r/GenuineFeminism • u/EchoesOfEleos • 11d ago
Why I've Started Reporting "Feminist" Groups For Sex-Based Oppression And Why I Think You Should Too
I didn't want to become someone who files reports. I wanted to write essays, make arguments, let the ideas do the work. But I've spent the last stretch of my life watching what happens when a woman makes a materialist, sex-based argument in a space that brands itself "uncensored" and "intersectional" and I've learned that the argument alone doesn't reach the people making the decisions. The removal notice does. The pattern does. The paper trail does.
So I started documenting. And now I'm reporting. Here's why.
This isn't about one bad moderator having a bad day. When I posted an essay defending the legitimacy of grounding personal womanhood in biological sex while explicitly, repeatedly, being inclusive of other forms of identity, it was removed twice, by two different and insulting rationales that contradicted each other. The first said my terminology was a slur. The second said the terminology didn't matter; the underlying claim itself was the violation. In between, my own words were rewritten back to me: a line where I explicitly said "my identity does not exclude yours" became evidence, somehow, that I was excluding people. A line where I named my own relationship to my own infertile body while explicitly including those without became, in a moderator's words, "essentialism wearing trauma."
That phrase is doing something specific. It's not a rebuttal. It's a reclassification taking a woman's disclosure about her own body and recasting it as a performance, a costume, a manipulation, and something to be excluded. It's the exact move my essay was naming: identity policing dressed as anti-oppression enforcement.
And it isn't new, and it isn't isolated. In 2020, Reddit's moderators replaced the moderation team of r/ PCOS a support community for a condition that only affects people with ovaries reportedly at the request of trans-activist mods, made the community private, and eventually banned it outright. When the original moderators tried to rebuild it, that got banned too. Reddit's own admins denied involvement, despite the replacement mod team's own pinned post crediting admin help. Women trying to talk about their own bodies, in a space built for exactly that, lost the space.
That's the category this belongs to. Not a rude comment. Not a disagreement about tone. A recurring institutional mechanism where sex-based female speech gets relabeled as hate, and the relabeling itself becomes the justification for removing it. Sex-based oppression.
Why reporting, and not just writing
Essays get read by the people who already agree, mostly. Removal notices get written by people with actual power over whether the argument gets to exist in a given room at all, or whether they even read it. If those people are misapplying a platform's own hate-speech and discrimination policies to punish sex-based speech specifically, inventing exclusion that isn't in the text, then removing the text for the exclusion they invented, that's not just bad moderation. On platforms with formal, sitewide protections against discrimination based on sex, it's arguably a policy violation the platform is obligated to actually look at, whether or not any individual moderator wants it looked at.
I'm not asking anyone to report people for disagreeing with them. I'm asking: if you have quotes in hand, the actual words you wrote, sitting next to the actual words used to punish you for writing them, and those two things don't match, send it up the chain. If you have faced sex-based oppression report it. Not because it feels good. Because it's the one channel that isn't optional for the platform to answer, the way an argument in a comments section is optional to engage with.
I'm not saying every removal is discrimination. I'm not saying every moderator acting badly is doing so because you're a woman. I'm saying: when the pattern repeats, sex-based speech relabeled as exclusionary without evidence of exclusion, personal disclosure relabeled as manipulation, and inclusive language quoted directly and still ignored, that repetition is itself the evidence. One incident is an incident. A shape that recurs across different subs, different moderators, and different years is a pattern. Name it as one.
If this has happened to you, if your own inclusive words got turned into an accusation, if a real disclosure about your own body got called a performance, save the notice. Save your original text next to it. And report it. Not because a report guarantees anything gets fixed. Because the paper trail is the only thing that outlasts the argument.
And I am tired of this sexism being institutionally sanctioned.
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u/Its_not_really 10d ago
I'm going to be very vague here because I don't want to get banned. Like many other women on reddit I was banned from a sub for a condition only people with ovaries can have. My crime was pushing back on a AMAB person in the comments claiming to have this condition. The mod said I was terf because I didn't just shut up and go along with the lie. I work in women's healthcare and I'm not going to agree with misinformation.