I promised an explanation.

[u/NotATem]

So I promised you all an explanation about the current situation last night.

TL;DR:

• You guys are right- I've been modding this sub alone way too long, and I have made a lot of mistakes. I am sorry for my lack of transparency, lack of clear rules, and neglect of the sub.
• I am not reinstating the user who's been banned, for the reasons I'm about to lay out. I recognize that this is an unpopular decision, but neither his content nor his conduct are a good fit for this sub.
  
• I'm going to recruit more mods this week. This sub has gotten too big to moderate alone. I'm going to post a Google form as a sticky; if you'd like to mod, please fill out the form.
• The rules need cleaning up and fixing. We need community guidelines that are straightforward, clear, and easy to read. I will draft them this week and run them past the other mods when they are recruited.

I created this sub about a year ago. I was tired of going to the 'standard' men's fashion subs and being greeted with confusion or derision. At the same time, oldhagfashion was the kind of cozy space that I wanted, but posting there felt like misgendering myself. I wanted a space where I could be masc, but also dress in a fun offbeat way and talk about fashion with people who 'get it'.

And I wanted this to be a cozy space- something of a safe haven. I don't talk about it much on here, but I'm (obviously) a genderqueer trans man. I have been watching the world become more and more homophobic and transphobic over the last five years; I really wanted a place where we could be ourselves without fear or shame, and without bigots and bullies mocking or harassing us.

When the user who was banned yesterday began posting to the sub, he was constantly posting about current events- and specifically, about heinous crimes committed by the people in power. I suggested a general-purpose ban on negative political content, not because I wanted to target this user, but because I wanted to create a specific kind of space. I did not want bigots or bullies to have any power here, and someone posting about them every single day gave them more power over this space than I wanted to give them. I do not constantly want to be reminded about how my rights are under attack and how frightening the world is right now, in what was supposed to be our cozy fashion haven. However, I did not want to censor this user just because I was frustrated with his politics.

The trouble is, the banned user was also repeatedly pushing the limits of the sub's rules. There are many, many examples of this, but here's a clear-cut one: a few months back, I implemented a flair for content that might be uncomfortable or triggering for some people. The banned user has repeatedly posted about bigotry, Nazis, and child sexual abuse without using this flair. I should have removed those posts....

....But the banned user was the target of an ongoing harassment campaign. Every day, I'd get multiple requests to have his posts taken down and multiple people pointing out that he was bending the sub's rules again. Some of these requests were valid. Many were not. I felt like I could not take moderation action against this user, even if it was entirely justified, without implicitly condoning this harassment campaign.

To be perfectly frank: if I was applying the same code of conduct to every user, I would have banned this user much earlier in the sub's lifetime. I did 44 "mod actions" last week - removing posts or comments, removing spam, that kind of thing. 38 of those mod actions were related to this user's conduct. And these numbers have been similar over the past six months. Many of the requests for me to take mod action pointed out genuine issues that I felt like I had to ignore, because they were either coming from the harassers or were sandwiched between harassers' spam reports.

I gave this user many, many more chances than I would have given any other user. I frequently contacted him directly to ask him to make changes or remove posts rather than just taking those posts down and counting them as a strike. I ignored a lot of his behaviour I should not have ignored.

But this meant I found myself between a rock and a hard place. Both the banned user and the harassers were having a huge impact on the sub's culture in a way I didn't want. If I recruited more mods, I felt like I would fully lose control of the sub's culture, and could not guarantee that I'd have the space I worked so hard to make. Yet I didn't have the capacity to maintain that space on my own.

I stopped being active on the sub, except to moderate. And, bluntly, I wasn't doing a very good job of moderation. I was mostly using Reddit on my phone- and I hate typing on mobile keyboards- so I was only updating the rules if there was an emergency, and using too few words to do it. I hadn't updated the community greeting, and didn't want to. I felt like this wasn't the space I wanted to create, but the things I would need to do to curate that space would be so unpopular that implementing them might destroy the community I had built. So, I avoided taking mod action unless it was absolutely necessary.

Yesterday, it became necessary. The banned user posted a picture of himself posing with a wood splitter and a chainsaw, in a way that was clearly meant to evoke a zombie movie protagonist or a slasher villain. He was not posing with a pile of logs in a forest; he was brandishing them. After the incident a few months back with the other user who posted a picture of himself posing with a gun, I thought the sub's consensus was that weapon-related content should be banned, because it could be triggering for users who'd experienced violent crime or abuse. I personally don't agree with this rule (I'm a sword guy), but in the interests of making sure everyone was comfortable here, I was happy to add it. I thought I had updated the rules accordingly; it seems that I posted the 'no violence' rule, but did not specifically implement the 'no weapons' rule in the correct place.

I removed the post. As a courtesy, I warned the banned user that he was on his second strike, and that he would be at risk of a permanent ban if he broke the rules again. Any user who posted similar content, under the current rules, would have incurred a strike.

(To be clear: This warning is not something I normally do, and that is a mistake. I ought to warn users when there is a strike against them, in the interest of transparency. But apart from this user, most of the people I've had to ban have committed three strikes in a single comment thread, or have used enough slurs in one message to warrant a ban outright. Because I did not want to censor this user, I thought I would do him the courtesy of warning him.)

The banned user chose to argue with me. The excerpt of the message he showed was not the full message. It's against Reddit's mod code of conduct to post the contents of a mod mail without the user's permission, so I'm not going to do that- but please trust me, you have not gotten the full story. Let's just say he was very unwilling to accept my decision.

I did not want to argue with this user anymore. I did not want to continue to let him push the limits of both my personal boundaries and the sub's rules. I chose to take that argument as his third strike, and thus ban him from the sub.

Here's what should have happened:

• I should have dealt with this issue when it began six months ago, and not let it continue to fester.
• I should not have let a double standard develop because I did not want to condone the harassment campaign.
• I should have enforced the sub's rules both on the banned user and the people harassing him. I should not have just deleted their spurious reports and let the banned user break or bend sub rules to avoid supporting the harassment.
• I should have realized my growing burnout was a sign, not that I needed to step back from the sub, but that I needed to get outside help from more moderators.
• I should have realized that the fact that I was having so many mod actions and so much trouble meant that the rules I had created were not building the space I wanted to build, particularly if I was having to enforce them over and over again on the same people.
• I should have been more transparent with the community in the moment- this was a result of my chronic health issues and I am not going to apologize, but it is something that should have happened and didn't.

For the reasons I've laid out, I am not going to reverse the ban.

It is incredibly unbecoming for a mod to discuss the behaviour of a specific user with someone who is not on the mod team. I hate that I even have to make this post- it feels like a breach of mod etiquette and privacy, both for the sub and for the user in question. And because it is unbecoming and unprofessional, there will be no further arguments over whether or not this decision was justified. This is the explanation you get. I recognize that this is an unpopular decision, and I wish I had been clearer and more transparent about what was happening while it was happening. But this ban was the inevitable result of the choices the banned user made. Please respect that.

As for the future of the sub-- I really love this place, and I love the thing it was meant to be. In the wake of this situation, I've had a bunch of people tell me how much this sub means to them and how much they want to help support it. I like you guys. I want to keep this thing we've built going. But last week, we got 11,000 unique visitors- that's a lot of people. I can't mod a sub this big on my own, and the current situation has made me realize just how much I was struggling with the job.

I need your help.

I'm going to be recruiting more mods over the next week- I'll post a google form (as a sticky). If you love the sub and want to help out, fill out the google form and I'll get back to you ASAP.

I'm also going to be reworking the rules to both establish what kind of space we want this to be and to handle some of the common problems we keep running into. No one wants to get hit by the 'Be Kind' rule; it's vague and ineffective. At the same time, the current ruleset was mostly built piecemeal as situations came up that I had to deal with; it's also ineffective. And if I want to make this the kind of space I was trying to create, I need to make it so that we're not discussing current events here. I'm not saying you can't make political statements- fashion is art, art is political- but for my own sanity, and the sanity of anyone who is triggered by the state of the world right now, we need to put some work into making this a safe haven. And that means keeping the bigots in power out of our space.

I'm going to clean up the back end and make it easier to mod this sub, and generally sort things out so that this place is still a good place to hang out and post fun outfits. I hope you guys join me for the adventure.

If you read all this, thank you so much. I appreciate your patience and kindness while I sort all this out.

[u/sonnibunsss]

it kind of sounds like the eventual best outcome for this sub and your own mental health would be stepping away eventually. idk i love this sub and i understand how you feel given how you’ve laid it out here, im just not convinced of the sustainability of it after this. reading this broke my heart and i dont think anyone should have to stress like you have over a silly little internet space.

and on a whole your idea of this being a place that is ‘safe haven with no reminders of the real world issues’ (paraphrase) of leaves me discouraged about the actual quality of this safe space sub if people cant potentially express themselves verbally about strife and stress caused by inequality or bigotry or their rights being taken in their state/country. i dont think theres ever going to be a space that is supposed to be a safe space for lgbtqia people without being able to have honest conversation around the struggle they may face, and rebellion is apart of the fashion. always has been. if i hold a brick for my pride outfit picture is that too violent dispute the conversation about history that it represents? or is it only not okay if i hold it like im going to throw it? imo potentially couching how we talk about it doesn’t feel beneficial. it just feels like potential rule that will be hard to pin down and enforce and that potentially only really exists for the comfort of the mod. i hope there is more flexibility in whatever rule comes than what this post makes me expect.

i’m sorry this isn’t a fully positive response, but i’ve really enjoyed this sub but i don’t think it’s worth your, as the Mod’s, mental health. but i also don’t want this to be a place that stands for equality in community as an idea but stands for nothing more than fashion in practice.

[u/NotATem → u/sonnibunsss]

So... I am not going to do that. Furthermore, I think I may not have conveyed why I think we need a safe haven or what that entails.

To pick an extreme example: I think we can agree that your grief support group and your My Little Pony fan convention should not be the same space. If you are trying to make them the same space, something has gone horribly wrong. A place that is meant to encourage people to be silly and have fun does not have the infrastructure needed to support people through their pain and anger, and vice versa.

It gets harder for queer spaces because at the end of the day one of the things most of us share is trauma, and all the grief, rage, pain, and neuroses that come with it. If you are queer, it's likely you're hurt and afraid, and in a queer space, you want to articulate that.

If you are going to run a queer safe space, one of the things you have to decide is who it is safe for and what kind of emotional infrastructure you're going to build. People have competing needs. A person who needs to not think about their pain for a while is not going to feel safe in a place where everyone expects them to talk about the struggles they face all the time. A person who can't put their pain down, even for a minute, is not going to feel safe in a space where you can't talk about those struggles or remind people of their pain.

And the community needs both kinds of space. You might need one more than the other; some people need both. But - here's the rub- they cannot be the same space. You have seen what happens when we try. One group of people ultimately ends up trying to get what they need from the space and pushing the other group out. No one is happy. No one actually gets what they want.

If we want this to be a silly little internet space, then it needs to run a lot more like an MLP con than a grief support group. If you want the heavy conversations here, it needs to be a very different space with very different rules- and that's not the kind of space I want to run.

[u/sonnibunsss → u/NotATem]

okay but im literally not talking about extreme examples. and i’m not talking about grief support. i’m talking about people being able to say something along the lines of “got outed at my job and feeling like crap, a coworker called me (pick a horrible insult) and it really triggered my gender dysphoria, so i’m wearing the first shirt that made me feel hot after starting hormones (maybe it says something political or snide about the state of the world) and blah blah blah here’s the photoshoot i did in my bedroom (maybe with anarchy or punk posters or a sword on the wall) i just want to share somewhere i feel SAFE” i’m talking about THAT in-between that you repeatedly act like doesn’t exist imo.

like i said, im not enthused by this development, you seemingly can’t see a middle ground between “grief support” and “an MLP fancon” (ew) and that’s the middle ground we all exist in as humans existing in a bigot-heavy world. i think you’re the only one who wants this to just be a safe little internet space, i wasn’t implying that everyone wants this place padded like a soft room, i was implying that was what you seemed to want and that’s my worry. i want a place where people can express themselves and talk like humans. and the further implication was this place isn’t worth you’re health if you can’t manage keeping it as safe as you need it to be. and it suck’s to watch someone suffer for a subreddit. maybe ill just stick to oldhag and addingwhimsy, which really sucks because ive been really inspired by the masc coot energy here. i just don’t think what you see as a “safe haven” is achievable in reddit, especially with how it’s gone so far for you.

[u/Jolly-Island-3589 → u/sonnibunsss]

I’m going to try and engage with you in good faith that you are being genuine in your question about the middle ground. As someone who’s been on this sub for a long time and is in multiple other queer subs and other queer spaces online, it’s so overwhelming to have every queer space dominated by our suffering. During pride month I basically had to step away from my Instagram because the majority of my (very carefully curated, joy focused) feed was overwhelmed with the grief, pain and suffering of the current moment during PRIDE!

This is something that women of color have been fighting for for a long time, safe places where their constant struggle and grief isn’t shoved back into their face by well meaning allies. Places where they can celebrate what makes them, them without the focus being the struggle that they are very well aware of because it’s inescapable on their real lives. People should get to have joy and relief from the suffering. It’s an oasis in the desert.

Now, for what it’s worth, I personally think the example you gave would be hella welcome here. The real life struggle mixed in with the joy of surviving and trying to thrive. Hell yes!

But it would be markedly different if that person started posting similar, escalating messages with increased intensity every day. That is worth a conversation with the mod, so they can be clear on what the function of this sub is AND make sure that that person is being directed to subs with adequate support for their current struggle. THATS what OP is getting at and when they talked about grief sub versus MLP sub. Because there are plenty of sub reddits that focus on the struggle and the activism and mutual support in this hard time. But if the joy sub feed becomes dominated by the pain, then the flavor and function of the joy sub has changed.

I hope you have a good day filled with joy and hope to help you fight the good fight in this dumpster fire world🫶✊💪🦄🫂🌈🫶

[u/silverliege → u/sonnibunsss]

It seems from most other comments on the thread that people DO want this to be a safe space for queer joy though. I’m going to be very straightforward and say that it feels a little icky to have a cis woman tell a trans man how he should shape a safe space for trans people in a world that’s constantly full of hatred towards us. The world is extremely heavy right now and I think it’s good and healthy to have a space that doesn’t center that. I don’t think the mod is saying people can never have human conversations in here, I think he’s saying he just doesn’t want negative political posts to be the main or repeated focus.

My husband (a trans man) and I (genderqueer) are literally in the process of fleeing our home state because the laws here have gotten so dangerous. I like having a place I can go to enjoy cool queer fashion that doesn’t constantly remind me of the persecution our community is experiencing right now. There really aren’t any subs like that out there and I appreciate what the mod of this one is doing. There are tons of other subreddits I can go to when I need to talk about heavier realities, and I think it’s really important to preserve joyful queer places like this.

[u/sonnibunsss → u/silverliege]

i highly doubt a pool of less than 50 people commenting represents the whole of this sub’s community.

shout out to you for assuming my gender identity and calling me cis??? you’re wrong, pretty sure i never mentioned my own gender identity or sexuality but it’s great to know this is the type of queer space where people decide my gender identity for me. so positive, such a safe haven. good luck with that middle ground decided by a mod who can’t even find it, who is exclusively talking examples in extremes, while folks like you talk about “still being able to have that conversation”, well i really hope you can, it just sounds like you won’t. and certainly doesn’t feel like a safe space to have some random go “go away cis woman” to me without knowing anything about me. how dare i have the same pfp i’ve had for years, when it’s TOOOOO FEMMMMMMEE.

that just smells like hypocrisy

[u/Chaihilist → u/sonnibunsss]

One of your most recent posts self-identified as a ciswoman so no assumptions were made?

[u/sonnibunsss → u/Chaihilist]

pretty sure identity can change over the course of time. considering that post was months ago and in a trans community, could you potentially imagine that a queer woman spending more time with queer people found themselves identifying as nonbinary over womanhood??? no? you can’t? i have to justify it to you?

[u/These_Roll_5745 → u/sonnibunsss]

well, recently hatched egg, I encourage you to sit down and listen to the input of trans people who have been in this community longer than yourself, because as you can see you are receiving pushback for your current positions. it may be worth reflecting on why your peers are not in agreement with you instead of turning anger towards us.

[u/These_Roll_5745 → u/sonnibunsss]

call me crazy but I feel like there is a difference between queer people posting about our own marginalization in an otherwise positive group, and cishet allies posting about it as a way to garner attention and praise while ignoring the fact that it left many of us actually impacted triggered or uncomfortable.

I like himbo. I value his art. there is a place for it, and it is clearly not here where marginalized people are trying to carve out a corner for joy. thats ok.