Justine has made a statement on the Spartacus thread:
Hello everyone.
I think the key thing here - and the position I've been banging on about very publicly over the last week - is that Mumsnet believes in and stands for freedom of speech and diverse opinion. That includes the right to discuss the issue of self-identity and opinions and consequences of that.
At the same time we're are committed to our moderation guidelines - i.e. that we will remove hate speech, keep it civil and delete posts which are mean-spirited, deliberately inflammatory or personal attacks (which is in effect our moderation policy across the whole of Mumsnet).
So we're not talking about deleting posts where people say "I believe transwomen are male" But a thread which is specifically about a named individual who's self identified as a women and which repeatedly calls that person he or a man is potentially hurtful and unkind and we'd class it as a personal attack. (In retrospect I think it might have been better to delete the whole India Willoughby thread yesterday rather than select individual posts for deletion, as I can see why that's caused confusion.)
It's the effect of the thread in totality that feels mean and can make people feel under attack, rather than any one post in isolation.
Lots of people have spoken about WeGoHigh as a principle. I think that's a fantastic idea. Here's why: Mumsnet is committed to freedom of speech, we can see the importance of this issue and we want to provide a space for discussion of it to happen - but it makes our job much, much harder if things get personal. Harder because it obviously encourages external attacks and trolls, harder because it makes it easier for people to ignore the substantive points and to label Mumsnet as transphobic, harder because it makes it a lot easier for advertisers who effectively support the site to say I don't want to be associated with this.
I hope you can see where we're coming from. We've taken a stand on this - and made our lives quite complicated tbh - because we absolutely believe it's the right thing to do. We're asking for your support to help MN 'go high' (even in the face of at times considerable provocation) and to help us maintain a civil debate; and we'll endeavour to be as consistent as we can be in our implementation of our mod policy and to admit when we've made a bad call.