On October 6, 2025, a user posted a meme with Anthony Bourdain with the caption "Once you've started estrogen, you'll never stop wanting to beat every femboy to death with your bare hands." Two discord team moderators reacted positively with the fire emoji.
This was part of a larger discussion involving femboys and trans culture. A lot of the issue was the fact that two definitions of femboy were being used.
To one group, the term is associated with pornography, used to refer to trans women without acknowledging their actual gender. It is, to them, a highly inflammatory term. Certain femboy spaces are filled with people who take advantage of that perception. Many of the people associated with these spaces have extremely regressive views about gender. Moderation understood the intend of this meme as a comment on these communities and various related transmisogynistic phenomena.
To the group reclaiming it, "femboy" is primarily a positive term used to refer to a broad spectrum of people who identify as male or non-binary and demonstrate some feminine traits. It was later understood by moderation that the language of the meme created an environment in which individuals who identified with the term felt threatened and unsafe contributing to discussion, and instilled in them the sense that they could not trust moderation to assist them when they needed it.
Throughout the resulting conversation, people would use the term in one way, and be assumed to be talking about the other meaning. This prevented productive dialog from taking place.
Not directly related to these events, there were spurious user reports sent against trans women, particularly those on staff. These were largely from a group of users who were not normally active in 19Cord, and would accuse trans users and staff members of being being rude, combative, or arbitrary in their moderation. Moderation had to approach the situation with caution as the spurious reports showed that bad actors were willing to abuse the server's systems in order to harm trans women. This context, and not anything about any of the users involved, informed the moderator response.
On October 10th, a user sent a report regarding the initial incident. Ariadne's Thread, a captain of the Discord team at the time, ultimately decided to tell the original poster and staff involved to avoid memes like that in the future. Because the moderation team believed that the meme was meant purely in the context of the offensive meaning of the term, they chose not to take further action. However, this was not reported back to the user who made the report.
On October 14th, Guaire, a Vice Captain of the Discord Team said that the report had been ignored, saying the fact that it had been reported was "hilarious." Later in the day, in response to questioning by several users regarding the dismissal of a user report, another moderator, pr0m37h3um, said that the report had not only been unactionable, but that the report was itself transmisogynistic and suggested there would be disciplinary action against the reporter.
A new report was made on October 17th about Guaire's statement. This was discussed by the Discord moderation team, but it was ultimately decided it was more of an issue for the Disciplinary team. At the same time, Ariadne's Thread was determining removal procedure against Guaire. She was unsure of the correct procedure and wanted to ensure it was done properly, and she did not pass it on to Disciplinary immediately.
The conversation regarding femboys continued. The Anthony Bourdain meme was posted again, but this time moderators present in the conversation asked that it be deleted. The moderators present (both of whom were trans women) were perceived as sympathetic to the poster, which frustrated members who were upset by the meme. The conversation would eventually receive a stop order.
On October 28th, the discussion was restarted regarding Guaire, and was sent to Disciplinary. The Disciplinary Team ultimately decides on no action, but the Discord captains removed Guaire from their Vice Captain position and demoted them to a regular moderator. This was not made public at the time.
In November, this would kick off again. On November 6th, discussion began about making reports unseeable by non-moderators. On the 8th, this led back to the discussion of reports being dismissed or mocked by moderators, and kicked off what would become known as the November 2025 Incident.
Rounderhouse, one of the other captains of the Discord team would make it clear that Guaire had been demoted specifically for falsely claiming the initial report had been ignored and mocking it.
In the background of this, the spurious reports against trans women began to spike. This contributed to a hostile atmosphere that was leading trans women to feel less safe. These were difficult to sort from genuine concerns.
The original reporter would ask for clarification regarding their report. Ariadne's Thread explained that they had decided the meme was not to be allowed in the official SCP Discord, but that action would not be taken against the poster, given their understanding of the original intention of the meme. The reporter mentioned that they had been accused of transmisogyny for reporting the meme, but declined to state where the accusations had come from, and was no longer willing to deal with the moderation team.
Both sides would continue to speak past each other, leading to accusations of transmisogyny and double standards. Eventually, a user starts using the term transmisandry. They did so because they were looking for a term to refer to the specific transphobia experienced by trans men. However, both due to the term misandry's connection to alt right and manosphere spaces and transmisandry's specific use in communities that organize harassment against trans women, this only increases the hostility of the discussion.
Overall, trans feminine users had to endure further harsh treatment. Meanwhile, trans masculine users had a harder time being listened to. Both sides continue to speak past each other.
Ultimately, several users would leave staff or 19Cord completely citing harassment received during these events, including Ariadne's Thread. The discussion would largely go dormant over the next few months before being completely overshadowed by the events of the Bright Works Project.
However, memories and hurt feelings over the event, as well as fears for safety and about moderator bias were rife, and the incident was still having a negative effect on how people felt in 19Cord.
In April 2026, staff would pick up discussion of the incident again. By this time, there were people from both sides of the discussion on staff.
Discussions this time were much more productive. Both sides were able to tell each other what they had actually meant in the moment. Actions taken by staff were explained and put into context. While the discussion did occasionally get heated, admins would make sure that each side had a chance to respond before the other would speak.
Other issues that people were unaware of came to light, like the way jokes about "mpreg," "forced feminization," or hostility toward "fujoshi (a gendered term that was once a slur against gay trans men, but has been reclaimed by certain groups of queer women)" were very alienating to trans masc users, or the harassment trans women had been facing across the incident. As the discussion continued on, members of the discussion began to stop speaking as members of two sides as common ground was reached.
These as the main mistakes by staff:
1) Not letting the reporter know that the reports were discussed and acted on when they first came up. While not every reporter needs follow-up, when a case involves the question of abuse by staff, we owe the reporter an answer. Sometimes, the answer is 'no.' But we should be able to tell them why. In this case, the answer was at least partly 'yes,' and we should have let them know that some action was taken, even if it was just telling users not to do it again.
2) Mods should have checked to ensure they were giving accurate information to users. By telling users that staff were ignoring the report, and implying we were in fact considering punishing the reporter for making the report in the first place, it led to a situation where people felt they could not rely on staff intervention, and that they had to take actions into their own hands. This does not excuse the harassment anyone suffered, but it did not help at all.
3) We should have been faster to put the chat on mute or slow-down in order to deal with the situation. We also should have taken more time to talk to people on either side in order to figure out where the breakdown in communication was. Most of the people involved were not people who would deliberately be making others feel unsafe, or defend the use of terms that demean a person's identity. If we could have uncovered the core misunderstanding, it might have defused the situation much earlier.
In the months following the initial incident, various flare-ups and rising tensions have remained a recurring problem. It is the belief of staff that this is in large part due to the lack of resolution that the incident concluded with - in order to avoid further catastrophe, disciplinary action was not taken for behavior related to the incident, leading to a feeling that no progress had been made and no tension had been relieved. Going forward, there will have to be action against users whose actions were particularly egregious. However, this will be based on their individual actions (which ran from minor actions like heated rhetoric up to more serious ones like harassment), not which side of the debate they were on.