Hi comrades, want to give you all an informal update on the discussions around the site’s misogyny problems that’ve been happening over the last several days. I wanna make sure you know that the admin/mod team has seen all of that discourse and we’ve been actively discussing solutions in the matrix mod chat. We’re taking this shit very seriously and acknowledge that we haven’t used a heavy enough hand on misogynistic rhetoric. As some of you saw we nuked that cheating thread from a couple weeks ago and handed out temp bans to the most egregious offenders. Idk how that was allowed to run it’s course but we apologize for that oversight. We’re going to do better.
We’ve come up with some ideas for how to improve this part of the site culture and we want to get suggestions from y’all as well, since the alarm was sounded on this by our beautiful c/traa posters to begin with. Our ideas so far include:
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A zero-tolerance policy towards any even remotely misogynistic/patriarchal posts or comments, as too much has slipped through the cracks on that, establishing a clear protocol for bans for violating rules against misogyny, and ideally tracking repeat offenders in a way that makes deciding a course of action easy when they reoffend.
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Uphold TC69 thought by starting up a book club (and hopefully more to follow) on feminist theory and encouraging mass participation, particularly from the he/him’s on the site. “The Will to Change” by bell hooks has been suggested by multiple people as a great starting point but please feel free to suggest any other works.
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Relaunching /c/menby with a trusted educated mod team and a specific focus on countering mainstream narratives about masculinity, relationships and sex that breed reactionary, patriarchal attitudes
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Encouraging [namely femme] participation in /c/womenby and taking steps to revitalize that sub as an excellent source of discussion on feminism and intersectionality
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Holding another mod drive to get more folks into mod positions in our communities who can help weed out reactionary attitudes
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Encouraging users to use the report button often on any post that seems even remotely sus, with the promise that no one’s going to be punished for “report abuse” for reporting posts in obvious good faith
Please let me know your thoughts on the above or any other ideas you have for making the site better, safer and more inclusive for our femme comrades. Once we’ve fully hammered out plans and updated policy we plan to make an announcement post highlighting these changes for the whole userbase. Thank you all for being here and being who you are 
Personally speaking, to give my own insight into another subject that others have discussed in this thread, I am all for a neutral (meaning neither specifically masculine nor feminine-aligned) non-binary space.
Seeing cisheteronormativity and binarism rife on every corner of the internet is deeply exhausting and honestly makes me feel like I’m “broken” for existing in a way that is far beyond any of it.
Not all trans people are non-binary either, so I can’t say that I’m 100% confident that enbyphobia/transmedicalism would never “leak,” even if just a little bit, into this community.
Truthfully, as inclusive as Hexbear can seem, I don’t give any unambiguous trust to anyone who is cis, hetero, white, or neurotypical. The fact that this thread needed to be made in the first place can show you why.
“Leftists” will go mask off and spew hatred towards someone like me when it no longer benefits them to pretend that they’re not hateful bigots.
i feel like having 3 separate comms for enby stuff will just end up splitting the userbase too much, probably best to consolidate. the number of posts here are kinda low outside of the megathread, for instance. according to the survey the majority of trans users here arent fully binary, about 2/3rds arent, which potentially means killing all four communities without a big tent (binaries might feel it unreasonable to post in a enby megathread and vice versa) or just everyone keeps doing what theyve been doing which is posting in traa.
In that sense, a workable idea is just to change the angles that the three communities are getting at.
For instance, c/womenby could be the feminist community, c/menby could be the “deconstructing masculinity from a male leftist perspective” community, and a hypothetical c/enby could just be… enby.
Grouping in non-binary people with a binary gender has always been a huge red flag to me. When people say things like “women and non-binary people,” it tells me to run and never interact with that person again. Though Hexbear might be better at handling that issue and not defaulting to the absurdly toxic “women-lite” shit, like I said, my skepticism doesn’t stop when I’m on HB.
However, it is a fair point that a neutral enby community might not attract many users. I gotta remember that most people are more “normal” than I am. A community I could find enjoyable may not appeal to most of Hexbear, like if we were to make a community specifically for djentposting lmao
It’d be just me and @Luna@hexbear.net, I reckon.
i v much agree with the way u lay out how the communities should work. the feminist and deconstruction comms should never have been made to “match”. and the enby one is a completely different kind of space, in my mind. we’re not exactly trying to make a gender comm for each of the 3 genders.
also please please can we have a neutral community. i’ve always felt v alienated by most trans communities because of this kinda thing and it would be so nice to have an enby community that isn’t divided by birth assignment. don’t get me wrong i appreciate that the trans community as a whole isn’t segregated here but it’s hard to feel at home sometimes when it just seems like everyone approaches things so diifferently to me.
Trans anything divided by birth assignment when it reinvents the gender binary with extra steps
this is what made me uninstall tiktok again recently… i know it’s a bunch of kids on there so you know pinch of salt but i didn’t need to be exposed to such takes as:
transphobic/queerphobic ignorant takes
“butch-fem relationships are heteronormative”
“if you take T or use he/him that means you cannot be a lesbian”
“you can only be a lesbian if you’re female nonbinary, male nonbinary can’t qualify”
yeag it’s bad