Radicalised on Mumsnet
I’ll admit to it, I was radicalised on Mumsnet. In 2015, on the MN Feminism and Women’s Rights board, I read about the now well-known, late, great Magdalen Berns, who was at the time a student at the University of Edinburgh and who was being threatened for a variety of reasons to do with her uncompromising radical feminist stance on women’s rights. She wrote about it in this blog, published in January 2015.
Until that point, my position on male crossdressers was tolerant; although I’d never been a Coronation Street fan, I knew that Hayley Cropper was nothing to be scared of. I would never have agreed that a man could change into a woman by changing his wardrobe and calling himself Loretta, but I would have called him Loretta without a qualm. At that time, we lived in Exeter, which seems to be unusually well supplied with crossdressing men. Our local Co-op had a transvestite member of staff, and my husband once came back from the big Sainsbury’s just out of town and told me that he’d been in the school uniform section looking for grey school trousers for our son, and had been accosted by a male staff member wearing a large version of the female staff outfit and talking in what he described as “that Monty Python funny woman voice”. Oh, how progressive I felt when I told him something I’d recently read about supermarkets being particularly good employers of trans staff.
Following the FWR thread on MN about Magdalen’s treatment at the hands of the apparently unhinged individuals at the Edinburgh University Students’ Association LGBT+ Society, particularly one “Ada Wells” and his flying monkeys, I realised that we weren’t dealing with Hayley Cropper any more. This was a new kind of crossdressing man. The coverage of Wells’ resignation from EUSA in the normally cringingly trans-friendly student publication The Tab paints a picture of an aggressive narcissist who was not being held to the same standards of conduct as any other student at Edinburgh University. In fact, the university seemed to be absolutely terrified of him. A man who, despite apparently enjoying all the benefits of a body which has been allowed to go through puberty, and whose sexual entitlement apparently led to him attempting to get lesbian students who wouldn’t agree that lesbians could have penises disciplined by the university, thought it was clever to hold up a sign that says PUBERTY IS OPTIONAL - KIDS, TRY HORMONE BLOCKERS at Pride Edinburgh.
I’m sure I’d have got to exactly the same place without Mumsnet, but my eyes were opened forcibly by the women on the FWR board, for which I am eternally grateful.
#RadicalisedByMumsnet