Reddit often provides a space for those searching for community, especially for queer and trans people. One of the most popular spaces for trans folks is the r/trans subreddit, which currently has more than 600,000 members. On Monday, the subreddit was the subject of controversy after a user named Tyler (@itsurbro7777) made a post attempting to raise awareness for rarely discussed issues he feels transmasculine people face.In a post uploaded to the subreddit last week, he shared statistics from scientific journal articles about the violence that transgender people face, writing, "trans masc people very disproportionately face sexual harassment and assault, with most studies saying almost half of trans mascs/men experience sexual assault at some point in their life." from trans He continued, "I've also seen multiple studies claim that trans men also face the most violence in general out of everyone in the queer community. I am confused as to why this isn't more common knowledge. This should be very frequently discussed. We should all be angry. We should be supporting and uplifting our trans masc and trans male brothers; it's not only the dolls that need protection." Tyler went on to write that he feels transmasculine people don't receive as much media coverage as transfeminine people do. "The purpose of this post is to raise awareness of the issues trans men face, and point out that the trans community largely completely ignores trans men's struggles, and then says 'well trans women have it worse' as a dismissal when issues facing trans men are brought up," the post reads. "Please stop ignoring us. Please educate yourselves on what trans men go through. We absolutely have to talk about all this more and push for change."A few days later, Tyler tells Out over Reddit DMs that the moderators of the subreddit "randomly removed" his post after it had been up for a week. He says the moderators' stated reason for the removal was that the post was "divisive" and engaged in "oppression olympics," which he says minimized and invalidated his experience. When Tyler challenged the moderators' removal, he says a moderator told him to "stop bitching." And when he reported that incident to other subreddit moderators, he says they did not believe him until he showed them screenshots of the interaction. His post was deleted (but later restored), and he says he was banned for three days.As the subreddit scandal made its way across the broader platform, the r/trans subreddit lost more than 5,000 members. Moderators attempted to stem the user hemorrhage with an apology. When Out contacted the r/trans subreddit moderators for comment, they replied with a statement saying they removed the moderator who responded "inappropriately" to Tyler's message."We cant ensure that a community of more than 600,000 members has absolutely nobody being horrible to each other in it and is completely free from outside hate," the statement reads. "We can, by use of automation, manual review, or a combination of these, remove inappropriate content and, if required, ban users from the community. We have a very strict set of rules and run r/trans as a safe space." The statement goes on to say Reddit moderators pride themselves on being able to remove a large amount of hate and bad behavior before users see it.However, the statement continues, "this has devolved into a hate campaign, with our team members receiving multiple death threats, [which] goes completely against everything r/trans as a community and our moderator team stand for. Reddit's first rule is 'Remember the Human' and sadly this seems to have been forgotten."When asked if he planned to continue using Reddit's online communities or seek out others, Tyler said it was his initial plan was to stay in the r/trans subreddit. But he says moderators are still deleting posts, have not taken tangible steps to improve the subreddit, and sent out "a nothingburger of an apology." He also says moderators have added post flairs which highlight and label certain categories of content to posts tagged with "transmasc." At this point, Tyler says he will likely leave the r/trans subreddit unless the moderation team makes genuine changes including addressing issues with the specific moderators who made him feel unwelcome. "I have been on Reddit for years, but all of this has caused me to receive a lot of hate, even violent threats in my DMs," he says. He adds that his original post was never intended offend anyone or suggest that trans men have it harder than trans women, since he doesn't believe that's true. Nevertheless, "I have learned that the erasure of trans men and our issues is much more widespread than I ever thought, and it is more important than ever to push for change and make sure we are taken seriously," he says.