Reddit is very enthusiastic about handing out site wide bans these days. If you say the wrong thing on the wrong topic you can be permanent banned, whereas before you would just be downvoted or argued with.
Same for subreddits being banned. But only when it comes to speech it seems, not picture or video. So, for example, we have the odd case of "truelesbians" subreddit being banned for being trans-exclusive, but "lesbians" subreddit which is also trans-exclusive, but dedicated to pornographic imagery, is allowed to stay.
A better example would be what happened with /r/ukpolitics and Aimee Challenor I think, it was a truly shameless display of how incompetent Reddit has become in recent years. The whole episode was an omnishambles, and a perfect microcosm of everything that's wrong with Reddit at the moment. It featured awful hiring practices, awful moderation practices, awful crisis management, awful PR management, and highlighted the piss-poor relationship that paid Reddit staff have with both the platforms's users and the volunteer moderators running what are in many cases enormous online communities in their own right.
Regardless of where they're at as a company, as a platform from the user's perspective Reddit been on a downhill trajectory for years. They manage to cock up moderation time after time, and every single UI change they make somehow manages to make the site even less usable. They'll double down on their crappy decisions in an enormously user-hostile way until literally the point users are in open revolt against the platform's staff which sometimes triggers a U-turn with all the grace and agility of an oil tanker.
This bad relationship between owners, moderators, and users often seems to kill smaller platforms (anyone remember Yik Yak?) but Reddit has so much inertia it's been taking literal years for this disease to become terminal. It will happen one way or another though, one day they'll make a decision too user-hostile and Reddit will have its very own "Digg V4" moment.
> A better example would be what happened with /r/ukpolitics and Aimee Challenor I think,
Would you mind expanding on this? I don't follow Reddit dramas any more.
> It will happen one way or another though, one day they'll make a decision too user-hostile and Reddit will have its very own "Digg V4" moment.
I highly doubt that. Reddit has far too much non-techie people, which tend to know less alternatives and don't punish bad design as directly as "we" would. More likely it will be a slow fade to unimportance, like MySpace or Facebook (the platform, not the company).
>Would you mind expanding on this? I don't follow Reddit dramas any more.
No worries! Aimee Challenor is a very minor political figure in the UK who's mostly known for the fact she hired her father to act as her election agent after he was charged with (and was later convicted of) truly horrendous crimes against a ten year old child. Later on she left politics entirely and began working for the Reddit Public Access Network, after which she was eventually hired as a site-wide administrator.
On /r/ukpolitics (a fairly large subreddit) a moderator posted an article from the Spectator that mentioned her indirectly, I believe simply naming her as a candidate at the time and not mentioning her background at all. This moderator was banned without warning from Reddit and it became known that Reddit had been systematically censoring any mention of Challenor whatsoever and worse, banning the commenter. It was claimed by Reddit this was through an automated system but it's been alleged that Challenor herself was carrying out the censorship personally*. /r/ukpolitics temporarily closed itself in protest of this behaviour as they (correctly, in my opinion) felt that it was absurd to ban legitimate discussion of a British political figure on a forum dedicated to British politics simply because they're also a Reddit administrator and at any rate they wanted to support their banned fellow moderator.
This started a chain reaction across the site in protest of Reddit's administrator team in which many subreddits with millions of subscribers set themselves to private in solidarity with /r/ukpolitics. I don't have any figures to hand but participation was very wide and I can't imagine it did that day's advertising revenue any favours at all! Eventually the administrators relented after intense criticism from almost all angles, fired Challenor and re-instated the banned /r/ukpolitics mod. The moderators of /r/ukpolitics handled the situation excellently in my opinion, their competence was in stark contrast to the incompetence of the administrators.
It's worth pointing out that it was the censorship on Reddit's part and Challenor's questionable conduct as a political figure that triggered such a strong reaction, not Challenor's political stances. From what I understand her political activism was mostly centred around environmentalism and LGBT rights, both very laudable causes in my opinion! I think the issue everyone had was that while harassment is never okay (and I don't think it's controversial that people often do suffer atrocious harassment on platforms like Reddit, especially transgender people) the reaction to it was extremely disproportionate and further complicated by the fact Challenor is a public figure - even if a very minor one. There were also apparently a lot of complaints around the issue of safeguarding minors on Reddit which followed on from their obviously inept hiring practices, although I don't know enough to comment further on that.
>More likely it will be a slow fade to unimportance, like MySpace or Facebook (the platform, not the company).
This could be a more likely outcome than what I suggested, although given how volatile politics on social media are these days I could definitely see Reddit tearing itself apart over moderation drama. Having said that this isn't always terminal, a good case study would be 4chan which has had several incidences over the years of parts of its userbase starting their own platforms with the same format.
*I'm still not sure about this, as a web developer I can't imagine Reddit with their enormous volume of traffic would seriously follow every outgoing link and scrape the page for mentions of Challenor. I think it could be done, but I don't think it could be done with good value for money! I'd appreciate someone with more experience than me weighing in on this.
You seriously going to gloss over the fact that Aimee Challenor is transgender? Like that has no relevance to their "questionable conduct"? Is this just the massive chilling effect of cancel culture?
Why would I mention it? It’s not relevant, the issue is about inappropriate censorship and incompetent moderation. What difference does it make if they’re transgender or not? There’s no aspect of Challenor’s personal identity that makes a difference to the fact Reddit’s hiring and moderation practices are apparently utterly substandard.
I’m not interested in fanning what’s rapidly spiralling into the inevitable flamewar that this topic creates, but I will say that there’s never anything to be practically gained from making a fuss over other people’s (and particularly stranger’s) personal identities whatever they may be. I’m not saying that for the sake of a “chilling effect”, I’m saying it because in most cases personal identity genuinely isn’t relevant and only serves to distract from the issues at hand as has clearly happened here. Why would I include an irrelevant fact about Challenor’s identity that instantly derails any thread it comes up in?
You are right, being a moderator is a lot of pain once the subs grow beyond a certain point. Furthermore as a moderator you are almost forced into using new reddit as well as the tools are not all there in old. Painful experience.
The "truelesbians" subreddit wanted a place where biological females could discuss lesbian issues with biological females. This was not allowed by Reddit.
The "lesbians" subreddit is a place where exclusively biological females are portrayed in sexually stimulating activity with each other (mostly for male subscribers to ejaculate to). This is allowed by Reddit.
Both of these involve discrimination against so-called 'male lesbians'. The difference seems to be that the male gaze is of more importance to Reddit than female speech.
Homosexuality is, by its very definition, same-sex attraction, not same-gender attraction.
Aside from Reddit's double standard when it comes to subreddit bans, the fact that some people wanting to discuss their attraction to a particular sex is considered 'transphobic', is the wider problem here. It's not right that actual lesbians are getting harangued and then banned for not being interested in 'girldick' or whatever nonsense.
> Nice dog whistle.
Not really, just biological reality. People can't actually change their sex (only their gender expression), so 'male lesbian' is a statement of self-contradiction.
Why are you bringing your personal vendettas onto another platform with a new account? I’m genuinely confused and I’m unsure what you hope to achieve in contributing in this manner. I’m sympathetic that you’re passionate about this subject but I don’t understand the benefit to the rest of the HN community.
> Not really, just biological reality. People can't actually change their sex (only their gender expression), so 'male lesbian' is a statement of self-contradiction.
This is where you are mistaken. You can change your sex with a sex reassignment surgery. While gender is identity based, sex is defined via the phenotypes (physical characteristics). If you make the alterations necessary to match the physical characteristics of a certain sex, you become that sex for all intents and purposes.
You may have different chromosomes than what is standard for that sex but by no means does that mean you aren't that sex. There are plenty of women who are born female, grow up female, present female, and identify as female who find out down the line that they have a Y chromosome. The same goes the other way with men who discover they have 2 X chromosomes.
I mean hell while not the exact same circumstance, something like 1 in 2500 males are discovered to have a karyotype of 47,XXY with the actual predicted prevalence (due to low rates of identification) being closer to 1 in 1000 or 1 in 500. The previously mentioned circumstances are of course less common than this (closer to 1 in 20000 or 1 in 80000) but in the context of the global population that is still a significant number.
My point being that sex is a lot fuzzier than most people realise and the only viable way of defining it is via phenotypes, which can of course be changed with medications and surgery. Defining by karyotype causes the entire definition system to break down because while chromosomes are of course important in determining your sex, they ultimately don't define it and there are so many other biological factors that play into you ending up whatever sex you are. And this isn't a "feel good" inclusive answer, this is just the scientific/medical reality because karyotypic/genetic sex just isn't a useful definition compared to phentotypic/physical sex.
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TLDR: It's not biological reality. Biological reality is that your sex is defined by your physical characteristics and while your chromosomes play a part in deciding which characteristics you develop, they don't provide a clean or consistent determination. If you sufficiently adapt your physical characteristics, for all intents and purposes both medically and otherwise, you are the sex your characteristics match.
"You become that sex for all intents and purposes"... i'd argue that you are perceived as that sex for all intents and purposes.
Having SRS you still lack the ability to carry a baby in terms of impregnation for MTF, which most biological women are automatically capable of unless they have some extraneous condition/syndrome/etc.
In addition I often wonder how the cocktail of female hormones including estrogen (versus mostly testosterone in biological males) play a part in neurological development and influence as a prepubescent.
> unless they have some extraneous condition/syndrome/etc.
How is this any different than SRS? You can call it a condition or whatever but it results in the exact same state.
> In addition I often wonder how the cocktail of female hormones including estrogen (versus mostly testosterone in biological males) play a part in neurological development and influence as a prepubescent.
It does play a significant part however it plays an even bigger part in the actual operation of the brain itself. So people who transition find themselves much closer neurologically to the sex with which they are hormonally equivalent to than their original sex.
Now take in the consideration of trans individuals who attempt to transition during or before puberty. Is there a difference now? The lasting effects (of which none actually disqualify you from the sex you transition to) are lesser so it should be even harder to differentiate now.
The point being, a MTF individual with SRS and HRT is of the female sex and vice versa for FTM individuals. They may be their sex with additional caveats or medical considerations but they are that sex. If we want to be scientific about it there is fundamentally no difference between a transitioned individual and any number of individuals of that sex who have some disorder or circumstance that gives them the identical physical characteristics.
> You can change your sex with a sex reassignment surgery.
You can surgically change genitals and pump hormones, the gametes don't change, nor chromosomes.
> you are the sex your characteristics match.
You're conflating gender and sex. Even for medical reasons alone, biological sex is an important consideration. We can show our appearance any way we like.
You aren't necessarily though which is the point. If you medication to regulate your hormones in the way a female's hormones would be regulated, your body largely acts as if it was female. The significant majority of sex related differences from a medical perspective are almost entirely hormone driven.
he exception to this rule are genetic disorders and sex-organ specific health considerations. The genetic disorders are karyotype specific but they aren't sex specific. Likewise sex-organ related issues still apply if you don't have the same chromosomal match-up.
A 46,XX male doesn't have a Y chromosome but they still have all the standard male biology. They have some additional health considerations (mainly infertility) but otherwise they are biologically male and are subject to near identical medical concerns as an average male.
Similarly a 46,XY female has a Y chromosome but they have otherwise physically normal female biology. The caveats being often needing hormone supplements and infertility.
Hell there are even a statistically significant number of people who don't have the same karyotype in all their cells. See 46,XY/45,X0 mosaicism and 46,XX/46,XY mosaicism.
My point being: In every case where the karyotype does not match the phenotypes, the driving characteristics that determines sex in the medical community is the phenotypes/physical expression.
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Now with that out of the way:
Is a man without their sexual organs still a man? Well how do you tell?
- By the chromosomes? Well obviously that doesn't work given the previously mentioned differences between karyotype and phenotype.
- By their sexual organs? Well in this case that doesn't work because they don't have any and/or had them removed.
- By the way they look? There are women who look like men and vice versa and this is quite subjective so it's not an entirely scientific way of making the separation.
- By their hormones? Well this is probably the best one since hormones regulate nearly all expression in the body and with hormone levels typical for a male, the body largely acts male and vice versa. But suppose we don't want to use this. What do we use?
Now do the same for a woman without their sexual organs.
In the end, if you remove the organs the only definitive differentiator between sexes is hormone levels. If you don't want to use hormone levels and you can't use sexual organs, there isn't any other differentiator that cleanly separates between male and female. Every other differentiator has N or 2^N caveats.
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So with respect to trans individuals undergoing sex reassignment surgery, if the differentiating sexual organs are removed/converted (a penis is biologically just an enlarged clitoris) and the hormones are completely replaced to levels equivalent of the sex they are transitioning to, what is left to differentiate them? Doubly so if they decide to transition before or during puberty.
Once again, biology is a lot fuzzier than people seem to realise. There is a lot of grey space and fluidity in sex just like with everything else in biology. The grey space is smaller in humans and mammals in general than in other species but it is well established in the scientific and medical community that sex is fuzzy and can change given the right circumstances.
Physicians don't suddenly stop needing know one's biological sex by virtue of reassignment surgery - if anything it's even more important. The mere virtue of having to constantly inject hormones to alter expression to a limited degree evidences what sex is in play. Some medication may react differently owing to sex, not just ratio of testosterone and estrogen.
You're reducing sex to something it isn't. I'm not sure to what end, because it helps no one.
> Is a man without their sexual organs still a man?
Yep.
> Well how do you tell?
A rudimentary exam could do it.
> the driving characteristics that determines sex in the medical community is the phenotypes/physical expression.
In terms of cursory glances only. In terms of actual examination, no. Absolutely not.
> The significant majority of sex related differences from a medical perspective are almost entirely hormone driven.
Entirely wrong.
> Hell there are even a statistically significant number of people who don't have the same karyotype in all their cells. See 46,XY/45,X0 mosaicism and 46,XX/46,XY mosaicism.
These aberrations exist but are incredibly uncommon. I think I'd read of a single woman thus far with XY chromosomes.
> what is left to differentiate them
What do you think is driving the need for constant hormone replacement?
Stop conflating sex and gender. Seriously, the fact that biological sex is a thing does not jeopardize gender expression and flexibility.
But what does this exam actually entail? I am looking for an actual specific class of test or set of tests.
> Entirely wrong.
Please elaborate. What mechanism drives those characteristics if not hormones?
> These aberrations exist but are incredibly uncommon. I think I'd read of a single woman thus far with XY chromosomes.
A woman having a 46,XY karyotype has odds of about 1 in 100000 which would put the likely number of women with a 46,XY karyotype at almost 40k people across the globe. It's undoubtedly rare but that is still a lot of people. While these women have lower hormone levels without treatment, they have otherwise completely healthy female bodies which results in most women never identifying that they have the condition in the first place. Unless a genetic test is performed, it just appears as if these women have hypogonadism which can occur for any number of other reasons.
The opposite (a man with a 46,XX karyotype) is even more common with about 1 in 20000 odds which sits the population at close to 200k people. But once again, because it results in relatively little to no health issues or abnormalities beyond low hormone levels and infertility (hypogonadism), it is often either left untreated or is treated without identifying the cause.
Similarly, a male with a 47,XXY karyotype has a very similar if not almost identical experience as a 46,XX male. With odds of 1-2 in 1000, that's 4 to 8 million people who don't fit that standard sex definition.
> What do you think is driving the need for constant hormone replacement?
Remember this is talking about an individual without their sex organs. If they are removed or are non-functional, the individual almost always needs hormone replacement because without those organs to produce sex-related hormones (which effectively serve as the control switch/regulatory system), significant chunks of the endocrine system stop regulating themselves properly and the individual ends up with hormone imbalances.
In the case of SRS, the hormone producing sex organs (either testes or ovaries) as well as anything else that isn't needed any more are removed and the remaining organs are reshaped to match the form of their counterpart for the other sex. At that point all sex-hormone production is artificial/manual just as it would be for an individual of that sex who had those organs removed due to health issues (or that have those organs non-functional).
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Trust me I've looked for any medical or biological evidence that human sex characteristics excluding the primary reproductive organs (testes, prostate, penis, ovaries, fallopian tubes, vagina) are driven by anything other than hormones. I can't find any evidence to support that fact. The prevailing opinion of the medical community seems to support the fact that sex is driven by hormones and organ presence rather than any other mechanism. If you can find a medical source that supports otherwise I would love to read it and this is a serious request because if by chance I'm wrong there's no benefit in me staying that way.
This is common rhetoric with people who have nothing to say.
You're arguing in bad faith. Stop wasting my time.
> sex is driven
SEX IS NOT DRIVEN. Gender expression is driven. Sex is: gametes, chromosomes.
> If you can find a medical source that supports otherwise I would love to read it and this is a serious request because if by chance I'm wrong there's no benefit in me staying that way.
I encourage you to put the bare minimum effort to educate yourself on what sex is, and you'll come to this conclusion.
Male lesbian? I unfortunately understand what you’re saying. It’s also very obvious that using such a silly phrase is intentional. The bias and possible bigotry is showing.
You've been rightfully needled for trying to start a culture flame war, but to heap on here, I want to specifically call out your virtue signaling claim that reddit cares more about the male gaze than female speech (speech you yourself care so much about that you misgender intentionally):
Reddit removed all pornographic subreddits from /r/all. If you go to /r/all now, all porn subreddits are gone. You can still see the very rare NSFW post from a non-NSFW community, but for all intents and purposes all pornography has been removed from all public channels.
There's a significant difference between removing a subreddits from /r/all and banning it from the site. Besides, you can go to /r/randomnsfw and pretty much only see pornographic subreddits. Or search for them on the subreddits search. They've not gone anywhere, and are still well catered to by the administration.
To show that the male gaze is MORE important than female speech, you have to show that there's actually a tradeoff happening. AWS hosting porn doesn't degrade their ability to also host important feminist content.
Why does the existence of porn subs degrade the value of feminist subs?
You're being disingenuous. It's a massive move that will dramatically lower the traffic to the subreddits, and was also done to the far-right supremacist and abuse subreddits before they were finally closed. It's the largest "anti-male-gaze" move possible without total sitewide banning.
But you set yourself a trap with the "well catered to by the administration" because you've defined this situation such that "catered to" is the equivalent of "done literally everything but gone nuclear with a full ban".
So now I can easily point to the continued existence of outright neo-nazism, white supremacy, civil war idealism, violent right-wing rhetoric, terrorism support, and other radical examples of "normal conservative dialogue" on reddit and easily claim that neo-nazis terrorists are "well catered to by the administration" by virtue of the fact that they exist at all and are not banned.
If you search for a quarantined subreddit (i.e. one that is actually a step away from being banned) on the subreddit search, it won't show in the results.
If you search for a NSFW subreddit, it will show in the results. Porn subreddits are easily discoverable, and not even close to being banned.
The distinction is that, for example, a 'world foods' (aka 'ethnic'!) aisle in a supermarket categorises stuff efficiently that the local ethnic minority group (predominantly) may be interested in, while more widely consumed (or consumed by local ethnic majority group) foods are distributed elsewhere categorised more according to food type; compared to saying 'you are {local ethnic minority}ian so you are not allowed to purchase {local ethnic majority} foods', which would be discrimination.
Whether it applies to the example above though is I think more debatable.
r/lesbians is a porn subreddit with content restricted to female same sex porn content. This is just categorisation.
r/truelesbians was supposed to a subreddit for lesbians to aggregate and discuss stuff. What ended up happening was while it was still a lesbian focused subreddit, it became a breeding ground for anti-trans/TERF content/discussions/rhetoric and the moderation of the sub enforced those beliefs. This is what makes r/truelesbians discriminatory instead of just being categorisation. It takes a step from "don't post content that doesn't belong here" to "don't post content that doesn't belong here AND don't post at all here if you match some arbitrary biological definition we don't like or if you support those people".
You also have r/actuallesbians which branched off from r/truelesbians when they got TERFy. r/actuallesbians is inclusive of all people who identify as female but have the same original focus of providing a platform to discuss and aggregate female same sex/lesbian content/discussions. This once again is categorisation and not discrimination because anyone can post there as long as the posts are on topic. Additionally the content of the sub isn't discriminatory in this case because it's focused on a topic (about same sex female relationships) rather than focused against another (against trans individuals).
So r/lesbians and r/actuallesbians both are categorical while r/truelesbians was discriminatory on top of being categorical because of the exclusionary nature of the subreddit.
Same for subreddits being banned. But only when it comes to speech it seems, not picture or video. So, for example, we have the odd case of "truelesbians" subreddit being banned for being trans-exclusive, but "lesbians" subreddit which is also trans-exclusive, but dedicated to pornographic imagery, is allowed to stay.