MN needs a closer watch of FWR

[BodegaSushi]

There is a concerning growth of posts with racist undertones cropping up on these boards, all under the guise of being proudly 'anti-woke'.

Apparently diversity is 'woke' and worthy of derision.

This is the thread I'm referring to here.

Disney went woke now they're going broke www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/4836570-disney-went-woke-now-theyre-going-broke

Mumsnet needs to looks at why that board draws such types of posts, and why posters feel so comfortable openly airing their racism.

Could we deviate from this constantly repeated statement or is it a klaxon of some sort? People disagreeing with the almighty FWR don't always "have an agenda".

It's not the disagreement I have drawn attention to. It is the animus: the nastiness, the name-calling and the sneers.

Why is your user name 'KarensManager" by the way? I'm curious because 'Karen' is often used as a put-down for middle-aged women.

Yes

of course it exists

in the same way it exists on other boards, and i agree that due to the heavy moderation that any posts like that quite rightly are removed by MNHQ

its just a shame it doesn’t happen as quickly on the other boards….i am guessing that its more a reporting issue

The Karen that I'm managing is not a middle-aged woman and I'm not outting her down. There are other Karens in the world and many uses for the name. HTH

So how does that explain the other people, including a vicar, who have recently had their accounts closed with no explanation?

In the case of the vicar, it was 4 days after he gave them some feedback on his thoughts about the extensive Pride flags decorating the branch. It seems like the banks are acting as thought police now.

I find this sweepingly offensive if you’re suggesting that the majority of posters on FWR are not feminists, are from the political right wing, or would support section 28.

That is simply untrue. FWR posters (those who post in good faith) time and time again articulate a clear and informed feminist position on any number of issues. The attempt to slur posters implying opposition to section 28 is astonishingly ludicrous and suggests that you do not actually read the posts.

FWIW I think that sperm donation and surrogacy are two vastly different issues with vastly different impacts

There is a lot of nuance in the FWR boards and knowledgeable posters on feminist thought eg surrogacy. It wasn’t an issue that I gave much thought until reading the discussions on FWR led me to reflect on the topic more deeply. Personally, I’m less opposed to a lesbian couple using anonymously donated sperm because the baby remains with its mother. However, thanks to the FWR board, I now appreciate concerns about how surrogacy reduces a woman’s body to a vessel and commodifies both pregnancy and a baby.

That's because you are following the playback yourself. It's very tedious.

I have carefully read this thread today in one sitting, what has also become rather clear is the deliberate overly derisory language that has been used by that same small group. Some of it bordering on misogynistic. All while scolding women for expressing their opinions.

That language reveals a great deal about how those posters view others who disagree with them. Particularly women who disagree with them.

I suspect this has so much more to do with your own clear prejudices about who posts on the FWR board that reality.

It is a twist from the previous ‘the only ones who don’t believe transwomen are women are a small minority’. This time it is the further parsing of this to be ‘only a small minority are feminists who are posting on a feminist board’.

And then in slides the ‘right wing ‘ and the homophobic beliefs.

So now it includes not just minimisation to dismiss the opinions, but ‘guilt by association’.

These assertions are false.

There are of course LGB people on FWR who actually went out and marched against section 28 and lived under it. And have mentioned all this on the thread.

But the tactic appears to increasingly be just to make wild unevidenced (and sometimes actively contradicting) accusations repeatedly in the hope that someone gullible, who hasn't read the thread or FWR, believes them.

The reality is that the number of people who actually describe themselves as gender critical feminists, call for the abolition of gender and post gender critical views on places like FWR and Twitter (often anonymously because we all know what happens to women who engage in this sort of activism under their real names) is relatively small and often seen as a fringe group.

This is partly because most normal people haven't heard of the term "gender critical", wouldn't call themselves feminists, and wouldn't call for the abolition of gender because they broadly consider gender to be the same as sex, and partly because Stonewall and the media constantly defame gender critical feminists by describing them as anti-trans activists and similar. (Just like how every time JK Rowling says something about women's rights, it is reported by the media as "her views on trans people".)

But when you scratch the surface and actually find out what gender critical feminists are saying, it basically boils down to, "If you were born with a penis you aren't a woman and shouldn't be allowed in women's single sex spaces or sports, and we shouldn't be letting children make permanent changes to their bodies."

That is also what the majority of the public believes.

If you look at those famous YouGov surveys, you'll get a certain percentage of each group agreeing that trans women are women, then a lower percentage of that group agreeing that trans women should use women's toilets, an even lower percentage agreeing that they should compete in women's sports, and an even lower percentage agreeing that they should be able to do these things if they have not had any gender affirming surgery (i.e. they still have a penis).

What does that tell us?

It tells us that a significant number of those agreeing that trans women are women don't believe this and are only saying they do because they have learned that this is something they must say otherwise they are a bigot. But if you really believed trans women were women you wouldn't have any problem with them in women's toilets, changing rooms or sports, because they would be (in your view) women.

Basically all the polling on this subject shows that whilst on a superficial level most people say they agree with the trans activists to avoid being accused of not being kind (or worse), when you actually dig down into their responses it's as clear as day that the vast majority of the population agrees with the gender critical position, i.e. with the people they have been told are anti-trans bigots.

And the more people realise this, the more they lose support for the trans activist movement.

Because T has taken over Pride and most organisations.

im B and I won’t have anything to do with Pride now. I actively avoid any company commercial using it.

To add to the above, this is why the trans activists on Mumsnet are so determined to keep the discussion hidden away in FWR. Because then it will only reach the people whose minds are already more or less made up. Every time the discussion is allowed to take place on somewhere like AIBU, posters who have absolutely no interest in posting in FWR are learning things trans activists want to be kept hidden and forming opinions trans activists don't want people to form.

Pride is the time of year when my own LinkedIn profile turns rainbow coloured because every previous employer of mine changes their logo. Big, powerful organisations including huge private sector firms, and also the government.

Do they change their logos for women's history month, or disability awareness, or AIDS awareness, or Holocaust memorial, or Christmas or Easter or Chanukah or Eid?

Do they fuck.

But the people with the constant, visible support from the institutions that run this country are the most marginalised, and don't you forget it.

When some posters on the AIBU threads pop up to complain any time a thread is started there with the same denouncements to shame women it becomes quite obvious that they have absolutely nothing else to contribute and cannot even just scroll past the thread like a mature adult. There only reason to post is to shame others into silence.

Quite.

If I see a thread in AIBU entitled "AIBU to think that cats are better than dogs" I just don't click on it.

Im curious, is this somehow different to accusing anyone who doesn't agree with you of faking being a lesbian, of being a man, of giving them "a slow hand clap", and so forth?

If you believe that a lesbian is a female person who is exclusively same sex attracted, it's reasonable to assume that anyone who disagrees with you isn't one.

It's alarming how a thread about racism has been almost completely (and obviously deliberately) derailed into stuff about men in women's toilets, mutilating children, etc. And the original conversation about racism has been lost.

Fwiw I am as gender critical as they come (I'm against surrogacy, for example, except maybe if it's a family member and they offer - and surrogacy is a racial issue as well as a feminist issue). And I'm a lesbian. But FWR is a hostile place because of the racism, the homophobia/lesbiphobia, obsessive "anything woke is bad", and general sense of being far right.

I don't think FWR is any more racist than the rest of MN (I've seen appalling, overt racism on chat, AIBU, and especially in the royals forum) but FWR is being exploited by white supremacist organisations/far right organisations who are actively trying to exploit GC women's concern for the rights of women and girls' safety as a cover for far right ideology, and that includes active white supremacy.

MN in general has a huge problem with overt and blatant racism and hatred of anyone who isn't white. Look at the intense hate campaign against the poster who lobbied for a Black Mumsnetter section, a small group of MNers actually photoshopped fake DMs to try to get her kicked off the site because they were so furious about the mere existence of black women. BLM protests were full of threads calling them thugs and racial slurs, but the far right/anti-BLM protests were full of "I don't agree with them but I support their right to protest." The racism Meghan faced was awful, and black posters in Royals were trolled and abused non-stop. The endless "ha ha my child called a black man chocolate/I don't see the problem with blackface/my granny had a lovely golliwog people are too sensitive/black people shouldn't be in TV commercials it's just wokeness." There is so much racism on this site and of course it'll spill over to FWR.

It's terrifying that we can't talk about the urgent need for the GC movement to be anti-racist without being attacked and abused, belittled, called a wokester, etc.

And yes, there absolutely is homophobia on FWR. Examples of this include threads where posters are seeking advice because their teenage or even pre-teenage child has come out as gay/lesbian. Now to be scrupulously fair those threads do tend to have a decent number of comments from posters who are actually gay/lesbian, pointing out that it's normal for gay people to know they're gay from a young age. But those threads still draw lots of comments about how it's unnatural and wrong for younger people to have an awareness of their sexual orientation, that kids shouldn't be thinking about their sexual orientation (but only gay kids). I've seen a lot of nasty comments about grooming - not grooming in a trans context but grooming in the context of gay people making kids think that they're gay.

It's obvious a lot of posters don't want kids being taught anything about LGBT at all and that includes the LGB part. I've seen comments like, kids shouldn't be taught that same-sex relationships exist until they're older because it's forcing it down their throats. That teaching kids that same-sex relationships exist is inappropriately sexualising children. That kids can't possibly know that they are gay. That teaching kids that same-sex relationships exist is a form of grooming and could convince the kids that they are gay too when they're not.

I've also seen a few different threads about butch lesbians being verbally challenged (or in rare cases physically assaulted) for going into ladies rooms, and those threads have been full of mocking and derision, people flat out calling lesbians liars and stating "this never happens" and basically throwing butch lesbians under a bus.

There have also been threads and posts strongly trying to manipulate women into voting for and aligning ourselves with far right wing politicians and political parties/movements (including those that are actively fighting to deny women any rights over our own uteruses, and specific men who have been credibly accused of raping numerous women and girls). "Vote for this rapist who wants to ban birth control and introduce Gilead because at least he knows what a woman is" is not really a feminist take.

And in general there's a huge purity spiral there where if you show the tiniest bit of critical thinking or say something they dislike, they viciously turn on you. I'll give an example. Someone edited Frances Barber's Wikipedia page to add some nasty comment calling her a transphobic bigot. A few FWR posters went to Wikipedia and started writing responses, but Wikipedia has really strict rules that govern ALL editing. A couple of people got banned - not because they were GC but because they hadn't bothered to take the time to read the site rules. And of course they enjoyed whipping themselves into a froth about how "Wikipedia is anti-women and has fallen to TRA! I am being oppressed for my feminist beliefs!" Then a poster who actually was a regular on Wikipedia and thus knew the rules stepped in, got the nasty comment about Frances permanently removed, got the TRAs banned, got the the page locked so TRAs couldn't vandalise it in the future, and posted a polite comment on FWR saying "fyi you were not banned from Wikipedia for being GC, you were banned for breaking this rule, the people posting TRA stuff were banned from Wikipedia too." She did not get a good response, even though she was the one who actually got the "transphobe" comment deleted and got the TRAs banned. Other posters were enraged at losing their moral high ground, so they didn't thank but were angry at the woman who had actually successfully combatted TRA.

I agree, I constantly read homophobic comments. There are some deeply unpleasant people here.

“The reality is that the number of people who actually describe themselves as gender critical feminists, call for the abolition of gender and post gender critical views on places like FWR and Twitter (often anonymously because we all know what happens to women who engage in this sort of activism under their real names) is relatively small and often seen as a fringe group.”

While I agree that absolute numbers of active feminists who seek to prioritise sex over gender when sex matters are small, the proportion posting on FWR is not small.

They are also not ‘vanishingly small’. They are increasing in number being vocal publicly and on FWR.

It is also noticeable that with this statement:

“The whole topic has become a right wing cause taken up by the kind of people who would have supported section 28”

The direct implication is that either the majority of the UK, who don’t believe that male people should be treated as female people when sex matters, are ‘right wing’ and would not have supported LGB people in the past. Or, that FWR has had an influx of right wing and homophobic posters.

Again, neither is true. To portray the UK population in this way is hyperbole.

Every time the discussion is allowed to take place on somewhere like AIBU, posters who have absolutely no interest in posting in FWR are learning things

I am learning that I like less & less to read MN at all.

Oh god. Everyone's so angry and it's all such a mess. How will we ever move past this.

I felt really hopeful that with positive, sensible changes like the Forstarter ruling, the Cass report and evidence-based decision making coming back to sport, that we were on the way towards a compromise position in the UK. But all this. It feels impossible. I do find it really depressing.

I realise saying this is interpreted in the ways expressed above as a concealed attack and bad faith agenda driven etc etc and I understand why. People who are constantly attacked become defensive and shut down, and both "sides" are now in this headspace. I don't know how we move towards a better future together.

Then your remedy is rather simple isn’t it? There is a hide function that allows you to hide anything you don’t like by the thread. You can curate your content quite easily.

IDKY it crossed out part of my post. In any case, I regretted posting immediately and will stop now! 🙅

100%. Truly grim.