25 years of Mumsnet and how it’s changed Britain 🇬🇧 is covered in Bagehot’s column in The Economist.
Quotation of FWR relevant section.
Mumsnetters have, however, been willing to be called unreasonable. In 2016 the trans lobby was in the ascendant. Slogans such as “trans women are women” were gaining ground; sites like Facebook and Twitter had suspended the accounts of some sceptics. Mumsnet did not suspend them, which caused it to lose advertising and attract insults. One article accused it of being “a toxic hotbed of transphobia”. Ms Roberts didn’t give in.
This was “hugely important”, says Hadley Freeman, a journalist. Some women used “the toxic hotbed” to organise “Man Friday” events at which they self-identified as men, wore fake beards and crashed male-only venues. Others used it to ask whether “aibu to think” that the trans stuff was going “too far”. One reason they resisted, says Janice Turner, a Times journalist who covered it, is that so many were mums. And nothing* *“brings home the fact biological sex is real more than giving birth”.
The trans debate is now ebbing. Mumsnetters are back to posting about the issues that really matter. aibu, asked a recent post, “to despise the word ‘comfy’?” Not much, then, has changed in the 25 years since Mumsnet began. And yet a lot has. yanbu if you think that Mumsnet made some of that change happen.
https://www.economist.com/britain/2025/03/06/how-mumsnet-changed-britain
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