Thread derailment

[Temporaryusernamefortoday]

Wondering if I am the only one that’s noticed more and more thread derailments. I’m not talking about TRA taking a TWAW stance but an individual being deliberately obtuse or missing the point of an individuals posts to create an argument about a tangential element. It just seems rather insidious and designed to prevent proper conversation.

This is not a TAT but a thread about a phenomenon.

Agree that if you weren't around at the time of the split imposed on us because nice feminists complained about having gender critical / sex based rights feminists being so unkind, it isn't clear.

So you could ask MNHQ what they thought they were doing.

Nobody apart from a few that MNHQ chose to listen to why there was a split.

The url of this forum makes it clear it is the original Feminism and Women's Rights network, and as over time it became one of the few forums on line where women could come and talk about being gender critical and not be banned, without an actual vote or anything, sex based rights was the main believe expressed on posts.

But some didn't like it. Complained and MNHQ created Chat for them.

So FWR (under MNHQ's ditzy heading) by default was for gender critical feminism to be the basis of the forum.

This has come up on other threads, that those participating on FWR dont want every thread to start with having a long discussion about why sex based rights, what about trans rights, why are you being unkind.

Or that they come on FWR to go back to ground zero all the time, or feel obliged to explain why they are GC / SBR feminists.

Nobody voted on this. Nobody chose the label.

That was MNHQ in response to a few complaints, and to be fair, some who thought it would be easier to have that shared believe as the jumping off point, not the point.

So, and this might be an actual thing, and I just don't know, but when one refers to Women's Rights, does that automatically mean a GC stance?

You see, up to now, if someone said to me that they are passionate or active in fighting for Women's Rights, I wouldn't assume that means they are GC. Just like I wouldn't know how someone feels about trans rights just because they describes themselves as a feminist.

Okay I've now reread and interpreted this a different way.

So do you see this forum as a place where GC views are prioritised over other views?

Kind of like a online space for non-white people where debate over the existence of white privilege is forbidden?

Dont be so silly.

Its no different to a group saying they are Marxist Socialists and discuss and base action on that belief.

Why dont you ask MNHQ to set up a third feminist forum where women who want to discuss all types of feminism can do that.

Instead of this endless niggling deal with what has been said as a whole.

MNHQ made the split and never full explained other than that some women did NOT was to talk with those who believed sex was a biological fact.

So trying to say I am saying it is a derail.

Logically if MNHQ thought there should be a split, it should be 3 ways.

A GC free feminist forum

An any type of feminism forum

A GC feminist forum

Surely 'GC' is more about facts than 'views' or opinions. People can't change sex. That is a fact. TWANW & TMANM. That is also a fact.

i think this is a very good point.

I find the ‘deliberately obvious derailment’ so much less insidious than the ‘patronising and reasonable’ tone that some common derailers use always with a couple of ‘red flag’ words sprinkled throughout their post just to encourage further natural derailment.

Well, there may be different things we are talking about.

There's derailing in the trollish sense, where we're having an interesting discussion and then someone sends us off down a tangent and the next 400 posts revolve around that tangent. This is very frequent when certain subjects are raised. One shouldn't rise to the bait, but...

Then there's the politicos, and they're invariably tribal leftists, who think it's a derail if you express an opinion that they think deviates from what should be FWR orthodoxy. My response to which is, who died and made you the gatekeeper?

I dont think i am being silly, I'm genuinely trying to understand.

"Its no different to a group saying they are Marxist Socialists and discuss and base action on that belief."

This analogy is perfectly fitting to what I am asking so we will use that. So, this part of Mumsnet is for people who have a particular GC viewpoint and thus moderation will err towards ensuring those voices are loudest? That's what would happen in a MS forum. It wouldn't be to debate the validity of Marxism or Socialism. People who did that would likely be banned at some point.

You see if you don't know that, then you can't really judge what is a derail and what isn't because it does come across like this is a section to discuss and debate gender and sex through a feminist lens. Not that it is for people who have a specific viewpoint about gender and sex.

"Why dont you ask MNHQ to set up a third feminist forum where women who want to discuss all types of feminism can do that."

You see this is where it seems like you feel I am derailing by asking for clarification about the purpose of the forum etc. I'm specifically asking so I can better assess who is derailing and where. I don't need such a forum, personally.

Yes this too. And the gaslighting that inevitably follows when you point it out or try to steer things back to the topic of the thread.

I agree reading comprehension skills have declined in recent years. People will misunderstand a statement and then swear blind that their misinterpretation of your words is what you actually said. It gets tiring.

But I think some of the people who cry "derailment" are just frustrated they can't control the conversation. There's a thread here in FWR, running at the moment, about Margaret Atwood. The OP is extremely frustrated and has stopped reading the responses, because she says the thread has been "derailed". But it hasn't. It's a thread which positions Margaret Atwood as a feminist authority whose warnings women should heed. The "derailment" is women of FWR - well-known posters, all - pointing out that MA ignored the warnings of women like us for years. She ignored our appeals for support, and many of us no longer consider her a voice worth listening to.

That's not "derailment". If the premise of the thread is "look, here's a feminist icon saying something important we should listen to", and a significant portion of the response is women challenging that . . . that's fair. These aren't trolls who have come in from outside to stop the conversation. They're just women who disagree. That's well within the bounds of healthy debate.

TLDR: Yes, there's a problem. But there's also a tendency to classify disagreement as derailment, which is doing no-one any favours.

The misapplication of what 'derailment' actually means arises from the perceived 'ownership' of the feminist forum by those with GC views as demonstrated on this thread. It's a code for 'wrong think' because there's no consistency for how it is applied given that as long as an irrelevant tangent is GC 'true believer' material its not considered a 'derailment' as opposed to a relevant one that's challenging.

There appears to be no space for those like myself who have GC aligned views on some issues but not on others that are contrary to feminist first principles like bodily autonomy & self determination.

As i see it, this board is specifically for how women are being impacted by trans rights organisations , (and as a sideline associated impact on children).

All other feminism belongs in feminism chat.
So, want to talk about setting up a rape crisis centre for women - you can use chat.
Want yo talk about the difficulty of setting up a rape crisis centre for women and not include and biological males- use this board.

The 'right wing' stuff i think has just been imported from the USA. In the UK it is hardly the fault of women that the left abandoned common sense, biology, and safeguarding. Many women on this board are clearly upset that their traditional political parties have been so captured on this issue.

Given that Gender identity is belief and sex is fair you are never going square the circle with true believers.

"A feminism forum for sex and gender discussions, feminist chat, theory and intersectional feminism."

Not that we all can't see it, but this is what it says this board is about on the site. This, to me, is neutral rather than GC.

Okay, I did a bit of searching to see if Mumsnet have said anything specific on this in the past.

Here is anything I found:

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/4778000-can-mnhq-set-up-a-new-discussion-category-called-feminism-sex-gender-discu

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/4271588-Mumsnet-is-hiving-off-sex-gender-issues-into-a-sub-forum?reply=108233287&utm_campaign=reply&utm_medium=share

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/site_stuff/4267223-Any-chance-of-a-review-of-the-FWR-moderation-rules-in-light-of-Maya-Forstaters-success-in-court-please?reply=108112569&utm_campaign=reply&utm_medium=share

It's difficult to respond to this, because you haven't directly argued any of the points I made. You've fallen back on broader buzzwords, instead of engaging with the specifics of the argument. Maybe you can't see it, but this creates the impression you're not arguing with me, but with some sort of stick figure you've made out of me, who represents the whole of the FWR board. Or the "GC true believers". Or just the ones you disagree with? It's not clear.

But I think I can fish out your point. You're saying that because GC views are the majority in the forum, they're given a free pass even when they're irrelevant and derail the topic at hand.

Yes? Maybe? Am I close, at least?

The problem with that is that you're ignoring the rest of my post. Atwood's track record on ignoring the erosion of women's rights in America is relevant to any conversation she now attempts to start about the erosion of women's rights in America. It might be the personal preference of the OP to ignore Atwood's failings on this issue, but they're not irrelevant, and it's disingenuous to pretend they are.

Mumsnet is a discussion board, not a bulletin board. If you find yourself unable to have the conversations you want about a particular issue, it might be time to look at how you're framing the conversation. What's your tone? Are you invoking controversial figures as authority voices? Are you using buzzwords that indicate bias? Are your sources open to criticism? What are you yourself doing to keep things on topic? Quite often, when a thread goes south, it's not as out-of-nowhere as it seems.

"A feminism forum for sex and gender discussions, feminist chat, theory and intersectional feminism."

I never noticed that header before. I'm not sure that it does accurately describe this forum, especially since the 'feminist chat' bit is actually a separate forum anyway and 'intersectional feminism' is not at all GC in my experience.

Still, I wasn't around at the time of the split so I don't know what MN's original intentions were

Yes? Maybe? Am I close, at least?

Perfecto!

I'm not disagreeing with any of your initial post, in fact I whole heartedly agree with it. Not sure why you would think I'm opposed to a critique of Atwood tho even if the OP is positive as that would be in the realm of relevant discussion in my view.

Mumsnet is a discussion board, not a bulletin board. If you find yourself unable to have the conversations you want about a particular issue, it might be time to look at how you're framing the conversation. What's your tone? Are you invoking controversial figures as authority voices? Are you using buzzwords that indicate bias? Are your sources open to criticism? What are you yourself doing to keep things on topic? Quite often, when a thread goes south, it's not as out-of-nowhere as it seems.

Yup, I get that it's a discussion board, I'm one of the few posters who's contrarian. My point is simply that in my experience even slight nuance is deemed 'derailing'.

In terms of tone or being open to criticism, kid gloves/egg shells won't even help if you aren't fully on the GC train because the dogma is so entrenched. I strongly suspect 'derailment' is just a silencing strategy. If the 'offended' can't have posts deleted or prevent others from engaging they will play the derailment card.

As far as preventing bias goes, good luck with that. We are all bias to some degree. Discussion forums wouldn’t even exist if bias was a condition of commenting. Nor would they if discussion didn't naturally broaden to related topics.

I have never witnessed a large discussion forum where commenters are so precious about tone & content policing than MN feminism.

I, too, agree reading comprehension skills have declined in recent years. I also feel, with almost painful regret, that the art of discussion - never mind actual debate - is becoming a rare skill. Twitterisation encapsulates this perfectly, imo.

Fuck knows how bad this'll get when the entire internet is reposting stuff we get from chatbots, which get their stuff from the internet, which consists of stuff humans rehashed from stuff they got from chatbots ... Everything will end up originating from before the 2020s! It'll get more and more normal to simply state the same received opinion on repeat. That used to be a fairly reliable indicator of low intelligence but now we see intelligent, educated people doing it. Exploratory discussion's my favourite hobby (especially with a good dinner), seemingly limping towards a quiet death.

Quite a lot of derailment is now, I think, symptomatic of this. Sometimes it seems to come from genuine stupidity and/or inflexible thought. Other times it seems to be some twat coming here to shout us down, exactly like a typed version of those chanting TRAs trying to disrupt women's meetings. I think this has increased exponentially over the past ten years.

What hasn't altered much is the sealioning and - my second pet annoyance - posters who pair up to argue against one another, disregarding the topic of the thread and any other replies. In a real-life group, the two would be physically edged out so everyone else could carry on without them. The only online equivalent is to ignore them, quoting a relevant post from before they started, but it's far less effective because readers have to scroll through their tedious spat.

Wrt to the purposes of the FWR boards, I don't see them as being for the exclusive use of feminist sex realists. You never get an informed view by restricting your exposure to those who agree with you. For sure, it gets boring to keep being asked Feminism 101 questions or why TW are not W. Previous posters have helpfully made threads to explain, to which questioners may be redirected. Should they keep asking anyway - they're reportable.

It's perhaps worth mentioning that some well-informed people with valuable views are just as prone to inflexible communication as thick people. Having previously wasted too much time, effort and emotion on trying discuss (not simply agree) with them, I've concluded they're worth reading but saving any dispute for another thread, or starting one.

I think you're ignoring the history of this board. MN set this up when not only were there complaints from other posters about GC posts being allowed in the feminism topic, they were also under serious attack from TRAs for allowing any discussion on trans issues at all. They came up with this board, maybe not ideal, but the fact that they were brave enough to allow discussion of trans issues, in the face of abuse and threats from TRAs, is something I for one am extremely grateful for.

I have never witnessed a large discussion forum where commenters are so precious about tone & content policing than MN.

Hahahahahah! are you so fresh & new that you didn't know about all the ENTIRELY DELETED Reddit boards - or the constant, ruthlessly brutal banning of contributors for 'wrong tone'?

Some of the deleted boards served nefarious purposes including the criminal. Others were 'gender critical', including some of the trans subs that permitted questioning of genderist philosophy. The existing feminist boards are so touchy that you can easily be banned for 'wrong tone' or an 'offensive' turn of phrase, and your post on any board will be deleted if you misgender without an instant abject apology.

I really hope that no MN board goes the same way.

Personal insults & hate speech aren't generally tolerated anywhere but that's not to say that some huge forums don't have rogue mods that operate outside the forum's standards because they are so difficult to control. It's often hit & miss on reddit because of its size. But I take your point. I have been 'clipped' on Israel reddit for a purely benign comment.

I have never witnessed a large discussion forum where commenters are so precious about tone & content policing than MN.

I think anyone who says that is either a liar, or painfully unaware of just about every other talkboard and forum on the internet. The list of sites where banhammers are dished out for the slightest mention of anything GC is too long to list.

Well, if you're wrong, people are going to point that out.

It's not about bias or dogma, it's reality.

Your 'nuance' is just a poor argument. Noone has to be biddable to you because you offer an argument that is nonsense. With respect, get your head out of your arse.

MN has been like this for yeaaars. I put it down to sleep-deprived, irritable mothers taking out their frustrations by picking petty fights. Or maybe that was just me 😆

Yeah those irritable wims picking petty, oh so silly , fights about women's rights. Silly wims!

Do you even hear yourself?

Have an actual read of the intelligent, thoughtful, articulate, massively politically influential posts here and honestly have a word with yourself.