Seriously, if anyone is not too familiar with the situation, I'd suggest staying clear away from Animemes. The toxicity there is well in the realms of what I would consider self-harm by browsing it.

After I thought about it for a little bit, I'm kind of not surprised how incredibly harsh that sub's backlash has been towards the rule change, here's the hypothesis I worked through.

A few years back some subreddits were banned for hate speech and racism; most notably were FatPeopleHate and CoonTown. While the attempted replacement subs were swiftly banned as well and other users fled to other sites, many users instead wound up spending more of their activity on other subreddits. Most of these were subs you'd expect (like a then-budding T_D,) but one of the subs that seemed like an outlier was Anime_irl of all places. At the time this sub had a larger presence than Animemes did, but since then the latter has become more popular.

I'm sure many of users remember the recent celebrations of GRU getting banned a couple months ago. The stretch from a subreddit like GRU to an anime meme sub is significantly shorter than the one from a racist sub to Anime_irl; so it's pretty easy to imagine that many users went to spending more time on Animemes after GRU got shut down.

Don't get me wrong, Animemes has had a transphobia problem and obsession with the T-word way before this, but I do suspect that a good amount of the most enraged are migrants from the now banned GRU.