (however you wish to classify them) who say the passion and preponderance of the gender-critical viewpoint in the current Feminism Chat area means they simply don’t engage with the Feminism topic at all (thousands of Mumsnet users have hidden it altogether). To quote one email we received this morning, ‘There is definitely a sense that Feminism Chat is only a place to discuss gender critical feminism. Any posts which question GCism get flooded with hundreds of hostile responses. Which might be more fair if MN was an explicitly GC site, but it portrays itself as a space for all feminism.’
Are we going to review our Guidelines on this topic? Can we make them more clear?
We see no reason to substantially change our guidelines on this. Our modding in FWR is much more about civility than anything to do with ideology. The aim of the extra guidelines is to facilitate the discussions. While it’s the most prominent example, we make or consider making context-specific rulings whenever any issue starts to draw large numbers of reports; we’ve restricted the number of threads about Meghan Markle, for example, and we’ve had to think hard about deleting misinformation or scaremongering when it’s not being robustly challenged by other users (especially on topics that touch on important public health issues, such as COVID vaccines). Moderating an enormous, busy forum will always mean adapting our rules (although not our principles which have never really changed) to new challenges.
We know some find our rules hard to interpret, but we resist giving a legalistic list of things that are and are not ‘allowed’ because we think context and tone must always be taken into account. If this wasn’t the case we could just apply an enormous list of ‘bad word’ filters and get rid of our moderation team altogether. (Which on some days they might quite welcome to be honest.)
We sometimes email after a deletion - and always when we give a strike - and we explain our decisions when users email us with challenges too. The strikes system on FWR is actually more generous than our parallel approach across most other topics because it resets after six weeks. If we moved to modding without the strikes system, the truth is it would result in many more bans for FWR regulars.
Two specific points to clear up: we won’t necessarily delete posts to the effect that ‘transwomen are male/transwomen are men’ - so long as it’s not being used as a personal attack or as a hostile statement to shut down discussion/ other points of view.
And we really want to knock on the head this idea that FWR users suffer because of TRA targeting on Mumsnet. Nothing gets deleted from Mumsnet unless our rules have been broken; nobody has their account suspended unless the user has repeatedly broken our rules. Our mod team are extremely well versed in this issue and read FWR frequently, and we are as aware as you are of which accounts are linked to Twitter or Facebook accounts and which activists are highly motivated. We take all of that into account in our decision making. Unlike most big platforms we don’t delete posts or ban users just because a certain volume of reports has been received; we make judgements about whether our rules have been broken and whether a post is something we’re fundamentally happy to see on Mumsnet (once it’s been reported to us). That’s the only thing that motivates our decision making - whoever is doing the reporting.
Is it really true that Mumsnet has suffered commercial damage?
Some posts here are questioning whether we’ve sustained real commercial damage because of hosting this board and refusing to censor these conversations entirely. Please don’t be under any illusion that this issue hasn’t had real and substantial costs for us. The truth is that most brands and most marketing managers have absolutely no understanding of this issue: they simply don’t want their brand name anywhere near anything that’s remotely controversial, and they’re easily persuaded (wrongly in our view) that they can reach an audience of mothers/parents just as easily on a number of platforms that are considered ‘less controversial’ (often despite having woefully inadequate moderation and - in some notable cases - giving a megaphone to genuinely hateful content.)
Just to take the most recent example, a couple of weeks ago a commercial competition we were running with the board game distributor Coiled Spring was picked up by activists on Facebook and Twitter, who targeted Coiled Spring directly and in reasonably large numbers, threatening to withdraw business unless CS publicly disavowed us.
We pushed back both publicly and behind the scenes, strongly making the case that women are entitled to discuss the impact of transactivism on women’s hard-won rights to single-sex spaces; you can see our statement (which CS shared on social) here. We explained fully how and why we host these conversations, and shared testimony from respected journalists and commentators who have supported our position. This all takes a significant amount of time.
CS were actually pretty solid on social media, but have paused future activity they had lined up with us despite the competition actually being massively successful. Please don’t target Coiled Spring over this issue, although I’m sure they’d welcome some support - they’ve behaved much better than many other companies (and trade unions…) we could mention, and they’ve come under enormous pressure from gamers in the US.
Is it OK to have a man moderate this board? Are Mumsnet staff/mods able to make good decisions?
Michael is the head of our moderation team, and like the rest of the team he works across all topics including relationships, pregnancy, miscarriage etc. (we don’t allocate mods to specific boards)
Michael’s a brilliant member of the Mumsnet HQ team who spends a great deal of time advocating for MNers and robustly pushing back against external attacks. I strongly believe that you don’t need to be a woman to interpret Mumsnet’s moderation guidelines or to moderate FWR with our ethos in mind. He is an extremely experienced moderator both on Mumsnet and previously elsewhere and frankly the attacks on him here are entirely misdirected; as per our guidelines - personal attacks on our team are simply not on.
More broadly, the idea that there are mods at MNHQ who are busily subverting the cause of feminism is straying into tin foil hat territory. Our mods spend huge amounts of time puzzling over nuanced decisions that involve balancing the competing rights and viewpoints of multiple groups, trying to pick their way through to apply our guidelines as equitably as they can. Any suggestion that our mod team does anything other than advocate for Mumsnet’s users and take their responsibilities seriously is deeply unfair.
Finally can I just say that it’s impossible not to feel a little despairing at the turn this thread has taken, with some users so ready to go on the attack. Over the past few years it genuinely feels like we’ve gone out on a limb to facilitate this discussion. We’re a site of women, owned and run largely by women and so if anyone’s going to go out on a limb, I agree it should be Mumsnet. But I can guarantee that had we had a different ownership structure we would have taken a different stance - as for instance Reddit did when they shut down their Gender critical subreddit. Besides not insignificant financial loss, we’ve faced down a huge amount of reputational criticism for allowing this discussion to stand and - judging by the reaction of most young women I meet - it’s possible that reputational damage will prove problematic in the years to come. There’s an irony in the fact that we seem to be in danger of ending up in simultaneous legal battles with both Trans activists and Gender critical feminists accusing us of being discriminatory.
We persist with hosting this discussion despite all that because we believe that this is a critical issue for many of our users and that they should be allowed to discuss it free from the harassment prevalent on other forms of social media. All we ask is that you’re respectful of others who might think differently on this issue - not for your agreement or submission but for your respect and civility.