Reddit Bans r/GenderCritical in the June 2020 Purge

r/GenderCritical was the largest and most active gender-critical ('TERF') community on Reddit, with roughly 64,000 to 65,000 members at removal, describing itself as 'reddit's most active feminist community' for women-centered radical feminists. The community organized around trans-exclusionary radical feminist ideology, which holds that sex is immutable and rejects the recognition of transgender women as women. Critics, researchers, and LGBTQ+ advocates characterized the subreddit as anti-transgender, while members described it as a space for women's-rights discussion; the gap between those framings defined much of the controversy surrounding it.

The community was a focal point in long-running debates over the boundary between protected political speech and hate speech targeting a vulnerable group. Reporting and subsequent academic work documented that the subreddit functioned not only as a discussion forum but also as a site of recruitment and radicalization into gender-critical ideology, with content frequently directed at the legitimacy and safety of transgender people, opposing trans-inclusive language and facility access.

On June 29, 2020, r/GenderCritical was banned as part of the Great Ban, the same sweeping action that removed about 2,000 subreddits under Reddit's revised content policy. The new Rule 1, announced by CEO Steve Huffman, explicitly prohibited communities that 'promote hate based on identity or vulnerability' — language that, for the first time, clearly covered gender identity among protected characteristics. It was named among the most active banned communities alongside r/The_Donald and r/ChapoTrapHouse.

The ban prompted an organized migration. Former moderators and members first regrouped on a Discord server and then, at the end of July 2020, launched Ovarit, a Reddit-style link-aggregator built by and for gender-critical feminists. Ovarit became one of the most prominent off-Reddit homes for the displaced community and has itself been the subject of academic study and critical reporting examining gender-critical discourse and anti-trans radicalization.

Coverage diverged sharply: mainstream and LGBTQ outlets framed the removal as a crackdown on transphobic hate, while gender-critical defenders argued enforcement was inconsistent because 'sex' was not an enumerated protected category and because the male-counterpart sub r/GenderCriticalGuys was not removed in the same wave. That disagreement — between framing the ban as the suppression of women's speech and welcoming it as the removal of an anti-transgender community — continues to shape how the episode is remembered.