Oh look, it's those guidelines making no sense whatsoever again!

[TheProdigalKittensReturn]

So, I got an email about a comment in which I said that I wanted to know why genderists keep comparing trans identified males to black women and lesbians being deleted. I think this is absolutely barmy, and have said so to HQ. I'm also baffled as to how this breaks any guidelines and thought perhaps it was time for us as a group to revisit the guidelines and explain once more to MNHQ why they're not working.

What's actually happening here is the the obsessive trans activists who monitor this site are attempting to pick off posters one by one. We lost Orchid last week, and she was just the most recent of many. I'm not sure in MNHQ realize that's happening and welcome it or if it's somehow escaped their notice, but it's a pretty messed up thing for them to be allowing to happen to their users, in my opinion. Are they going to allow this to continue until the only commenters left in this forum are the TRAs who want the entire site shut down?

I know the people who despise the women here would very much like this to all happen under the radar, and that's exactly why I'm not allowing it to play out that way.

I guess "deleted for making trans activists look like they have no evidence to support what they're demanding" would have been a bit too on the nose as a deletion message.

Occasional poster, mostly lurker here

@MNHQ I am a regular user and poster across MN as you will be able to see from my footprint in my various names. But it’s the Feminism Chat that keeps me coming back to the site for daily reading. It is an education and a privilege to be able to access so much knowledge from likeminded feminists. PLEASE stop deleting GC threads - and please lay off on the heavy-handed moderation. As a regular across MN I am painfully aware that the standards of moderation are much stricter here than in eg AIBU and Baby names or even Chat. There is no way posters in Feminism would get away with the common responses on other threads - Are you on glue? That’s batshit. No, you’re a CF. HTH. You ok,hun?
And God forbid we post a
And quite simply that inconsistency is not fair or proper.

I didn’t see the demise of Frack’s reference post, so I have no idea how that transpired- but it’s hard to believe that follow on posts could cause a whole thread to be deleted.

@MNHQ have you actually looked at the activity of your core users - I suspect many of your moderators think the Feminists are some niche group - I am confident we are not. We are your core audience- and if you can’t respect your core customers then you may just go the way of Ratners.

It’s time for MN to get off the fence - at heart this is a site for Mums and we would like to talk about ALL issues that concern us. @MNHQ if you can’t support us with this, we will find somewhere else for All our needs.

I am always extremely careful about what I write and where I write it when it comes to my (strong) opinions on this.
It seems to be that the mods have been under pressure from "outside forces" to clamp down on what is now, sadly, inexplicably considered hate speech.
It seems that it is perfectly ok to silence women, silence lesbians, silence black people, silence mothers, silence (insert type of person here), but it's not ok to discuss a matter that is slowly destroying woman-hood as a concept.
I find it all frightening. But I think that's what is happening. I think the mods KNOW it's not ok, but they are being pressured into controlling how we discuss the whole issue so as not to cause offence to men who want to be something they quite clearly are not.

I missed the end of Fracks thread. But thankful to have read many of the polite, measured, considered and informed posts before it was deleted.

Just to confirm, I won’t stop posting on here and I won’t stop talking. Precisely because it is clear there are some significantly weighty individuals who are determined to silence us.
Not happening!

Please reinstate the thread MNHQ.

I am a long time Mumsnetter and mostly lurker who has only recently found my way on to the Feminist chat because of the M&S changing rooms fiasco.

It has been an absolute revelation reading some of the threads here which are clear, articulate and far more polite than many of the threads I've read over the years on the rest of the site. I also have to applaud Talking's post for explaining the issues so clearly and have saved a copy for myself.

I didn't read the thread that has been deleted recently but would really like to read it and the linked references so that, like a previous poster, I can try and get a rounded view on the trans debate. I really hope it's reinstated soon.

I am totally fed up with posters making excuses for the mods deleting innocuous posts at the behest of misogynistic TRAs. Mumsnet is at fault.
Enough already.
This is a women's forum where women should be able to state their beliefs, opinions and feelings using whatever language they want. If TRAs don't like it then they can do the sensible thing and not read it rather than hitting the report button whining that the mummies are being mean.
Enough I want free speech not coercive control.

Late catching up with the thread but wow & a huge YES to talking's post from a few days ago.

I am joining the chorus calling for the reinstatement of Frack's reference thread. Although I missed the end, it was clear it was not going the way Frack had intended. So I am not surprised Frack wanted it gone.

And I want to thank the many articulate and informed posters who were politely tearing apart Frack's supposed evidence. That was the sort of evidence that could protect some young people from an irreversible mistake.

@MNHQ please reinstate it. You have been played.

This was their excuse on Frack's deletion.

I agree there's a lot of inconsistency.

They could have just deleted the troublesome posts, rather than the whole thing.
But... TRAs don't like having their arse handed to them do they.

MNHQ caved. Again. I don't really trust their judgment anymore.

It’s back up.

The thread's back up. Maybe that deletion message reflects the inexperience of the weekend moderating team. Especially the use of the words 'we think'.

MNHQ - thanks for putting the Frack thread back up. But I will say: again the restoration message elided what had actually happened. No acknowledgement of error on your part. No acknowledgement that a lack of understanding of the dynamics of community disruption is at play. Just a warning to regular users not to doxx - when they don't anyway and were the ones pointing out that it's bad on the thread.

You are putting unacceptable levels of stress on your regular users and pretending this is not happening is so awful.

Good.

MNHQ pretty clearly has an issue - which affects other boards too, the general spammers and trollers, and their resulting troll hunters - with 'off peak' moderation. Except weekends and evenings aren't off peak for posters, particularly ones bent on troublemaking.

Maybe there needs to be more thread suspension rather than going straight to deleting the whole thread in cases where the mods on duty can't deal with everything post at a time. They may be simultaneously be trying to handle more than one thread and simply be overwhelmed. Pause (but deletion of any ensuing attempts at TAAT ) might calm things down without causing bad feeling?

This is a really important thread, because the guidelines here are incredibly frustrating and one sided. Like Talking said, they assume that we are a group of 'bad women' 'being mean' to trans people which is complete DARVO. Trans rights activists are trying to remove our rights, so we are speaking up about that. To be silenced, censored and punished for that is incredibly unfair and frustrating.

I had a post deleted recently and when I asked why I was told that my use of apostrophe around the word transwoman was 'uncivil' because apparently it implied I didn't think they existed (despite me never saying anything of the sort) and that it sounded like I was implying all transwomen had a mental health problem. My post was not uncivil at all, it was well thought out and I used language and terms used by Stonewall, trans people themselves as well as Ray Blanchard to explain my point. Some transwomen are diagnosed with gender dysphoria, and I was pointing this out to highlight how there are very different groups under the term transwoman which I don't think the public are aware of.

It felt very scold's bridle to be deleted and chastised. I re read the email and could only conclude that the moderator was anti-women and was assuming I was 'being mean' to trans people, or that he/she had been persuaded by a TRA to read intention in my post that simply was not there.

It makes me feel like a child to be chastised, silenced and warned like that. It's awful. I was on Mumsnet earlier this year and for months on end TRAs were allowed to derail, filibuster and ruin thread after thread and nothing was done. I left because of that, it felt pointless trying to be part of the debate when the debate was being so poorly managed.

I've returned to join in again since it looks like some of those derailers have finally been banned, but it does seem like the moderating, particularly at the weekend, has become even more pro TRA biased with the constant assumption that women fighting to keep our sex based rights are in the wrong.

I came on here a bit confused, because I've just read Frack's thread, when earlier it had gone missing, but I see it's been reinstated now. Good!
Best thing is to shine some sunlight on all of this, let people read for themselves what's involved

Pause (but deletion of any ensuing attempts at TAAT ) might calm things down without causing bad feeling?

This relies on "pause" not being a euphemism for "delete" - that is, never to be seen again. I could name you a dozen threads, with similar dynamics, that have gone into the neverending black hole of pause.

None of this will ever resolve the basic issue: the default position that feminist speech must be limited while genderist speech is fine.

It felt very scold's bridle to be deleted and chastised.

YY - I have been deleted three times (must have been over a long enough period not to get me banned). I have been on this site for 12 years, (and was a participant in the first Spartacus threads) and NEVER been deleted before and I certainly did not set out to offend on any of the occasions I was deleted. It certainly has stopped me from posting subsequently, so I am grateful indeed for the articulate women on this thread who are not letting themelves be silenced.

... been persuaded by a TRA to read intention in my post that simply was not there...

Wouldn't it be bloody brilliant if we got to see the actual message of complaint that got a post deleted?

They should do that - something like "message deleted because we received this complaint" and then printed in full what was said..

I've had two posts deleted recently and did get emails from Mumsnet about each one. In the emails the offending post is quoted. Everyone I've shown them to has been amazed and asked why was that deleted. Really harmless stuff. Talk about touchy.

Unbelievable!

I am trying to dip my toe into the water on a few threads but I am so worried about breaking the rules that my posts don't actually say anything!

This isn't OK! Are TRAs being censored in this way?

A world where women being strangled is a unfortunate accident, a world where we can't even call ourselves women, a world where we have to put ourselves in vulnerable positions or be called transphobic. A world where we can't voice our concerns over the sexulisation of children. A world where despite all of the above we biological females are the ones who are oppressive tyrants with our foot on a vulnerable minority.

I don't understand how this is happening! Actually... I do understand... I know exactly how this is happening but I'm pretty sure posting that here would break some convuluted guideline, my post would be deleted and it would be as though I had said nothing at all, convenient that, just not for the women this site is supposed to support.

I'm getting to the point where I do not give a fuck anymore. Having "come out" as GC on my social media feeds and seen the consequences (I'MI'm speaking my truth, from now on. If @MNHQ can't cope with the truth any more then yes it's not the place I want to be posting.
I fully expect a "go well" email, hope I'm wrong

Under a previous name (one which I was probably more high-profile with) I had a TRA stalk me onto an entirely different thread and make a complaint about me being racist.

Reader, I made a self-deprecating comment about how rubbish British cuisine was. I am British.

It got reinstated when I questioned it, but it made me realise the lengths these people will go to. It also means I name change relatively frequently which means a lot of people don't "know" me. (Some of the regulars do 'cos I "know" them well enough to PM them. And Thigh very touchingly remembered I was married to her after a night of virtual drunken debauchery, which just goes to show amor omnia vincit or something, even across name-changes.)

Wait, was one of your comments deleted for being racist against the British cuisine?

Yup! It got reinstated with an apology - I presume a trainee in the back office had seen the word "racist" in the complaint and hit the big red delete button without even reading (it was back in the day when people were being encouraged to report via the MN twitter feed). Quite funny once it had been reinstated (I was pretty fuming when it was deleted).

It also wasn't even on FWR, it was some light hearted AIBU thread - so they really had been following names they recognised via advanced search and trying to get people banned for the hell of it.