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.

Are you ok with women posting you cannot change sex on FWR?

I’m not sure if you are focused on some of the board or the more basic statements such as this

Ok. So the Telegraph group was just some false evidence then. Something false to support your prejudiced claim.

Now what I believe you are doing is using the ‘guilt by association’ tactic. It is also lazy.

The concept that sex is immutable and that there are conflicts where those prioritising sex over gender is not purely a feminist notion. You are right. As the mocked upthread saying goes, ‘water is wet’. It is actually universally believed across the world.

Therefore, unfortunately in this instance, some of the outcomes will look similar (there will be differences) but will be from different motivations. Maybe even from opposite political perspectives.

Are you saying that if you supported an outcome that you discovered that a person with an opposing political view supports, you would abandon that very important objective? Because then you would be aligned with them?

That is what you are doing here with your guilt by association. As an aside, Feminists on FWR who collectively have their own desired outcomes and there are slight differences even there, have no control who posts on that board. None at all. It is a completely uncontrolled space.

“idea that it's left leaning people supporting fundamentally right wing views, ranging from anti abortionists to anti LGBTQ activitsts is what's laughable.”

and

”dont pretend that these are progressive ideas that are not rooted in conservativism and phobia!”

You seem to have forgotten that it was a group of left wing feminists, even socialist feminists, who started raising the alarm about the harm of prioritising sex over gender. And they are still the dominant voices.

So, perhaps the issue is what you, personally, view as progressive that has deviated from socialist feminists?

What is certainly clear though is using guilt by association, you have just ignored the feminist objectives and overlayed them with multiple other groups. You now seem to be referring to the very broadly described objectives and completely ignoring the feminist objectives.

I believe you have dishonestly done this, maybe not intentionally. It has been a tactic that extreme trans activists started to use to silence those feminist voices. Although, I sense deja vu here and I believe I have had this very discussion with you in the past.

You seem very scared that you might share any view that could be considered similar to ‘right wing’ or what seems to be the caricature of ‘right wing’ you have created. How do you manage with people on the right who also believe in climate change and support those initiatives? Or have you told yourself no one on the right or who is conservative could ever support them?

It really seems such a narrow view about left and right coming through on your posts.

Still also finding it odd that while there's recoiling in absolute horror and terror at the awfulness of other people everywhere, thinking and saying things you don't agree with -

it's only on FWR that this should absolutely be stamped out, presumably by FWR being shut down to control the awfulness and try and hide these people from public view. Gulags may possibly be the longterm answer. Or Chinese type brainwashing? How about depriving them of bank accounts until they're more like you and other nice people?

But what could it possibly be about FWR that means those particular women are more awful than any others for example on chat and AIBU and should definitely be the ones silenced but not the site as a whole?

<muses. While stepping out of the way of the elephants cantering around>

I feel there is something being missed here too. I was about to post ‘do you realise the board is called ‘sex and gender discussions ‘ ‘?

As in , that is the entire purpose of the board thanks to a small group of complainers who did indeed succeed in petitioning MNHQ assuring MNHQ they had a very great many threads to start who didn’t stick around at all on their special board. Many still stayed on the sex and gender board and some are probably on this very thread now attempting the same tactics to silence others through demanding FWR is even more closely ‘watched’. How very authoritarian.

I have a suggestion though. (A serious one.)

Why don't you start a thread in AIBU called something like, "AIBU to tell you about some of the microaggressions I have witnessed in a parents' WhatsApp group?"

Firstly, because it has nothing to do with FWR or this discussion and it's not cool to keep saying that FWR is a breeding ground for racist views, fail to provide any actual evidence of this from FWR, and then bring in something that didn't even take place on Mumsnet to imply that we are all part of the same nasty swamp of bigotry.

Secondly, because it's important. If it is in AIBU it will reach more people. Without seeing any examples of the kind of microaggressions you are talking about, if they are things that most people would recognise to be racist then such a thread would be useful for the purposes of opening people's eyes to the kind of daily racism that goes in in everyday environments. But the use of the word "microaggressions" also suggests to me that your examples may include things which some posters on Mumsnet have never thought of as racist, and hearing about how the use of certain words and tropes can be experienced by certain racial groups could educate them and make them think twice about their own use of language in the future.

Men.

Not trans people. Male people.

This will never happen because:
a - they are not here to do the work for you
b - you need to do your own work
c - if you don't know then that makes you a racist.

Why would people be more scared of women from the FWR board, than of men pretending to be women in supposedly single-sex spaces?
What exactly do you think a right-wing, conservative woman is going to do to you while you're sitting on the bus? Do you think there's more danger from a right-wing woman teaching your kid, than a TRA telling them they've been born in the wrong body?

I see we're back to saying everyone on that board is racist again, it seems to go in cycles.
I'll never get it, it just seems performative. Throw enough shit and see what sticks.

Tell me something, what is any individual poster supposed to do when there's a racist post, apart from reporting it?
Is there any action we can take without being covered in guilt by association?
Is FWR so much worse than the rest of the board? What makes FWR a special case that needs to be watched so much more than the rest of the site?

It's pretty ironic that people who strenuously object to the binary categorisation of humans as either male or female appear to believe it is possible to categorise people into "good people who agree with me about everything" and "bad people who disagree with me about everything".

Yes. I remember now. It was indeed.

Either way. The narrow reading habits of people don’t interest me, those who accuse others of aligning with the media seem to be determined to categorise others. I have always read a wide range of mainstream media because it means you get different perspectives about a topic. I assumed that is what mature critical thinking adults do.

It has only been in the past few years on MN that I have realised there are people who judge others based on what they read. It is quite eye opening. It still seems incongruous. What happens if they discover their mates regularly read media they don’t approve of??

So many wild fact free allegations. So:
The posters were Guardian readers (not Telegraph) who'd left a forum set up for them. They are in fact still posting with some interesting long running threads.

Glad that's been cleared up as facts matter.

Why would you think your reasonable post would be ‘flamed’ by both sides divided? I think you will find many agree with what you wrote in part or as a whole.

Surely the only way to avoid the dreaded echo chamber is to read views from a variety of perspectives, including those of the people you disagree with.

Otherwise you run the risk of making basic mistakes such as, gender critical feminists think trans people don't deserve to exist and should be forced to live as the gender they were assigned at birth.

I also don't understand trying to enforce a situation where you just never have to see anything from anyone you don't agree with. It doesn't make it go away or solve anything. Surely the way to change these views you don't agree with is to get them out there and argue with them? Convince people why you are right and they are wrong, show different view points?

I've just read the thread the OP set this thread up about, it's an interesting wide ranging discussion with a few questionable posts, which are on both "sides". There are posters excitedly trying to claim that merely citing a Daily Mail article means you are a 1930s style fascist.

If people had a problem with the existence of that thread specifically, then it can be reported, and if it was found to be not in the spirit of Mumsnet it could be deleted. But frankly this thread seems laboured, incoherent and hyperbolic and my impression isn't helped by some of the usual suspects who have popped up to smear women on FWR.

All part of the global "no debate" strategy, innit?

They have no hope of convincing anyone that male people can be women through intelligent debate.

I really am not sure you have much depth of understanding about the board. Yet you are here supporting people who are denigrating it. There seems to be inconsistencies.

The Sex and Gender board was set up purely for discussions about where the rights for all female people, whatever their gender as long as they were born female, and children come into conflict with males who claim access to those rights. That means whatever other characteristics they have, as long as they are female or children, that is the impacts we discuss.

If you started a thread that was not related to that definition, ie. Race where it was not related to the conflicts of males demanding access to the rights, it would likely be moved to the other board. There is a different feminist chat board where all other threads are posted including any that discuss only issues regarding race.

Which board is it that you are denouncing?

And yes “trans people” is ‘what we worry about’, including the trans people we love that are often teenage females! Your ‘trans people’ statement seems to miss the point of the board. Which as I stated :

“purely for discussions about where the rights for all female people, whatever their gender as long as they were born female, and children come into conflict with males who claim access to those rights.”

Or did you mean ‘male people who are trans’ are all we worry about?

Its very naive to think by trying to prevent anyone saying or writing it down that it can be made to go away - like a toddler believing if it puts its hands over its eyes that no one else can see it.

It just drives it underground, and the silenced people get angrier, and those underground movements will build up until they explode. Witness the past few years: no debate hasn't worked, has it? Because reality still goes on happening, regardless of specially nice people shouting 'no it doesn't, be kind and pretend like me!'

Typical responses really. Poster calls out racism on FWR and the responses are,

What racism? Don’t see no racism
That’s not racist (because Black people cant be trusted to spot racism)
If there is any racism, it all gets deleted, so no harm done (tinkly laugh)
If there is any racism it’s not us but men or TRAs as anyone can post.
Some of us are Black so we can’t be tolerating racism (ignoring the Black posters they’re throwing under the bus)

So very obvious the way in which posters are eagerly saying how they’re not racists, and then quickly appropriating victimhood by claiming it’s all part of an “agenda” to silence their very important work defending women’s rights.

This is one of the milder reactions we commonly get when we raise issues of racism on threads.

😆 Your post has illustrated perfectly why @NoteToThySelf would feel this way.

I hang white my head in shame (often) reading this bs. I am so so sad that white women make black women feel this way. I utterly despair that people 'my' people who can be so empathetic to others plight just refuse to show black and brown people the same gracious intent.

Make no mistake, there is NO other reason for that than the fact you (as in any of you whataboutery lot) are RACIST. Just because you are uncomfortable with that label does not mean you are not the very definition of racist.

@MNHQ I am sad that despite me trying to bring this to your attention a few years ago, racism and poor moderation ha sonly escalated. Protected by you. It is a disgrace.

What are you struggling with?

You're calling out racism without providing any evidence. When asked to do so you claim it has been deleted, despite also claiming that it is allowed to run rampant on this particular section of Mumsnet.

You might believe that the only non racist approach here would be for us to assume that you are posting in good faith, take you at your word and self-flagellate for things we have neither done ourselves nor seen others do, but unfortunately for you, we weren't actually born yesterday.

If there is racism (and I don't doubt that there is, as I have seen it) the place to deal with it is where it happens. Not in vague, poorly articulated TAATs where very little in the way of actual evidence of what is being talking about is offered.

Otherwise, it does just rather look like an attempt to smear FWR.

You might believe that the only non racist approach here would be for us to assume that you are posting in good faith, take you at your word and self-flagellate for things we have neither done ourselves nor seen others do, but unfortunately for you, we weren't actually born yesterday.

This.

Ah. I see. Only capitulation is acceptable, no discussion about why we should take on those descriptions, just capitulation and acceptance!

Any questions just prove that we are what people say we are.

NO.

If you are going to say that anyone is racist you need to have some actual evidence. Otherwise you're being defamatory.