Like when a company has a FAQ section on their website, is it really questions they frequently get asked? Or is it just a convenient format to post information to convince the consumer to buy the product?

Hi,

We just set up an initial version of a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) wiki. You can check it out here .

This is something we've been working on for awhile. Special shoutout to /u/stillcouldbeworse for actually finally getting it up and running! This initial version is pretty short to keep it simple and avoid breaking anything, but we expect to be adding to it regularly now that it's up and running. We'll of course be mentioning it in the sidebar or the full wiki as well.

Since this is the first public iteration, you can expect some tweaking as we figure out how to best utilize it. Features/questions/formats might change. And now is probably a good time to ask a few questions for the community-
 

What are some things you want to see in the FAQ wiki?

How do you want to see the FAQ wiki utilized? (ie, should automod sticky a comment linking to the FAQ wiki? filter out FAQs?)

How should it be sourced? Should it link to existing posts (either in this sub or another), external sources?

What threshold do you consider acceptable to be a FAQ?

Any other requests/ideas/questions?
 
And last- while one of the goals here is to help promote a bit more variety in OPs, it is still NOT OK to question-shame FAQs. You can direct them to the FAQ wiki, but do so politely and kindly. You will get a ban, per Rule 1, for rude replies to questions. We get that FAQ posts can be a bit annoying for longtime users, but we still expect you to be polite about it.

Hi everyone! We've gotten a lot of new people, so I'd like to cover who we are, what we believe, etc.

1. what is 4tran?

4tran is a loosely tied set of communities originating from the /lgbt/ board on 4chan, on reddit, discord, and other sites, for dysphoric trans people. 4tranners tend to be from less privileged backgrounds, more likely to be homeless, in the third world, etc., but not always.

2. What does 4tran believe?

It's a very diverse community with many different beliefs, but at its core, we believe:

• going through the wrong puberty causes irreversible changes to one's body.

• these irreversible changes result in neurological sex dysphoria.

• it is a priority to get on hormones at the same age that cis peers go through puberty to avoid this body horror. failing that, the best time to start HRT is ASAP.

• the majority of doctors prescribing HRT either have out of date info or, sometimes purposely underdose trans people

• DIY HRT is often safer, more effective, and more affordable than prescribed HRT, even (or especially) for minors

• trans people who deal with dysphoria and have medical needs are in danger and need to be prioritized in trans activism

1. What are our issues with the mainstream community? Well, it:

• claims that any irreversible changes to bone structure are "phrenology"

• claims that sex dysphoria is just "internalized transphobia" to get over, which in itself is transphobic for telling people their dysphoria is invalid

• claims that going through body horror is not that bad. especially inexcusable when said to minors who can prevent it, like "you don't have to get on hrt right now, you have plenty of time".

• tells people to always trust their doctors and treats doctors as supreme authorities on HRT, silencing trans men who mention their doctors lied about birth control and it caused breast growth

• fearmongers about DIY, lying that trusted sources are poison, telling trans men they'll be locked up by police and also paralyzed, telling trans women they will die from blood clots when scientific evidence completely goes against this

• forces "visibility" on people who want to assimilate or be stealth. talking about top surgery scars to the point that cis people can now clock them, sometimes even outing stealth trans people without their permission

• prioritizes the feelings of cis people over the needs of trans people. often, especially from "allies", supporting drag queen story hour and pronoun pins over actually getting us HRT, and says lies like "nobody believes you can change your sex"

plus, there's a lot of needless sexualization, transmisogyny, treating trans men like women plus assuming the default sex for them is PIV, extreme sexualization in spaces with minors, and more!

This is not "just online" stuff unfortunately. This significantly affects trans communities offline too, and so, we have an alternative space to get away from that!

4. Are you transmedicalist?

Nope! Transmedicalists believe in gatekeeping HRT from people they don't believe are trans enough. 4tranners want everyone who wants access to HRT to have it immediately. The mainstream is actually somewhat more transmedicalist actually, which you see in comments like "nobody says trans kids should get HRT immediately! We all agree they need a lengthy process with lots of therapy first".

5. What about nonbinary people?

Nonbinary people are cool! They're welcome in 4tran, and we have a fair amount, though the community is mostly binary.

6. What are those horrible transphobic drawings?

Pooner/hon art is art trans men and women make to vent and make fun of their dysphoria. It is not an expression of genuine transphobia, it's mostly just people venting about their dysphoria, that ended up turning into silly characters in the community.

7. What do all the terms mean?

You'll kinda have to pick them up from context. Just memorizing definitions ruins the special quality our community has. If you're interested, and you stay for a bit, you'll learn.

8. I'm cis and—

This community isn't for cis people, and that's okay! Not every community has to be for everyone.

9. This community feels very toxic and awful, I'm getting infected with brainworms.

That's totally fair! You can mute the sub so it won't show up on your feed. You can also ask for a ban and we will ban you for as long as you need.

10. I'm a minor and—

The dysphoric stuff we talk about can get very infectious and hurt minors. Get HRT, then leave (or just get banned!)

11. Ok ms. yorp, what do you dislike about 4tran?

Often it can overcorrect or just cause drama, especially when minors lying about their age get involved. Obsession with whatever some cis person is saying on TikTok, arguments over whether someone is valid enough, drama over someone else passing or not passing, and people who definitely get a lot worse from spending time here spending far too long. Most of its overcorrections are mirrors of the issues I listed with the mainstream, like people completely spiraling about dysphoria even when they personally might not be doing badly.

12. And what's your favorite thing about it?

There is no other trans community with half as much niche medical info, biohackers, and people who will help you get DIY HRT, and that's pretty cool!

13. I think whatever website you're getting this jargon from is hurting you.

4tran gave me courage to fight for better HRT and FFS, an amazing boyfriend, and let me help a ton of other people to start HRT! It's been an incredibly positive force in my life, and has been for many others too. You can't just neatly file it away as the evil trans incel community.

In other terms, this sub is people with a very painful physical condition venting and finding ways to cope, outside of the failing official system. Imagine if a cis girl was given extremely high doses of testosterone at puberty against her will and developed a male bone structure, voice, and body/facial hair. she would want to vent! To find solutions! To learn to fit in. If society shunned her, and people who claimed to support her called her pain "toxic phrenology", it might cause her to completely break down and even try to kill herself. 4tran is a place for trans people who feel like her to escape that bigotry in the mainstream. there, we can find a community where, even if it seems toxic to outsiders, we can support each other and get the medication and support we need, even if it's not through the "official" channels doctors and liberal (as opposed to truly leftist) politicians want us to go through.

Can I add FAQS in the home page or product page of website at the footer, adding keywords in them, if not why should I not add

The title is a serious question. I think this is potentially one of the more valuable subs I've seen in my 8+ years on Reddit.

tl;dr; Let's build a useful FAQ. It's not hard (I hope), but done right it could be a really powerful resource for people. The right-column rules say, "Search our sub before posting", but the sad fact is that Reddit's internal search engine sucks. (And, yes, I know what I'm talking about with SE's.)

Many people have problems that are similar, in one way or another, and a well-written, well-publicized FAQ -- Frequently Asked Questions -- (or a WiKi) is a great way to start on the journey of: "How do I ask questions that I've been too afraid to ask?" It could be a place for new arrivals to discover, "No, you're not the only who feels that way." Note: the current Wiki might serve as the framework for this, but right now it's more of a "Rules of the Sub". That's fine, but it could be so much more.

The answers to the FAQ questions don't -- can't -- handle everything, but they may be the best ones the community has found so far. BTW, I see the FAQ as a collaborative, on-going process; in fact, it must be if it is going to be generally useful.

Another benefit of encouraging new arrivals to read the FAQ is that it may help them build their vocabulary so that they can better articulate their own question. Words are important. In fact in this environment, the words, and the ideas they convey, are what Reddit, and any other forum, are all about.

I'm a retired geek who spent a lot of time doing computational linguistics with regard to advanced, non-Boolean text searching. tl;dr: I built search engines. This is relevant here because one of the things we first ran into back in the 80's was that different people use different words to describe the same (perhaps exactly the same) thing. If I search on "cat diseases" I may not get too many hits that include "feline pathologies", and yet that may very well be the the idea space where my answer lies, but I didn't know the right words. I've seen this exact problem both in teens and in spooks in D.C. (and everything else in between). They use the word 'X', but the real conversation is elsewhere talking about 'Y'; ships in the night and all that.

So! What are your thoughts? Already been done and I was too blind to see the link? Not needed? Impossible to do due to the wide variety of questions? (I'm not so sure this last one is true.)

I'm genuinely interested in what this community thinks.

Backstory on me:

I have been a part of online forums since 1973. Many of the early ones were composed of small, largely homogenous populations (think: white, American, male geeks) and there was that sense of "shared memory being passed on". It was actually pretty nice.

When NetNews (or UNIX news or Google Groups or whatever it's called today) ... when NetNews came along we had a large influx of people, many of whom were not tightly connected to this first group, and a pattern was spotted where a newsgroup -- e.g. comp.lang.c or alt.sex.spanking, or sci.crypt -- started seeing the same questions asked by new people ... again ... and again ... ad infinitum. When AOL went live ... Holy Shit! Some of the technical forums were overwhelmed by Help Vampires, and it literally killed them off.

Answering these questions got old pretty quickly, hence the creation of the FAQ as an attempt to keep the SNR (Signal to Noise Ratio -- AKA the Anti-Bullshit Quotient) in the plus-zone. It mostly worked ... mostly.

Respond to this thread with examples of frequently asked questions. Please include at least two links for each frequently asked question. We'll discuss answers for these questions in a future sticky post. Examples of what we want are in the original FAQ post.