In 2013, the most controversial post on Mumsnet – the UK’s largest forum for mums – was a debate about whether or not a man should dunk his penis in a beaker of water to clean up after sex.

A user named SaraCrewe ignited the conversation on October 8, asking her fellow Mumsnet users for reassurance about her husband’s habits. “Apparently our penis beaker is strange and not the done thing,” she wrote. Shortly after, Mumsnetters (and the internet at large) confirmed that it wasn’t.

How times have changed. Last year, one of the most controversial posts on Mumsnet said that transgender women were “men pretending to be women” and were “living a lie”. It was not an isolated post. In the past year or so, the website – once known primarily as a place where mums could discuss feeding routines, ask politicians about their favourite biscuits and argue about who is hotter, Ant or Dec – has become notorious for transphobic and anti-trans posts.

In June, Mumsnet brought in tougher moderation rules after activists threatened to boycott companies who placed adverts on the site. It’s down to the site’s mods to enforce these, and to find a balance between fair debate and hate speech.

“If someone posts in order to offend or upset or cause trouble, we’ll delete that post,” says Mumsnet user ‘HebeMumsnet’, a 40-year-old who has been moderating the forums for four years. “If they post in a genuine spirit of debate, it’s usually – but not always – fine.”

As a counterargument against critics who say the site doesn’t do enough to stop transphobic comments, she says: “We get many robust representations from feminists saying our moderation gives too much ground to the trans rights activists too.”

This false dichotomy between “feminists” and “trans rights activists” is at the heart of modern discourse on trans issues, as the term TERF – “trans-exclusionary radical feminist” – has gone mainstream. This term describes members of the anti-trans feminist movement, but many within that movement claim it is a slur intended to discredit their views and prefer just to be called feminists. Many feminists, however, baulk at the term “feminists” being used to describe women with anti-trans views, as they feel these people are a subset who do not represent mainstream feminist perspectives.

Controversially, Mumsnet’s new moderation rules not only ban transphobic terms such as “trans-identified male” (used offensively instead of “trans woman”), but moderators may also delete use of the words “TERF” and “cis”. “Cis”, short for cisgender, means someone whose gender matches the sex they were assigned at birth (i.e. someone who is not trans).

The decision to monitor the word “cis” in particular is unusual, as this label is not usually considered an insult. In banning both “trans-identified male” and “cis”, Mumsnet appears to give equal weight to both sides’ grievances – suggesting a false equivalence between comments that show support for trans rights and those that are actively transphobic.

In a statement on its moderation policy, Mumsnet explains its logic by saying that, just as most trans people find the term “trans-identified male” hurtful, “Many feminists are affronted by the term ‘cis’ and ‘terf’, so using these terms will make civil debate less likely.”

“It’s a difficult issue where language is changing rapidly, and where people have strongly-held and conflicting opinions about what is acceptable to say,” says HebeMumsnet, who spends 30 hours a week, paid, moderating Mumsnet. “I’m very proud that at a time when hardly anywhere permits even a civil discussion on this topic, Mumsnet continues to host it, even in the face of some quite aggressive criticism and a fair amount of business risk.”

Other Mumsnet moderators express similar pride – although only under the cover of anonymity. Only one of the moderators I spoke with would give their real first name, two did not want to reveal their age, and none would chat over the phones. One moderator did not even want WIRED to include the year she started her job at Mumsnet for fear of being identified.

Echoing HebeMumsnet, Michael, Mumsnet’s head of community who started in June 2018, says the website “puts its users before its business interests” when it comes to trans rights discussions. Lily, who has been a moderator for a few years, says the team of 15 community managers are “committed to free speech within the law”.

In the past, however, a former employee has spoken out against the company’s culture. Emma Healey, who worked as an intern at Mumsnet’s press office for six months, claimed on Twitter that “there was really no attempt to keep [trans rights] discussion civil or polite”.

“Misgendering and deadnaming [calling a trans person by the name they no longer use] were completely tolerated, and the internal moderation policy would change pretty much every day,” she wrote. “There were many staff members, me included, who raised concerns about what was being said on site – but it was never taken on board.

"Any criticism has been dismissed as a smear attempt by ‘trans activists’ rather than actually thinking about what was being said.” Mumsnet later informed the police about Healey’s tweets (which she then deleted) because they included the IP addresses of forum users.

Read more: How Reddit's r/funny mods weed out meme-slinging Russian trolls

Healey spoke out in April, and Mumsnet’s moderation policy changed in June. Arguably, things are improving, but the website remains contentious. Susie Green, the chair of Mermaids UK, a charity which supports gender variant and transgender children, says Mumsnet “still has some work to do if it wants to be seen as an inclusive forum.”

“Constantly, we see anti-trans narratives on there. There are well known anti-trans activists that are on there that are allowed to stay,” she says, explaining that in the past she has had to threaten legal action to get Mumsnet posts that she claims were defamatory removed. “Mumsnet has now got a reputation for allowing those narratives to continue… I think the reason they changed their moderation policies was because it was starting to affect revenue, because the people who advertise on Mumsnet were starting to realise that their adverts were being published alongside hate.”

It is clearly an ongoing issue. “My one big regret is that because this issue takes up so much of our time, we have less time to interact with the Mumsnetters as much as we’d like,” Lily says. “It’s definitely the most difficult part of my job.”

Elsewhere on Mumsnet, there is plenty else to moderate. “We’ve got 14 million unique users and most of them aren’t there to read about trans issues; they’re posting about relationships, or weaning, or education, or politics, or The Archers,” says HebeMumsnet. Michael and Lily say the most surprising posts the moderators have to deal with are created by “emotional trolls” – people who make up sad stories for sympathy.

“I never thought that people would troll about losing babies or about having a terminal illness, and I wasn’t really prepared for it,” Lily says. How do the team moderate these trolls? Michael says the moderators are “really good at spotting” suspicious posts and are “quick to investigate”. On the whole, however, he believes it is better to give people the benefit of the doubt.

“My view is that it’s better for members to provide help and support unreservedly than to worry too much about fake posters. The Mumsnet audience is huge, and any advice given will always be useful to others with similar issues.”

Unlike many forum moderators, Mumsnet mods are paid for their work, and many are employed full time. Michael, Lily, and HebeMumsnet do say, however, that they all became involved because of their love for the site. (Mumsnet was launched in March 2000.)

“I have moderated on a couple of threads where people have been given life-changing advice and come back to say that a thread changed the course of their life,” HebeMumsnet says. “That makes any bad day worth it.” As someone who enjoys debates and helping people get along, she describes the role as her “dream job”. “Moderating is a bit like hosting a really big party: you do need to be confident in your decisions, while still being personable,” she says.

Do any of these moderators regret decisions they’ve made in the past? Hebesmumsnet is quick to acknowledge she has made mistakes. “It would be impossible never to make a mistake in this job,” she says, though she adds that “regret isn’t really a very constructive response”.

Lily echoes this sentiment. “It’s inevitable, given the complexity of the issues we deal with, that sometimes our initial response will need to be adjusted or completely overturned,” she says. “Characterising these sorts of things as ‘mistakes’ implies it’s possible to do this job perfectly on the first take every time, and makes a virtue out of refusing to change your mind. That’s not how we do things.”

For Michael, his biggest regret is “spending so much time on vexatious complaints”. Although Mumsnet moderators and their moderation policies are unique in many ways, this appears to be an experience shared by moderators across the web. “A small minority of correspondents are never going to accept your decisions,” he says. “‘Keep it short’ took a while to learn.”

The Moderators is a new, semi-regular series in which we speak to the gatekeepers of different online communities to find out how they approach being the arbiter of what is and isn't allowed on the internet. Read how the moderators of Reddit's r/funny have been battling Russian trolls.

This article was originally published by WIRED UK