I can definitely see how there would be a disconnect for people who don't really go on the trans community nor look at the modlogs. I can also see how someone who's spent a lot of time in shitty online spaces might see a big farewell post and think it's for drama and attention. I'm guilty of that cynicism myself.

But at this point I don't know how anyone could see all this smoke and still deny there's fire. Well, I do actually, and it's basically between two things: being a reactionary little baby who can't tolerate any sort of change to an online forum they post on, and/or being a straight-up transphobe.

It seems likely to me that the very start of this probably stemmed from a relatively small number of dedicated transphobes brigading and trying to get reactions for their cringe collection or whatever the fuck. But then as the site admins experimented with different ways to address that, more and more formerly uninvested people suddenly start having all these Very Strong Opinions about mod overreach, or e-drama, or other purely reactive bullshit complaints. A lot of that got interpreted as users caping for transphobes although not all of those users thought that was what they were doing, prompting bans that were one layer of abstraction from direct transphobic posts. And it seems to have become a vicious cycle of escalation over the past few days. I'm usually biased against site mods on a lot of platforms, but in this case I can only conclude that it's us, the knee-jerk reactive and cynical userbase, that fucked up by not having a minimal amount of faith in the word of multiple trans comrades, and by being completely unwilling to see if the moderation changes actually help before throwing fits.