This place has an interesting premise, but your priorities are fucked.

For one, you're shooting yourself in the foot with your misplaced commitment to "free speech". A subreddit is not a society. If someone doesn't agree with the rules of one, they can just leave (look, I'm doing it right now!), so their right to speak freely isn't restricted by a particular place having its own strict rules.

You could enforce minimum standards for the quality of comments, ban accounts on reasonable suspicion of being against this sub's core goals, and otherwise take a common sense approach to keeping discussion both civil and productive. But instead, you'd rather myopically enforce a kindergarten-level rule about "personal insults", letting even the most thinly-veiled bad faith actors go on unrestricted as long as they stay superficially "polite", and you do nothing about the tinfoil hat nutters and illiterate morons cluttering comment threads with useless nonsense.

Who are you trying to benefit? Currently, you're a doormat for at best random dumbasses with nothing valuable to say and at worst actively malicious radfems and fascists, while the few of us with any insight to offer have to wade through all the garbage you let in to find each other. I'll guess that most of the users here are somewhere in between, having the potential to learn, but being susceptible both to the bullshit from the bad actors and to their own misconceptions and misplaced grievances. They could benefit from an environment thoughtfully cultivated to promote productive discussion, but that can't be reached through your current farce of civility.

You know, I find it kind of funny how much you hate being compared to menslib. Sure, you're not exactly the same: they tend towards a hero-worshipping complex when it comes to women and feminism, while it looks like you're attracting the bitter and resentful type who've chosen "feminism" as their bogeyman to blame for anything their simpleminded worldview doesn't permit them to understand. But what you do have in common is how your refusal to accept a more complex view of the world prevents you from ever being able to fully grasp the situation you're in, let alone finding and putting into practice any true solutions.

A perfect example of your problem is what I wrote about in my comments to this post. Since writing that, I've seen several threads and entire posts doing exactly the kind of thing I was warning about. When you fail to moderate effectively and let a community be overrun by lowest common denominator junk, that's what happens. A few bad faith, or just plain selfish or stupid actors just need to plant a few provocative seeds, and the gullible, easily manipulated bulk of your userbase takes the bait and runs with it. I find that how a community handles discussion on trans issues is a perfect indicator for their understanding of gender as a whole, and as I wrote in my linked comment, what I've seen here disappoints but does not surprise me, so this'll be it for me here.

Like your T2 diabetic, homeopathy-obsessed aunt who binges on candy, you'd rather soothe your misdirected resentment by selectively interpreting only what fits your preconceived, oversimplified worldview than engage with anything that challenges it. Partly because you don't want to acknowledge the problem, let alone the full extent of the role you've been playing in it, and partly because you're afraid of admitting how unhealthily attached you've become to your harmful coping mechanisms.

It's a long and hard road ahead either way. It's your choice where to follow it.