mumsnet & transphobia

being a brit, and spending a decent amount of time on the internet, i have noticed one quite stand-out thing - there seem to be places, 'hives', may be a more sensible name for this, where transphobia absolutely flourishes. lacking any good content on my site, i thought - why not make an article on this

so, here y'all are:

starting off, i have always liked what you could call the 'home-grown net', especially parts of it that cater to women. this is what i call web 2.0 sites that are UK-based, such as mumsnet, netmums etcetera.

netmums seems to have mostly avoided this, but mumsnet has a massive transphobia problem.

so today, i'm taking a look at mumsnet to see what on earth is going on over there.

case study - mumsnet.

i used to turn on twitter and see women disrupting pride parades, yelling 'dykes not dicks', 'lesbian not queer' and the like. Amidst the sea of angry, radical transphobes, you could see little badges saying 'radicalised by mumsnet'

“Mumsnet did not set out to change the world or engage in an overtly political way,” its founder Justine Roberts told Vice News in 2018. so, 24 years after the creation of mumsnet, it begs the question - how did this all go wrong so badly, and how did the women of mumsnet create their own transphobic echo chamber?

first of all, we have to take a look at the origins of mumsnet.

how it all started:

mumsnet began in 2000, as a website for british mothers to share experiences, chat, relax and discuss home life, their children, pregnancy, work and the like. up until 2004, the word 'transgender' was not even uttered once, as an advanced search on mumsnet shows, and it's first mention was completely neutral in context.

up until the late 2000s, the discussion regarding transgender people was relatively mild, and contained to a few posts within a generally unrelated or only mildly-related thread. there didn't seem to be a sort of hivemind ideology, and these discussions were proper arguments, football match style - 10 vs 10, and not the more commonly seen nowadays on mumsnet 50 or 40 vs 2 or 3.

waitrose, prosecco, and demographics

to understand how mumsnet grew into the terf-hub it is today, compared to similar sites such as mumsnet, you have to take note of the demographics of mumsnet users.

the majority of mumsnet users are university-educated, middle class women, 74% of whom have a household income higher then the national average. (source)

compared to netmums, which according to their own website, is mainly made up of 25-34 year old mothers, with the average netmums user's yearly family income is below £30k.

ergo, mumsnet is mainly made up of women who were raised when in-school discussion of lgbtq issues in schools was prohibited, are relatively priviledged, which insulates them from the real-life suffering of oppressed groups such as trans people, and have the time to organise on mumsnet and participate in political campaigns and so-called gender critical discussions.

and with waitrose women, comes this partiular type of feminism I like to call waitrose feminism, summed up best as a hatred of ham that isn't naice, fuss, and people who don't conform to their very narrow standards.

'feminism: sex and gender discussions', spartacus, girlguides and storming men-only pools.

in 2012, after several complaints from mumsnetters not interested in seeing transphobic comments on the 'feminism' subforum, only 2 years after the original board's creation in 2010, mumsnet's staff (referred to by mumsnetters as 'MNHQ'), split the original board, banishing discussions by 'gender-critical' feminists regarding trans people to the 'sex and gender discussions' board, and keeping the rest on a seperate board.

this board, referred to by many mumsnetters using it's original name - feminism and women's rights, often truncated to FWR, became the hub for organising, slagging off trans women, spreading pseudoscientific theories about 'autogynephiles' and yelling 'ADULT HUMAN FEMALE!!!' at the walls of their not-so-small echo chamber.

it was also the mother of the infamous 'I am Spartacus' thread.

this thread was what i see as the breaking point. the point at which this loud subset of mumsnet users realised - they could say what they liked, and mumsnet was on their side, and was not going to stop them.

the thread itself being being a 1000-reply long (1000 replies is the mumsnet limit) chain of users posting 'I am (username or pseudonym) accompanied by their statement, usually being something along the lines of some statement about how trans women will never be women, and vice versa.

a truly useless protest, since there is really no point in protesting something in your own echo chamber, like going to a meeting of miami cubans and saying 'I hate Fidel Castro and you should too.'

unfortunately, said mumsnetters clearly realised this, and decided to go out into the world and protest in a somehow even more pathetic way.

thus enters a men-only swimming pool in hampstead heath.

said swimming pool, the hampstead heath men's pond, was entered by women dressed in stereotypical male swimming costumes, much to the apparent annoyance of one even donning a a borat-style 'mankini' in the same lime-green as the film one.

they were escorted out by police, and the