Stonewall vs the Army Rumour Service

How the rot is probably deeper and more structural than we think

Thanks for the Afterthoughts episode, very interesting to hear a short overview of the “culture wars” of the past decade.

I’ve long been undecided whether I should bring up the following since it might not make sense to those who have never heard of it. But for me it’s another piece in this weird social justice puzzle, so I’ll give it a try.

About 15 years ago I was a member of the online forum The Army Rumour Service (ARRSE in short). Back then it was one of the largest online fora with about 50,000 users and it’s best seen as the more robust counterpart of Mumsnet. The sign on the door was pretty clear: squaddy banter, do not enter if easily offended. The humour on it was often very close to the bone.

In 2008 some of us started to notice people were signing up to the forum to deploy what looked like a coordinated strategy. They would start a new topic about military dress code or an historic event. The more serious ARRSE users got involved and answered the questions or debated with others about the point of a certain policy. After 2 or 3 pages (roughly 30-45 posts) the Opening Poster would give a turn to the thread by pulling in gender. It wasn’t called that back then, but otherwise my post gets too long.

For instance, a question about dress code would be followed up by “can transwomen wear the female uniform”. Or, “what’s the British Army’s policy on the use of bathrooms when man have transitioned”? It seemed reasonable at first, but there was clearly a pattern to this. Most of these threads would invariably get binned by the moderators after attracting the less politically correct of the site and descending into slagging-fests.

These new users could often by recognized by the addition of “_TG” to their online handles. It took me/us a while to figure out what this TG stood for... I remember getting involved in weird discussions about “what is a woman”? In all, we were not sure why these people would come on the forum. Until the Thread of all Threads regarding this issue happened.

As usual it started with a reasonable question or statement (can’t remember what it was). But this time various people immediately waded into this thread feet first. The notorious site users who’d usually abstain until they could no longer restrain themselves were on it right away. Moderators got involved and it ran into 125+ pages. People were pushing back in rather colourful ways to what we perceived as utter bull crap and gender lunacy.

Then one of the moderators posted a picture and a rather offensive suggestion. I won’t repeat it on here, but I imagined most people gasped first then had to laugh. It was really funny, in a very wrong way. Soon after, the thread disappeared without explanation. New threads asking about what happened to the Thread were quickly binned.

A day or two later one of the site owners posted a statement online. Stonewall UK had been alerted to the Thread, although it was suspected by others that Stonewall may have been involved in this from the start. Instead of contacting the site owners to talk about what was going on, they immediately send out messages to the site’s advertisers. Some of whom withdrew their support. The second site owner had been questioned by the police.  

I’ve been thinking about this particular episode a lot in recent years. Especially when people say we should have pushed back sooner or have been braver. We were kind of pushing back in 2008 and it didn’t matter. In the end Stonewall came down on ARRSE like a ton of bricks. What struck me is that back then most people in our social circles had no idea who/what Stonewall was doing at the time. Yet, apparently they had already successfully built a structure of fear to scare a large website and advertisers into silence.

The rot is probably a whole lot deeper and I think we should keep that in mind when addressing the “culture wars”. If Stonewall was able to do this in 2008 when most people hardly had any idea of what gender was or TG, etc, then I’m afraid we have a long road ahead of us.

Which is fine since I have no social life either.