12-Year Reddit veteran, sadly acknowledging the site won't return to the way it was 7+ years ago

submitted by neovulcan from self.Introductions

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[–][deleted] 4 insightful - 2 fun4 insightful - 1 fun5 insightful - 2 fun -  (4 children)

My complaint about GC is GC's complaint about reddit: stuff that followed the rules was silently removed anyway.

/s/Gender_Critical/comments/550p/what_were_your_opinions_on_radfeminism_that_got/

And aside from silently removing rule-following content and hiding that from participants, GC is more like a Christian sub. GC's canon and ideas as they are derived from radical feminist thinkers are more loosely defined than the Christian bible, but it's for a group with specific dogmatic beliefs, not a group that wants to discuss a particular topic in depth. It's more like "Eowyn is best forum" than "serious Tolkien discussion only please." If it were not dogmatic it would have been named "gender criticism" or "gender discussion" or "international women's protection league" or something. There is a LOT of room for discussion of what's going on with gender roles, and with transgender activism and it's effects on women, but GC does not allow a lot of that discussion.

And aside from that, GC very much emphatically is a place for "newbies" to post. There's a whole thread entirely dedicated to people who have "hit peak trans" (perhaps the equivalent of "discovered how great Tolkein is for the first time"). Newbies posted all the time -- "I don't agree with everything but I'm having this issue" "Looking for advice on this topic even though I haven't learned everything about radfem yet" "Only been here a few weeks but I have to say they're wrong about what they say about you," etc. Many women seem to think "gender criticism" refers to the current transgender stuff with a bunch of different gender options, not gender as a whole. It's not uncommon to see that sentiment.

I wish GC would be more honest about what it is.

[–]GenderCriticalOnly 6 insightful - 1 fun6 insightful - 0 fun7 insightful - 1 fun -  (3 children)

I don’t disagree with much of this: I think there was a failure of transparency, and I think transparency is important.

When GC started as a subreddit, it was much more about in-depth discussion by women who had deep backgrounds in feminist theory. And it was supposed to supplement the existing feminist subs, because nobody expected them to turn so hostile to criticism of gender or of porn and prostitution. As it grew, a lot of people came drifting in for other reasons, because it was the only place openly discussing any of this. Some of the strict modding was an attempt to stop these newbies from diluting the original ethos, but it could only do so much. Waves would come in, and many would start to bed in or be sent elsewhere, but towards the end the influx of newbies was very high and not slowing down. The Peak Trans thread served to compile experiences, but it also served to keep those comments contained rather than making the entire sub about them because people always wanted to make a post about it early on.

There were a lot of discussions among older users about the impact this was having, and if there were ways to counteract it and restore the sub as a place to actually discuss things in depth. That’s where the creation of subs like radicalfeminists and radfemtheory (also banned) came in, and trollgc to try to move that sillier content out of gc, and actualwomen to try to move conversations not about feminism, and GCdebatesQT and ask_radical_feminists and gendercriticalguys and so on.

They may have been losing that fight, but it was absolutely what they were trying to do. In the most recent wave, for an obvious example, a lot of memeposts were getting through on GC (rather than trollGC), because the level was so high of newbies posting who didn’t know how it was supposed to work but had been told this was the place for terfs who agreed with Rowling: I hadn’t seen memes getting through in years, so this gives an idea of the battle the mods were facing.

It’s been Eternal September. The influx of young teenagers to Reddit during lockdown hasn’t helped, either.

[–][deleted] 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

That's really interesting about the history, I didn't know that's how all the GC sister subs came to be, and the peak trans thread, though that makes sense now that you explain it.

I had heard that when GC started it was more about actual gender criticism, and was not primarily focused on trans issues. Is that right? How did that change happen? (if you want to answer)

[–]GenderCriticalOnly 6 insightful - 1 fun6 insightful - 0 fun7 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

more about actual gender criticism, and was not primarily focused on trans issues

I don’t think you can really separate those two things anymore, sadly, which is why the subreddit had to be created. What had been perfectly normal feminist discussion criticising gender had become cast as transphobic and unacceptable in the existing feminist spaces, even when it wasn’t about trans issues, and discussions of trans issues kept ending up at sexist statements that you couldn’t criticise without being called a bigot.

Here is the sub in October 2013 already showing a mixture of the two, and being brigaded. You can see it in September, too. It’s very much a place for women (and see the emphasis in the sidebar on lesbians) to go and talk about what’s been going wrong in their existing spaces, so I suppose you could call that being about trans issues.

[–][deleted] 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Bindel was getting death threats over transgender stuff back in 2013? wow. It looks like this war between, well, gender critical / radfem feminism and liberal feminism has been going on for a while now. It says "community for 9 days..." so it was made back around 2013? So it was made directly as a response to this transgender stuff. It did not start out as a community discussing how to liberate women from sex-based expectations as I had thought. I guess there was a lot of that going on in any feminist context. And this is just the continued manifestation of the split or attempted takeover or whatever you want to call it between people who think feminism should include transgender males and people who think it's about female people. Which put opposing feminists in the crosshairs just as much as any organization that goes against lgbt, with the same standards of "disagreement is tantamount to violence", used as an excuse to enact violence.

Was the sub made by feminists on reddit who were getting pushed out of other feminist spaces on reddit?