The particular site I haunted was small, cliquey, and dwarfed even then by the behemoth that is Mumsnet — the motherlode of mother chat, 25 years old this very month. What started off in 2000 as a tiny website, conceived of by founder Justine Roberts as a place to swap tips about vacations and strollers, is now the sort of outfit that can make or break commercial or even political fortunes.

Every month, millions of users ignore the boring articles on the front page and head straight to the “talk” bit: to learn, laugh, vent, and gawp at the incredible state of other people’s marriages. All female life is on Mumsnet: shooting the breeze, recommending products, worrying a lot, talking politics, judging other people’s parenting from a great height, discussing weight loss, and laughing at the unfortunate lady whose husband once ate some Bombay Mix, then tried to give her oral.

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Occasionally, men are to be found on Mumsnet too, the weirdos. They should probably be made to do a land acknowledgment. For, despite the ecumenical pretensions to being “by parents for parents”, in essence it is still a woman’s world. It has its own complicated rules, mythologies, social hierarchies, and culture. It even has a language: where else can an OP get a YANBU about that CF, DH, not wanting to SWI during your EWCM phase when all you can think about is getting a BFP?

Never has the wisdom of crowds been so hard to interpret. Eventually you get your ear in, though. My active chatting days on forums are long gone, but I still use Mumsnet for reassurance whenever I or someone close to me has unexplained health symptoms. Simply put whatever physical glitch you are worried about into the search bar, add “Mumsnet”, and find a thread by someone who had roughly the same thing.

There, in the answers, you will find an efficient distillation of at least 10 doctors’ opinions on your symptoms, filtered through the intensely detail-oriented scrutiny of hypochondriac posters who took the very same problem straight to A&E. Discount the answers from the most obviously crazy people, read the rest, and start to breathe again, reassured you probably won’t die anytime soon — at least, until you reach the bottom of the thread and realize the OP never came back.

The odd bit of dilettante lurking is a far cry from my enthusiastic levels of engagement back in the 2000s. I first found my own preferred site when I was newly pregnant, body fizzy with hormones, thrilled and intimidated by what was to come. The front page — a list of questions and exclamations by people with daft made-up names — seemed incomprehensible. Clicking on what I would later learn were called “threads”, I mentally approached each as if I was reading a static text, wondering why anyone would bother recording this ephemera for posterity.

But then came the gestalt switch, a moment of exhilaration I still remember from my current position as a jaded net aficionado. I pressed “refresh”. All the headings changed. I pressed again, and they changed again. The penny dropped: it was updating in real time. Women across the UK were chatting about their lives here under the guise of anonymity. And I could look in, voyeuristically. A few months later, I chose my codename — a very funny one I’d love to tell you about, except that nothing ever dies on the internet — and started to post too. My second life had begun.

For a while, I was quite obsessed, though that could have been the hormones. Because of its small size, being on this forum was a bit like being back at school; except that the cool kids who ran the place were those that were clever and good at writing, which made it very unlike the school I had actually attended. Here, too, there were the equivalents of prefects, rebels, teacher’s pets, sad losers and perpetual comedians. Indeed, as if at a virtual St Trinian’s, our more anarchic members would sometimes daringly embark on what were known as “panty raids” to a still-young Mumsnet to try to stir up trouble there.

As well as larking about, there was a lot of histrionics. “Flounces” were legion, though much mocked. I am sure I indulged in a flounce or two myself — after all, it’s quite easy to get annoyed at strangers on the internet, it turns out. And it was there that I first experienced the hypnotic pull of stripping yourself down to just a name and some sentences: no physical presence or inadvertent gestures for others to gauge the meaning of, but only your words.

Many births were celebrated — including both of mine — and a couple of very sad deaths were mourned. There was a lot of drunken TMI, several blood feuds, and the vastly entertaining presence of some total fantasists. At one point, a regular poster with a useless husband, new baby, and post-natal depression was dramatically unmasked as having none of these things, despite friends on the site having just sent her baby clothes. One of my mates had even just talked to her for hours on the phone, with the sound of her fake baby crying in the background. It is a wonder my own small children survived this period, so gripped was I by the daily melodrama.

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Obviously, part of the appeal of these places is that contact is all virtual. Being stuck in a room with your favorite internet characters is less fun than you might imagine — and I don’t have to imagine, because I used to go on forum meets. All the things that make huge gatherings of women hell in person — gushing insincerity, rivalry, passive-aggression, a lack of healthy boundaries, etc — are dialed down a bit, or at least are safely corralled on the other side of your screen. Meanwhile, the fun and life-enhancing bits of female companionship remain to be enjoyed at a distance: common sense, empathy, righteous outrage, campy irreverence, gossip. There is an energy and lightness in social interactions on Mumsnet which you could never get on a male-dominated forum. Quite simply, we were born for this social media stuff.

Perhaps not surprising, then, that Mumsnet has also played a major role in cementing the status of Terf island. If there is one thing I know for sure about transactivists, it’s that lightness and wit are not their forte. In this arena, angry envious men typing insults or shouting mantras just don’t stand a chance; they might as well pack up their laptops and go home to their basements. And anyway, childish emotional blackmail doesn’t tend to work on moms. Not to mention that it’s hard to pretend that human biology is a flexible state of mind, when you’ve just heaved a baby out of your bleeding body and now have to feed it.

The forum I loved the most closed a good few years back, sucked into the huge gravitational pull of Mumsnet and eventually consumed. I’m still in a WhatsApp group with a handful of former members, though the kids we used to ask each other worried questions about are now grown up, and some of them have children of their own. But every now and again my phone will light up as of old, and I will shoot the breeze with Skirt, Chels, Howdie, and Joan of Argos, a grin on my face as I scroll, type, and PMSL. Last night we were discussing a face powder we are all getting ads for: Howdie had bought it already, I found myself bizarrely tempted, and Skirt decided it would make her look like a pharaoh. AIBU to think, when so much else on the internet is dark and sordid, online friendships between moms are a wonderful thing? IMHO they really are.

That all changed last month, when a series of high-profile stories swept trans issues into the national spotlight, starting with the victory of transgender swimmer Lia Thomas at the NCAA women’s swimming championship. Although Thomas was, for the most part, lauded by the press, the victory was accompanied by protests, complaints from the parents of other competitors, and a string of anonymous tabloid leaks from Thomas’s teammates — at least some of whom seemed opposed to her presence on the team.

The pictures of the broad-shouldered, 6’1” Thomas towering over her competitors, were striking. Long-winded explanations about the role of testosterone in athletic performance aside, it was hard for the average person to conclude she hadn’t had a competitive advantage.

Then, later the same month, Florida governor Ron DeSantis signed the Parental Rights in Education Act into law. The “Don’t Say Gay” bill was vociferously opposed by the White House, much of the media, and major corporations such as Disney and Apple; it prohibits classroom instruction on sexual orientation or gender identity from preschool to third grade — roughly ages four to nine — and requires that parents be notified about any medical or mental-health issues with their children. Prominent liberals were scathing, with Biden denouncing the law as “hateful”, Pete Buttigieg’s husband warning that it will “kill kids”, and the hosts of the Oscars chanting the word “gay” in protest. The Right, meanwhile, has launched itself into a frenzy, accusing Democrats of wanting to “groom” children and insinuating that opponents of the law are pedophiles.

It is no coincidence that both pillars of the current trans controversies relate to education. A leitmotif of the post-pandemic world has been parental rebellion against progressive excesses in schools and instruction on issues such as race and gender. Remote schooling allowed parents to peek into their children’s classrooms, where they saw elementary schoolers being instructed to rank themselves on an intersectional privilege hierarchy and to celebrate the “black communism” of Angela Davis.

Republicans, sensing opportunity, have embraced the parental crusade with anti-CRT bills, curriculum transparency bills, and, in some states, new restrictions on trans athletes and “gender-affirming” medical procedures. They are responding to the fact that the woke extremism popular with professional educators is deeply unpopular with voters. Indeed, wokeness in general is unpopular, and “educators”, as a class, are something like the Salafists of social justice. This is a specific instance of a general problem for the Democrats: its professional and leadership class is fond of social positions that strike a lot of ordinary people as wacky or perverse.

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Democrats, however, have fallen into what Ruy Teixeira calls the “Fox News fallacy” — the idea that if Republicans are complaining about something, it must be made up. On CRT, for instance, they have used the unconvincing defence that CRT is only taught in law schools and dismissed parental concerns as a product of “disinformation.”

Similarly, they have cast the Parental Rights in Education Act as a homophobic attempt to “force kids back into the closet” and prevent gay teachers from discussing their home life in the classroom — when, in fact the main concern of the bill is gender identity. The strategy, as Leor Sapir has argued, has been to make the debate over the law a debate over gay rights — which are supported by the vast majority of Americans — while dodging the much more contentious issue of whether, and how, schools should be teaching about gender.

This is no idle concern. What evidence we do have suggests that paediatric gender dysphoria is rising at a rate that would be almost impossible to explain purely as a result of greater acceptance or diagnostic sophistication. One clinic in Northern California reported an 500% increase in paediatric referrals for gender dysphoria between 2015 and 2018, while in Sweden, gender dysphoria diagnoses among teenage girls rose by over 1,500% between 2008 and 2018.

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Some researchers, such as Brown University’s Lisa Littman, have argued that this rapid increase is consistent with other social contagions such as anorexia or cutting. This suggests that many children are adopting these identities due to peer influences and social media consumption rather than a stable and deeply felt sense of dysphoria. But if these messages are reinforced at school, they may be more likely to stick.  This is a particularly explosive issue given that schools have encouraged children to socially transition without notifying their parents, and some states, such as California, consider failure to affirm a child’s gender identity as grounds for stripping a parent of custody rights.

Although Littman’s work has been denounced as “misinformation”, it has received support from a number of “detransitioners” who have gone public with their stories. Their stories, on the whole, follow a pattern: a girl who is struggling with an unrelated mental health issue such as anxiety or depression falls down an Internet rabbit-hole, where she learns she is unhappy because she was born in the “wrong body”. She visits a psychiatrist who, instead of interrogating her feelings, “affirms” that she is actually a boy and sets them on the road to medical transition.

Only later, sometimes after painful surgeries, do the girls realise that whatever was bothering them was not gender dysphoria but another unresolved psychological issue. They are left wondering why the adults in their lives allowed them to damage their bodies in the name of what they later come to believe was a delusion. Due in part to stories like these — and to the lack of solid evidence in favour of “gender-affirming” care — a number of European countries have begun to discourage medical interventions for youth gender dysphoria in favour of psychotherapy.

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The full implications of the move are unclear, but they could include denying federal education funds to states that bar trans athletes from girls’ sports. Separately, the Justice Department warned states that any attempt to limit access to “gender-affirming” care for children could be in violation of the Constitution and federal civil rights law.

Biden may be miscalculating. Americans are by and large tolerant of differences and tend to take a laissez-faire attitude when it comes to how individuals choose to live their own lives. But they also have a basic sense of fair play and proportion. Majorities oppose laws, such as Arizona’s, prohibiting “gender-transition related medical care for minors”, presumably because they seem to legislate individual medical decisions. But a solid majority believe that trans athletes should compete on teams that match their birth sex, and polling suggests that even a majority of Florida Democrats supports the language of the Parental Rights in Education Act.

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By picking a national fight over these issues, the Biden administration risks stepping into a trap it has so far avoided: siding with the common sense of college-educated progressives against the common sense of the electorate as a whole. For a GOP attempting to rebrand itself as the party of ordinary people, this could be a blessing in disguise.