Telegraph interview with Mumsnet founder

[TheNoWord]

Some interesting comments about this board:

”“I wish it wasn’t an issue that created so much anger. For me, if you want to choose to be a woman, with all the disadvantages that entails, I’m going to embrace you. But biologically is a trans woman the same as a woman? I would say no.”

“There’s this tension because both sides are rightly worried about safety. Trans women feel they are not safe in male spaces because of male violence [if they’re forced, for example, to use male lavatories] and cis [heterosexual] women are nervous about that because they think this might be exploited by violent males. It gets my goat that women – and trans women are included – live with this spectre of male violence and no one politically or otherwise seems to saying: ‘this is the real issue.’”

www.telegraph.co.uk/women/life/mumsnet-founder-users-have-extraordinarily-strong-vitriolic/

This forum has been cited in a Vice article. It has its own parody Twitter account. It is regularly monitored by a dedicated team of people looking for screenshots and reporting posts. It is regularly visited by pbps and TRAs. Screenshots are posted on Twitter by well-followed TRAs.

I’m struggling to see how Justine expressing an opinion on it will make this worse.

It's quite clear that a lot of people, including national newspaper journalists, still don't understand the issues properly. It strikes me that Justine hasn't understood them properly either, but at least she's allowing this forum to exist - and for a long time it was the only place on the web that we could discuss what was happening. I think it's at least partly down to Mumsnet that women in this country have been able to mount a fightback against a viciously misogynistic ideology.

I think Justine deserves a lot of credit for allowing this space for discussion to exist. She could have just bowed to pressure and shut it down.

On a slightly different note, I was saddened to read her backstory. I was inspired by the mum who made supporting women and mothers in a positive way into a successful business. Learning about the money, class and connections she must have behind her, ie living next door to the future Prime Minister, it's less inspirational to me.

And yes, I am aware that I am criticising another working mum for succeeding - I just wish the opportunities were as available for those without money and media contacts 😢

It has all been said by @nilsmousehammer . It's all the sexism, always. Sexism affects our entire lives and the whole trans thing is one more stick to beat us with for being people instead of the angel in the house.

Well, quite - no one does.

Yes.

Does mumsnet ever release figures of how many browsers certain boards get, and users etc. I mean I know we can never know which side of the fence the lurkers lurk on but I'd be fascinated to see how the numbers and stats break down for the various areas of the site is active posters versus number of people just reading.etc and I've always wondered exactly what the data is on deleted posts, I imagine this area is the main driver of deletion posts.

I guess I just want to actually know if there really is only six of us with multiple user names and some bloke from Croydon checking in every third Wednesday or....?? I want to know!

'eight million unique monthly visitors'
'10 per cent of votes up for grabs'

Crikey.

Thanks, Justine, for holding the line and ensuring FWR continues. It's an invaluable space.

They have done before - FWR was one of the more popular areas of the board.

I personally know several gay men who have been harassed and even hospitalised by beatings-up from other men, yet they never sought access to female toilets or changing rooms or other female set-aside spaces to protect them from violence. They recognise why our spaces exist. So why the laser-like focus on access to spaces where women undress from trans activists? If it was really all about trans-identifying males fleeing 'cis' male violence, 'gender neutral' (i.e. mixed sex) toilets and changing rooms wouldn't have been adopted so widely by Stonewalled institutions.

I agree with the general idea of thanks for hosting the board here. I am certainly grateful for that. It has translated into real life action for me that is having an impact. Without this forum I would not have lured myself in real life which has been massively productive in ways I’ll describe one day.

But it’s been an active management decision to move threads concerning gender ideology from boards like AIBU to here. I’ve noticed a few more have persisted there recently but someone somewhere made that call and it was enacted on. That doesn’t demonstrate naivety or lack of understanding, it demonstrates a full understanding that certain topics aren’t for public display and need to be hidden away. I also struggle to believe that a sub forum that had its own rules generated for it didn’t undergo rigorous office discussion on the topic in question to come up with those special rules.

It’s also noticeable that there has been a shift, possibly ahead of but certainly parallel to society’s shift and what is demonstrated on Twitter as to what is acceptable to post and not be deleted. We can say things now about things we couldn’t say 6-12 months ago (apart from Eddie Izzard and Sam Smith 🤨). Look at threads on Twitter now that say what was unsayable a year or two ago. It’s happened here. There has been a shifting of the winds. This must come up in MNHQ discussions around moderation.

So I don’t buy the “lack of understanding” theory. I think it’s been a business decision balanced with/against genuine sympathy for the views of posters here.

“Outed not lured 🤔

What are these disadvantages of coming out as trans, for biological males? In sport you go from being a mediocre contestant to winning the prizes, sponsorship, scholarship, starring in adverts. You get TV documentaries and airbrushed magazine covers. In the arts the theatre commissions and acting jobs are rolled out. In business, you get named as woman of the year. In politics you get fawned on and promotions, invited to the White House and given a ministry. In the church you become a priest. Commit a violent crime, you get sympathetic supporters, media amnesia and housed with women. In beauty pageants, you get crowned. And you can still do all the man things like going on a hike alone and not having periods or a body clock or pregnant or needing maternity leave or needing an abortion or the menopause or getting harassed or raped or stalked or lower paid for the same job or looking after the children or caring for elderly parents and so on and so on.

Yes, it was third, I think. Behind AIBU and relationships. It was right up there.

I’m grateful to Justine. I bet she gets all sorts through her letterbox.

Yes, wasnt there an email a few days ? Ago. Time in my head bears no relation to actual time so it may have been weeks. With the most popular threads/boards across the whole site. Afair it didnt mention fwr but its definitely been mentioned in the past.

For Justine agreeing or not with our opinion, it doesn't much matter (I hope she sees the issues at least) so long as we still have the space. It's not like (m)any other mainstream sites let us have this convo. Yes there's the farms, but much as I like it, it's not mainstream and I'm not sure I would admit I ever visited it irl.

Far from being the neutral observer, seeing Justine's input on threads around the time of the Great Divide, I have to say I was surprised at her enthusiastic support of posters and ideas which the good women of FWR usually spent much of their time refuting. From the evidence, my guess is that she is firmly of the Be Kind/TWAW persuasion because she fondly believes that most TW are HSTS rather than the far more common or garden (75%+ and rising) apples grapes pears variety.

So, yes, all credit to her for sticking with FWR despite her personal beliefs. However, the reaction to Maya's victory/splitting the boards and this interview shows she does not really understand what we are seeing so I don't expect her any time soon to want to take any credit for the wider contribution this particular forum has made...

And I entirely agree with you NotBadConsidering on the shift we are starting to see. When historians come to write up the role of Mumsnet in the Great Gender Debacle of the early 21st century, I wonder if they will also note the role of the FWR talk guidelines on the use of language?

Posie is increasingly frustrated by the mealy-mouthed use of male/male bodied/identifying as a woman where we just mean 'men' and I have a hunch that this might be as a direct result of the FWR talk guidelines where brilliant women with fantastic powers of analysis have had to dutifully contort our words over the last few years to avoid deletions.

The 'positive' is that we could all by now, for example, write an IPSO compliant article without using wrong sex pronouns/'her penis' by judicious use of surnames but is it stopping us from telling the truth - that a man committed a sex offence/was in that women's refuge/broke the women's record?

We no longer seem to have the talk guidelines pinned to the top of the board - I hesitate to mention it because I don't want them reproachfully there - but there are still deletions of posts here that seem possible to say on different topics - so are we now actually free to say what we really think? Can anyone confirm if the special rules with rolling strikes/bans still apply here? And if the rules have changed, are we still constrained by their shadow?

What role do our external monitors get to play in reporting posts/flagging up threads on Twitter? What proportion of threads here are taken down as NITS compared to elsewhere on the site, implying that FWR women should be nicer?

Can we include words in our posts like 'cult' or 'peak' or 'grooming' or 'castration' or 'fetish' or question any downward pressure on the age of consent without risking a deletion - or do we still have to self censor?

Who are we still not allowed to criticise?

Yes, wasnt there an email a few days ? Ago. Time in my head bears no relation to actual time so it may have been weeks. With the most popular threads/boards across the whole site. Afair it didnt mention fwr but its definitely been mentioned in the past

@CryInToYourCornflakesNicola with over 23000 unread emails......days, weeks....years...decades...time is transcendent !!!

It must have been difficult for her to be thrown into this. She's done a great job of steering a way through. Thank you Justine

IvyTwines a fair summary of where we are.

What a glorious thread! Thank you 🙏🏻

I also want to express my thanks and admiration to Justine.

For me, the important thing isn't what her personal views are or whether they match mine. The important thing to me is that she allowed this discussion to continue when everyone else was censoring it. She and MN must have faced SO much vitriol for this.

I felt sad reading the extracts of that Torygraph article. More of it is pasted in by OP on this thread: www.mumsnet.com/talk/the_royal_family/4715110-justine-has-called-anti-meghan-sentiment-here-deranged

Firstly she appears to quite dislike and certainly to ‘other’ MN posters. The ‘cis’ thing when talking about the discussion by posters on the site is really offensive.

Justine’s political aspirations for the future is interesting and she appears to have the soft skills for an effective politician but Justine would only need say what her views actually are not just ‘I know what millions of women on the site say’.

As a side note to that prospect, surely it’s the death of MN if a founder is still involved in the site and she then joins a party line. But from this article and the detached tone in which she talks about MN it feels like maybe Justine isn’t that involved in the site and maybe is repeating what staff have said about the hassle of moderating posts. No way for anyone to know that of course but I was sad to see such little respect paid to posters by Justine. A lot of what’s on here is thoughtful and the opposite of below the line craziness on newspaper websites and on other social media.

Also the stuff about MN not having an algorithm on the site- when there was one very recently.. ?www.mumsnet.com/talk/site_stuff/4678030-what-is-this-you-might-also-like-clutter

Plus there’s some incorrect stuff in the interview- like saying there needed to be a Harry and Meghan topic. there isn’t a Harry and Meghan topic? There’s been the same RF topic here since it were fields.

I feel like I probably spend way to much time on here after reading that interview.

Complety agree. I owe it all to MN and I'm quite vocal now, definitely have peaked friends.

‘Cis’ stands out, loathe that term