The Mumsnet Trap

British TERFs recruit by lying to women on the verge of a breakthrough. It’s happening here, too.

Jude Ellison S. Doyle

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A woman sits at a laptop, gazing down at her baby, who’s on the floor next to her. She seems irritated.
Watch out, Little Timmy, shit’s about to get weird. Photo by Standsome Worklifestyle on Unsplash.

So help me, I did not intend to spend part of my week pitying the TERFs on Mumsnet, but, thanks to a truly fantastic article by Katie J.M. Baker at Lux Magazine, that’s where I wound up.

Mumsnet, which began as a parenting forum twenty years ago, has become the premier digital hub of the British TERF movement. Checking in on the “women’s rights” forum on a Saturday afternoon reveals users railing against trans people being allowed to donate blood (“haemoglobins won’t change if someone just identifies as a different gender”), or police reports identifying trans people by their correct genders (“rape suspects” will “choose to self-identify as female”). One of the most popular threads, with 270 comments and counting, objects to the concept of pronouns. Its title — “Why do we need pronouns when we have names?” — uses the pronoun “we.” Twice.

The first reasonable response is bafflement. Here are a bunch of well-off, mostly-white British women who logged on to discuss sleep training or milk pumps and wound up mounting a crusade against the English language. How did they get sucked in? The answer, Baker suggests, is simple: Being a new mom really, really blows.

These women log on in…

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Jude Ellison S. Doyle

Author of “Trainwreck” (Melville House, ‘16) and “Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers” (Melville House, ‘19). Columns published far and wide across the Internet.