@Cazpar https://www.vice.com/en/article/a3mn9k/mumsnet-uk-mom-forum-terf-transphobia-feminism
"Since 2016, Mumsnetspecifically its Feminism boardoard_--has increasingly found itself on the receiving end of criticism from trans people and their allies. “When I started using Twitter and engaging in the trans sphere in mid-2017, Mumsnet was constantly referenced both on my timeline and in DMs,” says Joss Prior, a trans woman who is part of a sizable trans community that monitors and discusses Mumsnet regularly. “The whole of the Feminism board was like a spectre hanging over the daily trans discourse.”^
Prior points to the now partially-deleted but notorious 2016 “I Am Spartacus” thread in which a user asserted that “men cannot become women, ever. Women cannot become men, ever” and went on to misgender a number of trans men and women, including high-profile campaigners Paris Lees and Danielle Muscato. The post sparked thousands of supportive comments and is consistently referenced in up-to-date threads, with “I am Spartacus” acting as a shorthand rallying call for anti-trans feminists. Attempts have even been made to organize campaigning activityty_ around the phrase.^
In March of this year, Mumsnet was used to organize against Girlguiding’s trans-inclusive membership policyy in collaboration with anti-self identification campaign group Fair Play For Women. Users also responded to Gender Recognition Act proposalss that would allow trans people to self-identify with protests such as Man Fridayy, a campaign that encourages cis women “identify as men on Fridays"" and partake in male behaviours like “manspreading and mansplaining” or to access single sex male spaces such as changing rooms, swimming facilities, or sports clubs.
“It’s a core group of a few hundred hardcore trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs), a tiny percentage of overall users,” says Christine, the mother of a trans child and also part of the network that regularly monitors Mumsnet. (Christine’s name has been changed for privacy reasons.) “Yet the Feminism board is just 90 percent discussions about trans people on any given day.”
Testing this out across four consecutive days, I found threads about trans rights and related topics to consistently dominate the Feminism board, with new threads appearing more than hourly and the handful of unrelated topics receiving only a fraction of the same engagement in terms of comment numbers. Topics during this time included discussions about specific trans campaigners, gender reassignment surgery for children, and the now-closed Gender Recognition Act consultationon. Searches for the names of high-profile trans women throw up many instances of deadnaming and misgendering amid sometimes intensely personal insults. A search of my own name returns a post calling me “a witless handmaiden”n” for supporting trans people on Twitter." (Continues)
No comment, but that remark wasn't me! At the time I wondered if it was.