Yeah, iirc in the early days of this site existing transphobes used to stalk this site and try to dox openly trans users but then our mod team basically went extremely hard line on any perceived transphobia with trigger fingers on the banhammer that even the 1919 Cheka would have considered itchy; although a few good faith users were accidentally banned along the way it did solve our transphobia problem and now we’re pretty decidedly a safe space - post federation the most common reason by a long way I’ve seen for new users making an account here is them being queer people who like our militantly anti queerphobia community and moderator’s (on the flipside I joined back when I thought I was a cishet guy, and then I realised along the way that I’m actually a bisexual trans girl)

Unfortunately yes. Though it was much more common early in the site’s history way before most lemmies even existed.

Hexbear is a left unity forum that began as a successor site to r/chapotraphouse after the reddit admins banned it. The short version of why we got banned from reddit is that we outwardly celebrated John Brown’s attempted slave uprising at Harpers Ferry in 1859. We adopted the slogan “kill all slave owners” in honor of his memory. Somehow, the ghouls on the reddit admin team took this to mean a serious incitement to violence. I suppose their sense of linear time was just broken or something. Who can understand the mind of a liberal, after all?

To this day, the page for r/chapotraphouse says we were banned for “promoting hate”. That’s a massive farce considering we were one of the most absolutely inclusive spaces on reddit. We’d make anyone feel welcome there so long as they weren’t a small business tyrant, a landleech, a racist, a sex pest, a fascist, or queerphobic.

One of the biggest demographics in the r/chapotraphouse userbase was transgender people, and that has remained the case on Hexbear. So we take transphobia extremely seriously here given how it is currently one of the safest spaces on the entire internet for trans people to hang out without worry of being targeted for harassment.

r/chapotraphouse’s ban was a very high profile event on reddit when it happened. Previously the admins had chipped away at the sub in an attempt to stop its massive, rapid growth in user count. They removed our ability to ping users, and they quarantined us. At one point they even sacked our entire mod team and installed hand picked replacements. Despite that, we continued to grow. The admins were clearly afraid of the backlash that would come with an outright ban, so they also banned the empty husk of r/the_donald in order to pretend it was a “both sides are too extreme” type decision. That never held water considering r/the_donald was already dead after its userbase had moved to a reddit clone called thedonald.win. It was clear that the kill all slave owners thing was what ended up being the last straw.

Our subreddit had made a lot of enemies on reddit during the years it was active. So many that once this site started up a couple months after the ban, we experienced nearly daily raids from places like KiwiFarms and the transphobic harassment discords I mentioned. Ultimately we got rid of the downvote button because transphobic users abused it in order to anonymously express disapproval at the existence of trans people. Joke was on them in that they weren’t aware that votes are not necessarily anonymous on lemmy.

Once the raiders got bored, and once we banned anyone who used the downvote button that way, things became pretty stable for us up until we finally federated. Now we’re just trying to figure out how to balance federation with the maintenance of the same safe space we had built before.

Hexbear is a website for having consensual gay sex with your dad

Yeah, the majority of people are either indifferent, vaguely supportive, or at worst slightly rude or dismissive of trans people day-to-day. But there’s a vocal minority who straight up will see a person who’s visibly gender non-conforming, have a bunch of propaganda flood into their mind about how trans people are pedophiles or whatever, and just instantly rage. And that vocal minority is more vocal and less of a minority online because it’s pseudo-anonymous and most forums are ran by cis people and therefore don’t take it seriously enough to ban aggressively.

The insta-rage is more of an issue in person in my experience. Especially if you’re in public with a child. I used to get in fights a lot in school, so I know the “I’m putting conscious willpower into not punching you in the face” look really well. And it’s terrifying to be walking into a store with your kids and see a dude 10 feet from you giving you that look as you walk by. Before I started transitioning, I’d never had anything like that happen, even from people who were regularly in fights. It’s the visible repression of the feeling that makes it look that much more unhinged.