My impression was that the rules were brought in because people like Helen Belcher and TELI were breathing down MNHQ's neck with threats of legal action. The term 'trans identifying male' / 'TIM' was banned just over a month after Helen Belcher gave evidence and attempted to have it designated as hate speech.
Things have changed since then.
May 2018 thread
www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/3238618-Trans-Media-Watch-has-written-to-parliament-saying-trans-identified-male-can-be-considered-as-hate-speech-and-that-Mumsnet-users-referring-to-penises-are-being-transphobic
Janice Turner Times article today:
concludes:
"Women may end up as collateral, but then what’s new? This dismantling of safeguards by extreme trans activists is building a reluctant mass movement. Women are forming new organisations, mustering legal challenges, lobbying politicians. These are not modern Mary Whitehouses but Labour members, Greens, lesbians; progressive, humane women — including trans women — who marched against Section 28, who’d defend to the death rights of trans people to live and work free from harassment and discrimination.
They don’t want this fight, just as I don’t want to write about it, given the hideous abuse, and the risk to careers and even physical safety it engenders. They’d rather be running book clubs or the PTA or walking their dogs. But fight they must. Because their inner sirens are screaming.
A guide leader wonders why male-bodied trans teenagers are now allowed to sleep in girls’ tents without parents being told, and is sacked. The NSPCC tells a concerned parent: “Should the child or adult identity as female then they are female and there are no safeguarding concerns.” Note “are” female. Thus sex, a protected characteristic under the Equality Act, is erased, and with it all thought for girls. There is no hope of compromise, perhaps “third spaces” where privacy and identity can be balanced: nothing less than total capitulation will do.
But women see what is happening. We know what battering down our boundaries with insults and threats can allow in. Not, to be clear, from trans people, but potential abusive chancers looking for open doors. Peter Bright, a left-wing US tech writer, argued endlessly with feminists on Twitter about gender self-ID. As a proud trans ally, he decried “TERF [trans-exclusionary radical feminist] fear-mongering about public restrooms” as “fact free drivel”, asking “Is that a great disaster? That a girl sees a penis?” Following an FBI sting in which he believed he was grooming a mother into allowing him to have sex with her children, Bright has confessed to discussing “engaging in sexual activity with minors”.
I read every official report into Jimmy Savile’s abuse in hospitals. What struck me was how he easily bought off the men: gave the porters TVs, took sherry with the consultants. He intimidated the young women. The only people who ever barred his way were older nurses. They could not be fooled. Nor are we now. We will not be bullied into surrendering our safeguards and seeing our liberation in porn."
www.thetimes.co.uk/article/children-won-t-find-role-models-in-playboy-ztfjq0t7t?shareToken=a80ba7e9bcd3850e593572a530746785