(a note before reading. when I say “most important reason”, i dont mean that another reason isn’t someone’s personal reason for leaving the site, I’m more just saying I’m not sure if you surveyed everyone who left the site that they would check “misogyny” as the reason or that the site gets exposed to so few cis women and trans men that even if the majority of those who leave the site choose misogyny on said hypothetical survey, that if got exposed a similar amount of times as it was exposed to cis men and trans femmes the ratios would be much closer to being normal.)

in my (potentially dumb cis guy) opinion you can’t point to any one factor for why there is such a lack of cis women and trans mascs compared to trans femmes and cis men. The main factors I could think of that need to be considered are as follows: legacy of CTH, latent misogyny because of the same thing/legacy of chauvinist socialist organizing in general, impact of the transphobe purges and having a very active dedicated trans community, and where people have come in after the site’s founding like VCJ or the reddit exodus and what the composition of those people were.

(i know the AGAB terms can be tricky to use especially as a dumb cis man so for brevity’s sake if i’m going to use CWTM as a shorthand for cis women and transmascs.) I’ve seen misogyny be mentioned more than once as a reason in this thread, but I’m not 100% certain if this can be pointed to as the most important reason despite that. before I get crucified, hear me out. my current thinking, is that for this to be the most major reason, it would have to mean to me that CWTM come in and think this community is more misogynistic than reddit and I’m sorry but I find that very hard to believe, the amount of outright misogyny I’ve seen and still seen on frontpage reddit pages is fucking insane. and in the case of incel central on reddit (r/tinder), i still used to see plenty of cis women (i dont think I ever saw any trans people using r/tinder tbh), using it in the past, so for cis women specifically I find it hard to believe the incel dating threads that pop up here on occasion are keeping them away. additionally, like it’s been pointed out no matter how trans positive the community is I feel like it’s hard for me to believe that there would be so many trans women on the site if misogyny was anywhere near as omnipresent as on reddit. like already mentioned, CTH was almost certainly cis male dominated, but we are 4 years out from that and with more than one wave of new people (plus whatever small continuous trickle of new users there was), i dont think it has much explanatory power anymore, and I seriously doubt anywhere near 50% of the site was trans at the time either. one thing that’s important to keep in mind though is still has a strong effect on the culture of the site even besides any misogyny, which could potentially be turning CWTM away. all this to say I dont want to deny that misogony on the site is a serious problem that needs fixing, but saying it’s the reason why has uncomfortable and frankly quite confusing implications for me.

It seems like having a trans admin that went to war against transphobes of any stripe ended up creating one of the most militant, active, and trans positive communities on the web. this is a very attractive prospect to any trans people who stumble across the site, even more so than a generic cis male socialist would which means more trans people that find the site stick around than even cis men do. the problem with this is it doesnt explain why so few transmascs are on the site comparatively, so I dont think this can be the most important reason either. one thing I know is that there’s been attempts at reaching out to trans communities on other sites to get them here (and maybe even one focused on trying to get more trans mascs here?), i would be curious to see where these attempts took place, how successful they were, and what the breakdown of trans femmes vs mascs that ended up getting onboarded.

finally, we have the waves of people joining hexbear post 2020. I’m unsure if genzedong had any meaningful influx into this site, from what I remember they mostly went to grad but of those who did I remember genzedong being pretty male dominated so i would imagine whatever growth came from that didn’t help the ratio (although I wasnt a user of genzedong at the time and reddit had gotten better about some of its gender splits over the height of the panedmic so i cant be certain about this). I know almost nothing about VCJ but i think if they were more evenly skewed it will bolster the argument of something being wrong with the site’s culture so if anyone reading this who makes it this far it would be helpful to my thoughts on this! finally, there was the massive reddit exodus. this i am also relatively unsure about, many of those who fled were some of the users who had very old accounts, which means that they skew even more heavily cis male. it also depends on what the split of who was using 3rd party apps, because those with 3rd party apps were typically those looking to leave reddit. I think this skew was probably more likely to be cis male dominated too, just by the simple fact that from my understanding over the years more and more people came to use the first party app over the third party app and cis women (again not sure about trans mascs never saw any data about them vs trans femmes) again were less likely to use reddit the further back in time you go ergo the more skewed the ratio is of angry 3rd party app users was of men. finally there were the socialists on socialist subreddit who got alerted to hexbears existence. now, i dont know what the gender ratio of the socialist subreddits left, but I will say I personally think there is way more and way more blatant misogyny in those subreddits than on hexbear, and combined with the gender chauvinism known to also be present in many if not most IRL western organizations, i could see this keep cis women and trans mascs and femmes both away. my best evidence of this is only anecdotal, but I have had to argue with dudes on there that it’s misogynistic to call women the b or w slur more than once, and while I can’t guarantee there arent cis men lurking who think it’s fine to use those words at the very least i think the slur filter lets them know that it’s not tolerated here. all this to say, if I had to guess what is happening and choose the biggest reason it would be that, that during the reddit exodus and even outside of big waves the most likely people to join are ultimately socialists, and if most of the people coming here find their way from reddit in one way or another from reddit socialist communities and if those communities are cis male dominated like i suspect, that would explain a lot of it. i think my theory is only viable though depending 1) on how effective the general “advertisement” the dedicated trans community does on here and 2) how many trans women got ripped away even if they werent explicitly socialist.

ultimately this is a lot of speculation from me as someone who is 99.9% missing the experience to pick up on certain bigotries, but these thoughts have been rattling around on my head and i wanted to put them in a comment. the best way to figure this out would be through polling, but I don’t think we have enough data to figure everything, I think we would have to find a way to get a poll to some CWTM who have topped using the site, and we also need to figure out how most people find out about the site. speculation may be the best we have for now.

• The obvious one that other people have already mentioned — misogyny. There is a culture of misogyny that permeates through this site. It has honestly turned me off from engaging with the majority of it and now I mostly stick to the trans mega. We seriously need a purge, and said purge would affect a lot of long-time posters and be very very unpopular (though not among us trans mega folks!)

• There is a lot of discussion of weight on this site, and while it is usually under a spoiler it is still overwhelmingly about losing weight and that can be a triggering topic for a lot of people. It has, in fact, started affecting me and my own relationship to my body in a bad way. I know that weight can be a source of dysphoria and it’s not on me to dictate what people do about their bodies, but also constantly talking about dieting and wanting to lose weight creates a culture of anti-fatness whether we want it to or not. I think the solution to that is to have conversations about anti-fatness and not to ignore that it exists and is the primary driver behind dieting culture, which hexbear currently does. As a caveat: I have thin privilege, but I would definitely be very wary of recommending hexbear to the fat trans people in my life.

• I have seen anti-system shit on hexbear before and I do not feel that this is a safe space to openly discuss plurality or present as plural. I think the trans mega is much better than the rest of the site, but unfortunately it doesn’t exist in a vacuum from the rest of the site. I would be very wary of recommending hexbear to my trans plural and system friends.