cw: TERFs and general transphobia
For the most part, I avoid Reddit like the plague, but when I'm feeling sad, I find myself going on r/terf_trans_alliance, and then I feel worse.
I don't know what drives them to participate, but the minority of trans posters are ridiculed, subjected to abusive comments, and mass downvoted for any attempt to get through to them in a way that isn't absolute self-flagellating placation. Some things I noticed after just a minute or two of scrolling:
spoiler
- The term "TRA"
- Accusations of male socialization, with some gaslighting when trans people try to discuss their personal experiences about their upbringings that do not fit the narrative
- Accusations of "mansplaining"
- Assumptions that trans women are predatory
- Assumptions that trans women have an entitlement complex
- Accusations that trans women conform to rigid misogynist stereotypes, but also that trans women are too masculine to embody what they identify as
- Assertions that trans women defending themselves need to accept male privilege, comparisons to white fragility
- The comparison of being trans to a cultist religion
- The insinuation that upvotes or kind words "shields trans people from reality"
- Casual references to trans women, whether indirectly or directly to trans commenters/OPs, as men or males
- The likening of trans women to white supremacists
There's this stereotype that Reddit is this liberal echo chamber, but I seem to know all of the many places where it's not, and I seek out those places when I know they'll hurt me.
For those of you just on Lemmy, what are your strategies not to stray back to Reddit?
Bangs are helpful, but my problem is that I previously used search engines to find informative articles and product suggestions beyond the scope of Wikipedia, and so much of that is AI slop now. And if it's not that, Reddit shows up disproportionately in search results and Google is dominated by promoted posts.
Search engines used to be really good at connecting people to reliable resources, even if you didn't have a specific website in mind, if you were good with keywords/boolean and had a discerning eye for reliable content, but now the slop-to-valuable-content ratio is too disproportionate. So you either need to have pre-memorized a list of good websites, rely on Chatbots, or take significantly longer wading through the muck.