Reddit admins have shut down radical feminist spaces and supported coups in women’s health support groups to ensure ‘inclusivity’.
Online forum Reddit is banning women’s groups or making them inaccessible to users following a content policy update. At the moment of the update, various sub-forums, or ‘subreddits’ were shut down by site admins, “giving moderators no time to re-align their content to fit the new standards.” M. K. Fain reports that the new rules state that “Communities and users that incite violence or that promote hate based on identity or vulnerability will be banned.”
But users and groups moderators affected by the issue are saying that the new rules attack free speech. They claim the platform is directly attacking not only feminist forums but also ALL groups where women were discussing female health. Days after the r/GenderCritical subreddit, a forum that at the time had about 65000 users, was banned, a PCOS sub was made private for talking about Polycystic Ovaries Syndrome.
Reddit removed the groups moderators and replaced them with users who are trans activists or trans allies. The new moderators made the group private while they purged subscribers and non-compliant moderators. A new group was formed by the latter, but it was immediately banned by the administration.
After the PCOS sub coup, r/ Pregnancy was also targeted and made inaccessible. Many users are taking to social media to denounce that trans activists are taking control of the groups moderation in order to impose the new rules. For them, the message from Reddit is clear: women are being forbidden from talking about female issues. They support this claim with reference to the responses they got from the new moderators, who are demanding women to call themselves “cis women”, “menstruators”, “womb havers”, or to simply not talk about any issues at all that affect female bodies, because doing that is “transphobia”, according to the complainants.
Another group targeted was r/AskWomen:
On Twitter, @DykeSolidarity confirms the claims that all women’s groups formed for health issues related to the female body are under heavy scrutiny and censorship. She wrote that many subreddits for female medical issues are now inaccessible. She posted a screenshot of a woman who was challenging the platform’s new rules, who wrote how important the forum was for women who have nowhere else to talk about female health.
According to women reporting the attacks, public groups are being made private, or inaccessible and unsearchable, or simply banned, while female moderators of women’s groups are replaced by male moderators who then act on making the groups disappear, leaving thousands of women without a platform to talk about issues that affect female bodies.
M. K. Fain, who founded Spinsters, wrote on the 29th of June about other banned feminist subreddits. Apart from r/GenderCritical, her list included r/BanFemaleHateSubs, “a subreddit dedicated to fighting misogyny on the platform” and r/JoanneRowling, a fan subreddit for the children’s author. Two other groups, r/PinkPillFeminism and r/TrollGC, are reported as having gone private to avoid being banned.
An archive demonstrating the level of censorship can be seen here.
Feminists have been warning about “female erasure” for some time now. Besides promoting the idea that males who ID as women should be in all women’s spaces, transactivism also demands completely capitulation to a language that women do not recognize. Ruth Barret wrote a book in 2016 called “Female erasure: What You Need To Know About Gender Politics’ War on Women, the Female Sex and Human Rights”. Her synopsis says: “Female Erasure is a dynamic collection of diverse voices speaking out against gender identity politics, exposing the origins and harmful effects of transgender ideology on the lives of women and children today as a continuation of female erasure and silencing.”
In 2019, Jessica Pin, a researcher who survived a botched vaginoplasty and now fights to include proper description of the female anatomy in OB7Gyn literature, found herself banned from nearly all online platforms, including Quora, Facebook and Twitter. She challenges medical apps and medical bodies who neglect the correct anatomy of the female genitalia but is constantly told her research “violates their policies”.
Also last year, the author of the Vagina Bible could not advertise her book on social media because the word vagina was considered too graphic. According to the BBC, “Twitter, Facebook and Instagram blocked adverts promoting a doctor’s book about vaginal health, according to US publisher Kensington. Numerous social media posts using the words ‘vaginal’ or ‘vagina’, advertising Dr Jennifer Gunter’s The Vagina Bible, were rejected.”
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Posted by Floriana
9 July, 2020 at 9:21 am
These are frightening times for us women. I don't go in for the 'oppression Olympics' but history shows us that women were often treated as second-class citizens. At least no-one denied our very existence, though. 'Transgenderism' has brought women-hating to a whole new level that must be unprecedented, where acknowledgement of our existence hangs in the balance. Young men whom we would all have described not so long ago as 'juvenile delinquents' are being actively encouraged to spew rape-threats and disparaging comments about our body-parts at us. Female academics live in fear of assault. Universities are no longer run by the principal, but by the students who dictate who gets to speak or keep their job, and it's the women who are being fired. Women are being ousted from politics while men take over and compile hit-lists of both groups and individuals. Women in martial arts now risk being killed. Female weight-lifters risk permanent pelvic injury trying to compete with men. All women's sport is being driven out of existence. Female authors are targeted for expressing their views. Girls are being encouraged to hate their female bodies. We are threatened with the loss of our toilets and changing rooms. We can no longer escape the male gaze in nightclubs by finding a haven. Girls are being told to wait outside their own communal showers if they don't feel comfortable with a boy in there. Lesbians are being abused at Pride marches, for being the lowest of the low - women who always, not just sometimes, say 'no' to men. Women are being denied access to healthcare. When I found myself with a gynaecological condition in 2017, I knew nothing about it because there was already a lack of public information - because 'women's stuff'. I had to guess what it was by typing in the name of a female body-part - can I even do that, now? I chose to see a female doctor because I was embarrassed, and I got one. Two years later I was told that women can no longer choose a same-sex health practitioner. I got treated dismissively by the British NHS but found a lot of support online from forums where women could discuss the issue. Now these are being stopped. We are being stripped of the right to not only discuss health issues that only affect us, but to even use the names of body-parts and functions that only we have. Our definition of ourselves as 'women' is being stolen from us, along with 'female' and 'girl'. The latest is the word 'mother'; we can't even mention our female ancestors or our relationship to other people. Next it will be 'grandmother', 'aunt', 'niece' etc. I think this is the first time in history that we are literally being DELETED.
Posted by Lou
14 July, 2020 at 9:39 am
Well said. A lot of us feel exactly like you but we are in fear of saying so publicly. I was a young feminist in the 90’s I started a little Women’s Group in my 6th form were we sat and talked about our lives and futures . I never anticipated this future, this feels like total assault on our existence. Our very language is being altered by force and In doing so the way our children conceptualise and think about the world . As long as gender identity ideology with its reinforcement of rigid sex stereotypes and innate gender exists women’s rights are at risk . The idea cis women are those whose gender and sex match ignores the fact many women feel ill at ease with gender and are critical of its constraints . Motherhood , girlhood, menopause, sexism and sexualised body images mean we all have moments of unease with our biological gender under the gender identity definition we’re all trans ! I can’t believe we can’t even use scientific terminology about sex without being silenced.