Dealing with inflammatory posts re Trans on MN

[womanformallyknownaswoman]

I am concerned to see the message below from MNHQ at the end of the T thread. Regarding posts that I consider "goady", I have a personal policy of not feeding them, not engaging and not rising to the bait. I ignore them. OPs looking for conflict as a way to feed themselves won't get it from me. Firstly, it's exhausting-they are not interested in dialogue, despite what they say, and secondly the best way to deal with them, imo, is to starve them of attention and not rise to the bait. Don't give them what they want i.e. a fight and conflict.

My concern is I predict there will be a lot more new threads and OPs looking for a fight, as the public becomes more aware of the issues and the tide starts to turn against TRAs. They will want to try and get this Place closed down for discussion, and none of us want that to happen.

Personally I have found it empowering to learn how not to engage and to turn it back on them if absolutely necessary, by the use of ridicule and short rebuttals of their nonsense. I am happy to share some techniques if it will help plus learn more from others. There's no point in trying to score points and win all the arguments they make as it's the engagement down their rabbit holes they want - they literally feed off conflict. They're anti-social remember, so any attention is better than none. They want to keep you coming back and arguing, so they can derail, prolong, provoke and generally make life difficult for MNHQ - to force them to take action. The negative attention "turns on" those looking for a fight….so please don't feed them, ignore them and lets keep this place open.

Message for MN:

Hi all

Since this thread is getting near its end, this seems like a good moment to make a really serious point.

We've just made some more deletions on this thread, and we're pretty exasperated tbh - we feel we're running out of ways to say 'please stick within the TGs or risk losing MN as a place to discuss this issue.'

We're really proud of our commitment to free speech, and we put a huge amount of time and resources to enabling this debate to take place - as many of you have pointed out, it's one of the few places left.

To those who haven't yet been able to stop and look at things from our end of the barrel - please understand that you're risking this space for everyone; if you really can't debate civilly with those you disagree with, it might be time to consider that MN is no longer the place for you. We're sorry to have to say this - we don't like it one bit - but tbh nothing else seems to have got through so far: we're at a point of last resort.

Thanks to all those who modify their first instincts and manage to make their points in a calm, considered and civilised manner - even in the face of goadiness. We appreciate it (and so would Michelle.)

Thanks all

MNHQ

*The antithesis is that as women we have been socialised to be polite and empathetic while the male people with whom we are mostly arguing have been socialised to think our views are unimportant and to shout us down. This dynamic, pragmatically, poses more of a risk to our ability to be heard than turning some people off by shouting 'too' loudly.

There's an important balance to be kep here.*

Why can't there be room for both? Datun's endlessly patient attempts to explain the issues to newbies and Lang's anger? The women reading these threads who're newly arrived will also span the entire personality range, and whether gentle and patient or bloody furious reaches them more effectively will depend on what kind of person they are.

I've sometimes found JJ difficult to engage with, but her stroppiness and refusal to back down an inch is exactly why she was the one to publicly stand up to the Labour party over self-ID on all women's short lists. We need women like that just as much as the ones with a more gentle, kind, patient approach.

Some day I will manage to get bolding right consistently, but today is apparently not that day.

I've sometimes found JJ difficult to engage with, but her stroppiness and refusal to back down an inch is exactly why she was the one to publicly stand up to the Labour party over self-ID on all women's short lists. We need women like that just as much as the ones with a more gentle, kind, patient approach.

So much this. We are all individuals and respond to different framing and arguments. A variety of approaches are needed.

Chin up Kittens - you got your point across perfectly clearly.

Regarding the use of slurs in user names I would like people to take a moment to think back to what happened when women tried to reclaim the B word in the seventies and the POC tried to reclaim the N word.

The act of reclaiming "slut" and other slurs is done as an act of rebellion but is interpreted as permission. Failure to object is assumed to be acquiescence. Pop culture is full of white men using the slurs on one another that we tried to reclaim in the seventies. They were never our slurs, we were just the targets. They always belonged to the white man.

Thank you, I've been trying to articulate this for a while. Also, with so many names with terf in I get mixed up.

I really liked your last post OP, spot on.

Lang's anger

Moi? How very dare you. I am sweetness and light, me. The DH is always saying so while I chase him round the house brandishing my wooden spoon.

I wonder how many of the TRAs have actual biological children. Do you think that's why they don't seem to 'get' the safeguarding issue?

I think they just don't care about others, MargeH.

When I first came on here I was shocked by the way people just bold as brass called a trans woman Male. It was truly shocking to me but they are and we don’t do anyone any favours pretending otherwise.

There is no doubt that mumsnet is attracting whole bunch of new people. And it must be a massive relief to be able to say the truth - the Emperor is naked, and we all know.

Which probably accounts for less than discreet posts and a certain outpouring of pent-up frustration.

I have zero doubt mumsnet is coming in under tremendous pressure from TRAs. We all know they have plans for 'strategic litigation'. It's all part of it.

But in terms of advertisers like Tesco and Birdseye. Firstly the women on mumsnet are their core demographic. They want to advertise here. They want this audience.

But secondly, they won't want any negative publicity. Tesco targeting mumsnetters would look dreadful.

What they might say is we don't want our ads appearing on any pages with certain keywords. Which would reduce revenue for mumsnet.

That's a nod to transactivists who have influence, whilst not damaging their own product.

Which is maybe why mumsnet is trying to police the tone. Keywords, in this instance, are quite difficult to identify. Tone is everything.

I don't want to make life difficult for mumsnet, they've been brilliant.

And I'm sure they can defend these discussions in any number of ways, including the right to free speech. Which is a political hot potato at the moment.

Asking us to check our tone, and not be inflammatory seems, to me at least, to be a request for support.

I don't think for a minute that they want to shut the discussion down. The bad publicity wouldn't be worth it.

sue

Women's fear of men is entirely rational. This ignoring of male violence and power dynamic between men and women is getting really old now.

Regarding the use of slurs in user names I would like people to take a moment to think back to what happened when women tried to reclaim the B word in the seventies and the POC tried to reclaim the N word.

The act of reclaiming "slut" and other slurs is done as an act of rebellion but is interpreted as permission. Failure to object is assumed to be acquiescence. Pop culture is full of white men using the slurs on one another that we tried to reclaim in the seventies. They were never our slurs, we were just the targets. They always belonged to the white man.

This is one of the issues that I have with the use of TERF. From reading the FWR boards and contributing (while regularly name changing, incase it needs saying), I understand why the users with TERF in their name do. But I don't need convincing of the GC argument. People who come across these boards following mentions in the Press come here not understanding what we're trying to put across fully, and then are suddenly confronted with all these terf-y names, could think "Oh, so TERF is a thing then" and not take the points seriously.

There's also the apparent cleansing of Twitter, where some prominent TRAs are starting to stop using TERF altogether to enable the "well if they call themselves TERFs we're not misogynists"/"if black people say it...." school of thought.

Usernames are up to the individual, but it's worth bearing in mind that these boards aren't viewed by MNers at the moment.

Sue, did you read about the doctor who worked with the US gymnastics team who'd been abusing the members of that team and the team at the university he spent most of his time working at for 20+ years? That's the length predators will go to to gain access to prey. They'll become priests, they'll coach sports teams - they'll build their whole lives around gaining access to prey if that's what it takes. Compared to that, signing a declaration is a pretty minor thing.

Even that isn't really the problem, though. The problem (and you can already see this in places that are farther along the self-ID route, like many parts of the US West Coast, or Canada) is that once the expectation becomes that there will be male people in women's spaces and it's not kind or polite to challenge their presence there because they're probably a trans woman then it doesn't matter whether any given male person has that documentation or not, because the expectation is that when women see a male person in a women's space they're not supposed to challenge his presence there. So any man can walk right in and, in the unlikely event that he is challenged, all he has to do is say he's trans and the person challenging him is expected to back down. Washington state issued official guidelines on this that state that if a woman complains about what she thinks may be a man in the toilets then security should instruct her to go find a different toilet to use if she has a problem with it. That's where this is headed.

What most women here are worried about is that once that expectation is in place, that male people in women's spaces are not to even be questioned on their presence there because they may identify as women, men with no feelings about their gender identity whatsoever will be able to go into women's spaces to, and there will be nothing the women in those spaces can do about it. Surely you can see how inevitable it is that predators will abuse that situation.

I am old, as you have probably gathered.
When I was little men called it "The Battle of the Sexes".
Today we call it "The War on Women" because we recognize it was not just a battle because it never stopped.
There is not one single right that women fought for and won that is not constantly being undermined, up to and including the right to vote and be recognized as a citizen.
As far as I have been able to learn there is not a culture on the planet that is not a hostile environment for women. They abort female fetus in India and China and are sterilizing female children in the US and UK who are diagnosed as transgender or non binary.
Please tell me what I should call these instead of hostile actions in the war on women?

Why can't there be room for both?

Absolutely hence the reference to a dialectic, although in some kind of oppositional reaction to having to be reasonable I just spent the whole thread disagreeing with whichever position seemed to be uppermost

he thinks TERFs are a quite scary highly radical very organised underground movement.

That's come from social media, where I can never work out if it's a difficulty believing (as seen this weekend) that ordinary people have concerns and questions and an attempt to keep it mentally comfortable by making it a demonised, shadowy group who can justifiably be dehumanised and don't have to be listened to, or if it started from intentional misleading. As that's how 'terfs' are talked about, that's also how the newspapers interpreted it when they first were trying to make sense of the online jargon. It's one of the most successful myths created since the Loch Ness Monster.

That does mean that when people look on MN for the fictional monster created to justify a lot of the 'we're fighting for our lives!' high drama, as MN is constantly accused of having fed and nurtured, what is here to be found is just women talking. The reality gap is obvious. That people are taking the accusation and name of 'monster' being thrown at them and making it a joke of 'yes, it's me' it takes a huge amount of power out of the word. People are getting increasingly less bothered about being called a bigot or a terf. And since it's a made up word, you might as well shout 'blop' or 'floop' at people, it has about the same meaning and impact.

Point taken about TERF usernames. I've been called a TERF when actually trying to do what's right by my trans mtf sibling, so took the name as a sort of response to that.

But I shall change it forthwith. As soon as I remember my password anyway!

As a qualifier to my earlier remarks, I loved it when so many women on MN instantly changed their user names to Telling E Real Facts. It felt great. Partly because I was one of the women ordered off the blog by tigtog when she created the acronym TERF to "other" the Feminists who were not sex positive male inclusive.

The thing that makes me ‘laugh’ about TERF is that it makes it sound like the only people objecting to this are a load of Greeresque Millie Tant women.
They aren’t going for the men who wouldn’t consider a transwoman for a relationship; who won’t want transmen in their toilets; who wouldn’t allow transmen join men only clubs.

IRL the only people I know who believe what the TRAs believe are under 25. There are a lot of people who'll use the requested pronouns etc to be polite, but they don't believe the person has actually changed sex, because that's impossible.

I know nobody who thinks that "biological sex is a social construct", which is the extreme end of the TRA position.

And since it's a made up word, you might as well shout 'blop' or 'floop' at people

www.functionalneurology.com/materiale_cic/389_XXIV_1/3373_sexual/

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_humans

Sue -“the vast majority of people are inherently good “ .
I don’t know one woman who hasn’t experienced some level of sexual assault. Not one single woman. I know six or seven women who have been raped, one as a child. That is just the ones who have shared that information with me, the actual figure is almost certainly more.
I don’t think it is one man doing all the assaulting and raping. Given the constant child abuse scandals appearing, and the #metoo, I think that statement above is at best naive, at worst gaslighting.

Thanks for the link Sue

I would just like to observe that a single case-study from 50 years ago is pretty ropy evidence for immutable gender identity, and further, that even if immutable gender identity dissociable from sex and from socialisation can be demonstrated, nobody has even begun to explain what this has got to do with defining women, who are defined by their sex.

thebewilderness - As a qualifier to my earlier remarks, I loved it when so many women on MN instantly changed their user names to Telling E Real Facts. It felt great. Partly because I was one of the women ordered off the blog by tigtog when she created the acronym TERF to "other" the Feminists who were not sex positive male inclusive.

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