is mumsnet a safe space for me?

[rexrabbit]

would you say mumsnet these days is a safe space for a non-transphobic lesbian with children to hang out?

My Gen Z son works on building sites. I’d put money on the fact that the views of the people he works with differ significantly from those of the highly representative group ‘people you know’

They are not paid specifically to answer specific questions. They are paid in points for doing any questionnaire.

Do you understand the difference? People are paid, a very small reward, for answering questions on any questionnaire, there is no reward offered for specific questions because if you offered reward to answer specific questions this may indeed induce a person to answer in a biased way.

However, offering a broad reward for simply answering whichever polls you choose to is not incentivising a poll respondent to answer in any particular way.

It is inconvenient, that is.

Er, no. As the POLLS PROVE, in real life you are in an (ever decreasing) minority.

You live in a very secluded, cloistered echo chamber of fellow misogynists which is why you don't realise you are a fringe minority.

🙄No, they do not pay people! They are official pollsters. No one is paid if they answer what political party they're voting for. You're embarrassing yourself now.

And even if they did pay people, what difference does that make to what answer they'd give? Given its a professional pollster? They don't pay depending on your answer. You make no sense at all whatsoever.

The world of real work, unknown to those who live their true authentic lives in their Ma's boxroom.

I know the thread has moved on but I'm just catching up.....have I missed the dragons being handed out? Please don't tell me I'm too late. I've got a chicken I need to roast later and the oven's broke.

As for "safe space".....the padded rooms are thataway, darling.

One of the chaps at work says "That's the badger" and I have since adopted it as I like the phrase. You are the only other person I have "met" who says it.

I know, posters like this are so small-minded. In their silly little puritanical/authoritarian and self righteous echo chambers made up of people exactly like themselves which can't cope with any diversity or robust thinking whatsoever. Which is why they don't even have a grasp of the basics, aren't capable of rational arguments and always fall apart in debates.

Round about 2000, I noticed that we finally had a situation where pupils at my (secondary) school felt comfortable enough to come out as gay or lesbian while they were still at school. By the time I retired about 6 yrs ago, boys were still coming out as gay but girls had stopped coming out as lesbians: instead, they were trans.

I went back on supply. By then, one of the girls had reverted to being a girl. The two who had left school had gone back to being young women once they got away from peer pressure.

I think we could popularise the phrase “That’s the dragon!”, if we try, @RumNotRun.

I think there is a significant misunderstanding between being paid a small reward by an independent polling service to do any questionnaire on their site without knowing which company, if any, have sponsored that questionnaire and being offered a reward directly by an organisation with political leanings you support to answer a questionnaire.

A great deal of marketing research involves payment. Should a qualitative focus group’s results be dismissed because they were paid to answer questions when they have no idea which organisation has paid for the research to be done?

The dismissal of YouGov polling seems pretty weak at this stage. If they are to be dismissed, considering that early research was in fact sponsored by activist organisations who support gender identity, what polling data will ever be accepted?

None in the face of that argument.

I never understand why age is considered a negative by some people, as if the more you experience not just of life but of how your needs and challenges are different at different stages of life, and the more people you meet and learn from, and the more political and economic eras you live through, somehow results in less awareness of life rather than more.

When I was twenty I would undoubtably have been all for replacing sex with gender. I'm sure I would have seen it as the next step in undoing sexsm.

When I was twenty I hadn't seen how opportunities and power accrued to men because society is structured to make their lives easier at the expense of ours.

When I was twenty I hadn't noticed yet just how men feel entitled to my time and attention.

When I was twenty I hadn't seen the degree to which women making feminist or really any political statements in public are attacked and vilified and dismissed to a far greater degree than men.

When I was twenty I thought that politicians, cultural leaders and business leaders being mostly men was just the end of an old era and women would be equal in a decade or so.

When I was twenty I thought men listened to me because I had things to say, not because they liked hanging out with a twenty years old female body.

When I was twenty I thought men appreciated women who had sex with them and wouldn't have sex with women they didn't like or respect or value as people

When I was twenty I hadn't had much exposure to older women as equals and hadn't heard them talk about the challenges they faced that i had not

When I was twenty I hadn't had the experience of making myself smaller and compliant to meet the expectations of a partner who would never be satisfied because the problems he saw in me were projections of his own demons

When I was twenty I hadn't met people who fit fairly traditional social stereotypes for class, sex or race and got to know them as friends and discovered they had insights I didn't into cultures and contexts I had very shallow ideas about

When I was twenty I hadn't lost people to illness or suicide

When I was twenty I hadn't seen good friends tear each other apart in toxic divorces

When I was twenty I hadn't seen female friendship groups shrink into the spaces around childcare while their husbands and partners maintained their hobbies and trips.

When I was twenty I hadn't seen people who held views I found awful on some things do things I admired in other areas

When I was twenty I hadn't seen movements for change play through from best of intentions to same old problems because people are more complicated than theory

When I was twenty I had never seen the impact of being a carer

When I was twenty I hadn't had the experience of supporting men who didn't fit society's idea of manhood only to find those men felt juat as entitled to my support and were juat as blind to me as a human of equal value as the men they claimed to be different to

When I was twenty I hadn't had no money

When I was twenty I thought i knew everything! Now I'm much older I know I hardly know anything and the only way to get somewhere is to do it with lots of people together not one vision for everyone.

Great post, thank you FlirtsWithRhinos .

Exactly @FlirtsWithRhinos the phrase ‘older and wiser’ took hold for a reason

👏Excellent post. Particularly this: When I was twenty I thought men listened to me because I had things to say, not because they liked hanging out with a twenty years old female body. So true.

I'd also add, when I was twenty I wasn't aware of nor bothered about child safeguarding because I didn't have children.

And when I was twenty I had no idea of the permanent damage that childbirth / c-section could do to a body, since the media image is of women just bouncing back.

When I was twenty I didn't have the life experience to understand that my mother's problems stemmed from untreated severe post-partum depression / anxiety. Which is now quite clear to me.

I would add: when I was twenty, I thought most men saw women as their equals and respected us - after all, they all have mothers, right? And lots of them have sisters. Sadly I now think a lot of men really don't like or respect women and even those who seem to on the surface, are really quite indifferent to the discrimination we face when it benefits them.

Great post @FlirtsWithRhinos

I can promise you, looking down on on women and mothers because they don't want rapists to be house with female prisoners is very much a minority view.

😂😂

Cats and dragons of any sort are most welcome.
But...you clearly can't be any kind of beetle I want if you can't swim and need a lifejacket!?
You'll be telling me next that you don't know how to fly

ETA Wrong thread!

While we're doing 'people I know' we went on holiday with my elder (millennial) son and his girlfriend. One of the aforementioned younger generation. Talk turned to JKR. I held my breath. She went with "of course she's right" followed by her opinion that while she's all for people being able to be called what they want that doesn't make them women and it's ridiculous they think it does. Mind you she also has a real job (A&E nurse) and is one of those pesky immigrants.

I agree with using "That's the dragon" and someone's suggestion of "looking at the wrong end of a spider". If you're ever in a business meeting and you hear either of those phrases then you either know there's a fellow FWR there, or someone in the meeting has been FWRd.

A 23 year old woman at work randomly made a joke about gender identity, and then told me (in rather coarse language!) that as far as she was concerned, men were male and women were female.