Honest to god, is this a subreddit for the UK or not? We know from the recent census that this is a fraction of a fraction of the population. We know from the law that since 2010 and 2004 they have had certain legal rights to equality.
And yet every day or every other day we have posts, stories and articles, mostly from right-wing press with outrage-style headlines and article content about, seemingly *anything* negative that can be found in the country that either a) AN individual trans person has done or has been perceived to have done, b) that some person FEELS a trans person COULD do or MIGHT be capable of doing, c) general FEELINGS that non trans people have about trans people, ranging from disgust to confusion to outright aggression.
Let me reiterate, this is a portion of the population who already *have* certain legal rights. Via [wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgender_rights_in_the_United_Kingdom):
> Trans people have been able to change their passports and driving licences to indicate their preferred binary gender since at least 1970.
> The 2002 Goodwin v United Kingdom ruling by the European Court of Human Rights resulted in parliament passing the Gender Recognition Act of 2004 to allow people to apply to change their legal gender, through application to a tribunal called the Gender Recognition Panel.
> Anti-discrimination measures protecting transgender people have existed in the UK since 1999, and were strengthened in the 2000s to include anti-harassment wording. Later in 2010, gender reassignment was included as a protected characteristic in the Equality Act.
Not only is the above generally ignored and the existing rights treated as something controversial, new, threatening, and unacceptable that trans people in 2023 are newly pushing for, which has no basis in fact or reality – but in these kinds of threads the same things are argued in circles over and over again, and to myself as an observer it feels redundant.
Some people on this subreddit who aren’t trans have strong feelings about trans people. Fine! You can have them. But do you *have* to go *on and on* about them every day? If it was any other minority I don’t think it would be accepted, if someone was going out of their way to cherrypick stories in which X minority was the criminal, or one person felt inherently threatened by members of X minority based on what they thought they **could** be doing, or thinking, or feeling, or judging all members based on one bad interaction with *a* member of that minority in their past.
It just feels like overkill at this stage and additionally, the frequency at which the same kinds of items are brought up, updates on the same stories and the same subjects, feels at this stage as an observer, deliberate, in order to try and suggest there are many more negative or questionable stories about trans people than there actually are, in order to deliberately stir up anti-trans sentiment against people who might be neutral or not have strong opinions.
Do we need this on what’s meant to be a general news subreddit? If that’s what you *really* want to talk about and feel so strongly about every day, can’t you make your own or just go and talk about it somewhere else?
29 comments
Although “meta” we have discussed and agreed to let this post through. As a mod the massive influx of trans posts has been very tiresome recently. We are open to ideas about anything we can do to make this place less hateful… but there’s some limitations we need to work within. For example we can’t ban sources as then where do we draw the line. Etc
Note that it’s the same people repeatedly posting those threads also.
Yeah, it’s pretty annoying to see the same posters post their same transphobe garbage day in, day out.
Always the same crap too.
Please. It is incredibly tiring to see the same people posting the same inflammatory articles from the same shitty journalists day in, day out.
The threads are full of sealioning anti trans accounts pretending to be civil, and responses from exasperated and frustrated trans people tired of having to defend their existence every fucking day get deleted, leaving claims that are obviously bullshit to anyone versed in this up for causal bystanders to take in as truth.
The amount of misinformation around various topics in this area is astronomical.
Notice you’ve likely not seen the articles on the trans woman who recently died waiting on NHS treatment. Because trans issues isn’t what’s getting posted over and over – trans hate is.
The subreddit is being brigaded. Hard. Please, do something about it.
This sub would die if they remove Culture Wars and Brexit articles.
It’s going to be the theme for the Tories to fight for next election since they have nothing else, so it’s quite relevant right now, the press are priming the electorate for it.
I think an easy starter is the differentiation in how quick responses are approved
Any attempt to combat the misinformation is often inherently(as with all misinformation) going to need a much much longer post to correct the falsehoods. Than someone just joining in in spreading the misinformation .
The posted responses running along and spreading outright falsehoods but as long as they are “civil” and short end up approved quickly
Anyone that actually tries to explain why it is misiniformation more often than not is left just hanging in the background never getting their pot approved and in turn making a thread 90% misinformation 9% whatever we dont care and 1% eventually becoming the postal trying to correct the record.
The speed at which short reactionary comments that might as well be posts youd see on Daily Mail or The Sun comment threads vs the speed at which any attempt no matter how small to correct the record is just insane and honestly feels like theres a substantial difference in scrutiny applied by the mod team
This isnt even elements with scientific debates but things like “yeah evil transluminatti trying to push for allowing themselves to enter bathrooms that’s bad and wrong how dare they ask that” vs “we have had this for decades under various laws this is no different than has been the case for decades”. The first is seemingly approved substantially quicker and more often the second you are lucky to ever get approved
Add on like others have pointed out the clear skirting of the rules for single issue topic posters; the amount of obvious sea lioning and just keeping the quiet part pseudo quiet that gets posted and happily approved by the mod teams or ignored and frankly it’s just silly.
Perhaps looking at how the threads themselves are moderated given that they are the first starting point
Edit to add: the comment another user in this thread put of claiming trans people are just larping is such a common claim; using various different ways to the same the thing; in all the anti trans threads that always somehow get approved and allowed on the heavily restricted threads that require approval for comments to be seen, yet this time when reported it gets removed?
That’s an example of how comments get approved for the restricted threads yet would not normally be accepted even in an unrestricted thread as this is currently.
Edit edit: look we even have blatant examples of people pretending theres a secret transluminatti running around pulling the strings for an agenda such an agenda that dares to point out what the current laws have allowed for decades with no unending issues.
The same person has these comments in threads mods are actively responding to and alongside; the same person that does this in pretty much every anti trans hate thread and always gets approved in those for those posts. Then again we also have a mod agreeing with the claim of a trans agenda and pretending “but but both sides”
It’s true. I’m sick of seeing hateful shit and I couldn’t imagine seeing people debate my humanity. I mean I’ve experienced overt racism but normally a good chunk of people will say “f off” to the offenders, whereas this stuff is so normalised.
When you constantly see the restricted comments flair on the same topic you have to wonder what the point is.
A quick search shows that one user in particular is posting the majority of anti-transgender skewed articles and regularly argues with people in the comments about the content of said articles.
5 of the last 10 topics with the word “trans” in the title come from this user, 2 of the last 10 using the word “transgender” are also from that person. You look at their history and they disguise it slightly with other topics submitted to /r/ukpolitics but they participate in next to none of them.
Their agenda is pretty fucking obvious.
Like honestly, sick of seeing the constant anti-trans stories in this sub, it’s pathetic. Leave us alone.
Beyond the fact that, as others have said, the posts seem to be made by the same few of people, I’m still constantly amazed by the level of engagement they tend to get. They are *consistently* upvoted highly and have a stupid number of comments. Even when it’s pretty obvious that the story is just the standard Sunday anti-trans hand-wringing from the Torygraph or something.
And, yeah, I know I’m being a hypocrite. I only comment on trans threads here XD
I know it might be more work from the mod team, but I wouldn’t be averse if stories that don’t describe a material issue were removed. So, for instance, the Section 35 story could stay, because that’s a big fucking thing with devolution implications, but Rishi going GC on TalkTV and the non-story about the Athletics Association (which contradicted itself in the same article, and has been shot down by the EHRC of all groups) maybe remove? I don’t know. I’m thinking out loud here. But, yes, it’s gotten silly considering how many of us trans people there actually are *and* considering the country is a fucking bin fire in so many other ways right now.
I use this account specifically to talk about trans issues to avoid getting weird DMs, but I’ve also been a regular poster on this sub for years on my main. Increasingly, I’m avoiding it entirely on both.
It’s just exhausting. On top of the sheer saturation, the general discourse about trans people here – or really, in the UK generally – has become insanely detached from reality. It feels like the general population have internalized the idea of sex being separate from gender identity and mantras like “you can’t change sex!” to the point that the whole thing is now framed entirely as a wholly-abstract conflict between people who believe sex matters and people who believe gender matters. Everything is discussed from the presumption that trans women are physically identical to men, and policy around them should be informed from that understanding, or about something that isn’t actively (or sometimes at all) connected to the present-day reality of people’s physical bodies, like genetics.
I’ve been presenting as a girl since I was 13 years old! Hormones radically change people’s phenotypes and health profiles! I have a _vulva!_
And yet everyone won’t stop discoursing about how completely understandable and reasonable it is for bigots to effectively want to segregate me from the general population because they don’t share my “belief”.
My junk is not a fucking belief!
This “debate”, in pursuit of some absolutist solution that still manages to stuff everyone into a box, has become completely disconnected from the actual physical reality of people’s lives and needs!
There’s a big push at the moment to subvert attention from a class war.
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Totally agree, the obsession with negative stories about trans people is extremely depressing.
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As a Trans person who routinely uses this sub-Reddit, the constant stream of anti-trans nonsense and hysteria has made the sub-reddit neigh unusable for me. After all, I have no interest in reading another post about a random transgender person doing something wrong, and for the story to only get attention because it’s on a trans person.
In addition, the discussion on trans issues is beyond low-tier: I have seen multiple well-liked comments by people saying that I should either just straight up be banned from sports or bathrooms. Then when I respond I just get told that I am a “Biological Male” (let’s just move past the fact that sex is bimodal and that intersex people exist) and therefore pose a specific danger, have unfair advantages or have – somehow – never experienced misogyny.
In all, I have no idea why so many toxic discussions and non stories continuously continue to happen.
If you didn’t realise yet Reddit is just another platform being astroturfed hard to keep certain stories and topics in the news
Whenever you have a right wing government that are working to strip it’s citizens of their democratic rights you have a group of people that are scapegoated.
Gives us someone to blame for how rubbish we’re all feeling.
I agree, I’ve started to see repeated anti-trans articles on this sub. I am not trans but I don’t like seeing such frequent negative press for trans people. Much like any group of people, they deserve better.
Any article skewed negatively towards trans should not be getting the attention this sub allows. I know the mods are trying to keep open and equal discussion, but you have to be pretty thick not to see the nuance here – this is not open speech for the sake of open speech. This is someone deliberately making use of the supposedly open nature of this subreddit in order to bring what feels like daily anti-trans messages across. Burying your heads in the sand isn’t the right way to go.
Yeah but LGBT people are the latest political football and what else do right-wingers have to distract us from how badly the Tories are currently fucking us over?
Few days ago there was a thread uncritically praising JK Rowling’s “charity” and instead of a civil discussion on the PR motivations behind charity wielded by the rich and powerful, comments were calling her and her hitler-quoting friends’ borderline genocidal anti-trans views as “someone disagreeing with you on twitter” and that it shouldn’t matter.
Most UK subreddits are anti-trans so this is nothing new. Starving and suffering from hypothermia instead of going out into the streets to riot against the conservative government and their thievery bleeding the population dry for corporation profits, they use transphobia to keep them warm.
What really ticked me off was the fact that a few days ago, it was pointed out there were more stories about trans women in women’s prisons on the BBC Scotland homepage than there were trans women in women’s prisons in Scotland.
The total number, for those interested, is five. Five people is what it takes to dominate the news cycle like the Queen has died all over again.
As a trans person thank you for saying this, I don’t want to politicised in every conversation, I just want to be treated humanely and like an actual person
I really don’t get why our national conversation on social issues revolves around a group of people who make up a fraction of a fraction of a percent.
Can’t we just leave them to get on with their lives and focus on the broader issues?
As a trans person, I’m so glad this is finally being called out.
I was very ready to do what many trans people have already done and unsubscribe from this sub.
Now imagine what it feels like when you’re the subject of these constant stories and discourse
But if the media stops focusing on hating minorities, people will notice Rishi Sunak being scummy and corrupt.
NO NO DON’T LOOK AT THE ECONOMY OR THE STATE OF PUBLIC SERVICES, TRANS PEOPLE ARE USING YOUR BATHROOM!
Seems to be the gist of it
We had 8 stories about ONE rapist from the BBC. They didn’t even report that heavily about the police officer who raped 20 women.