Distinguishing between the two "Feminist" forums

[MsAmerica]

You really need to clarify the distinction between the forums. One is called "Chat" and the other has "Chat" in the subhead. I have no idea what the difference is supposed to be, and I suspect I'm not the only one.

I agree. In fact, I've questioned a bit the whole idea of the forum, because to me it falls under different categories - like politics or history or work. It pervades everything.

Agree entirely. Again, my understanding is this was historical. Years and years ago posters complained that they didn't like all the feminist threads, so a board was created to tidy them away. (And then split some years after).

For context, all of this went on with a backdrop of women being banned and booted off other net forums for having the wrong opinions, being fired, doxxed, physically attacked, and prevented from meeting to discuss what we discuss on 'Sex and Gender'. So it has been a hold out for women for years, and MN deserves credit for maintaining that, despite losing advertising revenue, and also being threatened for hosting the discussions.

Anyway, I hope it doesn't put you off from posting. I wouldn't worry too much about what goes where.

long ago there was one board, ‘feminism and women’s rights’ (hence FWR and the url ‘https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womensrights’ still persisting.

Then it got split into lots of categories such as feminism theory, books etc because some people thought that would be a good idea but most of them were tumbleweed so it got tidied back into one. This was before genderism arose - pre 2015 roughly iirc. All strands of feminism were covered including a strong strand of Gender Critical feminism - which had bugger all to do with transgenderism and everything to do with not boxing kids in with stereotypes (Toys will be Toys etc).

And then, unfortunately, the attacks on women’s rights geared up and as MNHQ rightly rejected #nodebate (albeit with firm guidelines) this became one of the few places women could discuss the issues.

roll forward a few years and a few people asked for the board to be split so they could avoid those discussions. But the new board hasn’t been used much, and some of the threads on Chat ‘should’ be on FWR but get overlooked, as do other worthwhile threads.

I really think the time is ripe to return to just having one ‘Feminism and Women’s Rights’ board.

Wholly agree, Errol.

I agree too Errol.

Besides. Haven’t many of those posters who demanded the split now left or been banned? How many of those are still using any feminist board?

This thread is a great demonstration of how confusing it is to have two boards that appear to be arbitrarily split. Longstanding members understand the history, newcomers don't.

I would just spend a bit of time reading both boards. It does get clearer the more you read.

The sex and gender board was for gender critical feminism specifically, that is, resistant to gender theory and stonewall style trans rights activitism. It isn’t all of feminism, arguably, because it doesn’t specifically discuss eg the sex pay gap. Or maternity rights. But arguably it is, as you can’t talk about things like this unless you’re allowed to talk clearly about women defined by sex rather than gender identity. Things were fraught and some women wanted to not think about it and asked for it to be hived off.

We were very much policed and bound by rules about what we could and couldn’t say for a while there.

There was a ‘3 strikes and you’re out’ rule for anyone eg calling a trans identifying male a man/TIM or saying he instead of she.

We were being watched and threads were screenshotted linked by TRAs so that they could pile in and tell us what terrible bigots we were for correctly recognising someone’s sex, we’d be reported for wrongthink and get posts deleted left right and centre.

Thankfully once MN realised that these idiots were making a mockery of this site they eased up a bit, but not before some prolific feminists were banned from the site.

During this time some feminists who believed in the TWAW mantra said they wanted the option to hide threads that talked about female biology in the context of trans rights.

In fairness most posts around that time included discussion of the impact of the trans rhetoric on women.

So MN created a separate space to talk about “sex and gender” i.e. that women’s female anatomy presented specific life experiences that meant we didn’t want to be conflated with TIMs.

We had to keep all discussions mentioning trans people in this section so that posters could hide the topic if they didn’t want to see it. Any post added to chat or AIBU was moved there too, so it really was the only place not only online, but on MN that we were allowed to discuss it all, albeit with some limited language.

Now that we’re allowed to say that transwomen are men again, it all seems like some fever dream, but I’m thankful that MN gave us this one small safe corner of the Internet to gather and talk, to realise we weren’t all losing our minds when confronted with the batshittery of it all!

Trans rights activists and their supporters were very keen to stop women raiisng awareness of the attack on women's rights and the abuse of children. Some people just didn't want the subject discussed at all, for a variety of reasons.

when stonewall went out of control and the guardian and everyone else made it impossible to separate sex and gender without being threatened with physical violence, there was a lot of talking and thinking to be done, and nowhere else to do it. Most places just banned those topics. It’s important to remember that even Woman’s Hour didn’t allow even a theoretical distinction between women and trans women. You were literally not allowed to say even philosophically let alone practically that they were two classes of thing. So it made a lot of people very uncomfortable on here. Some from an ideological position that it was a hateful point of view; others just didn’t want to think about it, as forcing an absolute ontological equivalence between women and trans women is clearly nonsense but as society absolutely demanded it, it was a very stressful thing to face

This follows a previous history where “radical feminism” had to be invented as a separate board because liberal feminists got upset if anyone challenged them on why doing what they felt like doing and generally going with the flow was necessarily feminist. So there was an attempt
to separate challenging feminism from you go
girl, girl boss girl power feminism for some reason but again, it just meant one board was effectively unused because no one needs a special board to go “u do u, hun”

So it’s best understood as the latest thing in a long line of certain people whining for certain discourses to be banned; mn recognising to their credit that they should be allowed to happen; creating a range of boards as a sop to the complainers; the important discourse continues and in fact attracts most traffic as it’s visibly the most important

“it just meant one board was effectively unused because no one needs a special board to go “u do u, hun”

😁

So all of this was akin to there being a Style and Beauty board and some posters saying they didn’t want to read posts about wide leg jeans even though that was a hot topic as it was in the news, important and relevant to a lot of posters so MN made a whole new board that people had to use if they wanted to talk about wide leg jeans?

Yes. That is it in a nutshell.

Kind of. The claim was that some people only wanted to talk about bootcut jeans. And that anybody that often talked about wide leg jeans weren't allowed to even visit the bootcut jeans board. It quickly became apparent that the bootcut jeans board had few visitors, not much to say.

It also comes down to a group of people’s personal inability to scroll past a thread that they don’t want to participate in. And they wish to then have MN personally curated for their preferences.

While trying to convince others that they are kind and tolerant.

I’m shocked that all of this happened.

I just had a look. The 'chat' board had five posts yesterday. Not threads, posts. Two of those from one poster.

One of those threads was about Nicola Packer, created by the OP because they hadn't seen a thread about it. Only of course there was at least one thread, on the 'sex and gender' board.

This happens quite often, too. People assume that one or the other board is the only feminism board. So discussion gets split over two boards and diluted/repeated.

It was more like that they wanted a new board if they never wanted to hear anything about wide leg jeans even though everything else S&B was still being discussed on the original one alongside WLJs .

I think the reasons for the split are now historical and everything has moved on. I think there is a good case for going back to one FWR board. I forget to look at the Chat board and when I do there isn't much there.

I believe that our wonderful Terf Island is thanks largely to a combination of:
MN
Glinner
JKR

Surely we should go back to one board….? There’s the SC ruling but also the ruling the GC beliefs are protected (Maya Forstater). On what basis can MN argue the two boards should be separate? It’s pandering to something not supported in law.

On the other hand, if the boards are joined back together, I believe that we shall have to defend the joining back again in the future. Maybe I am feeling defeatist.