You're lucky your pieces haven't been targeted for this kind of unfair treatment. Sadly, I, too, have had this happen. No edits were made to trigger the un-distribution. I wrote a piece that went mega-viral — as in, hundreds of hours of read time, tens of thousands of views, and thousands of dollars in earnings in the first 4 days. It had already been approved by a publication that employed professional editors; the caliber was legit. It was an emotional intelligence story with a feminist angle, centered around a conversation I had with a man who wanted to sleep with me. The insights the story offered to the reader drew on my background as a mental health volunteer and as a researcher in the social sciences. In other words, the story way over-delivered, and the title and subtitle were 100% honest. Multiple readers have even commented on the fact that the insight it provided was life-changingly empowering for them.

Anyway, it was yanked from distribution and accused of being clickbait at the peak of its popularity. I always wonder how many more people it could've reached, and helped, if not for Medium having done that.

Long story short — as you can tell by now from the fact that multiple women on the platform have explained that this has happened to them — this, indeed, happens. And it's always frustrating, because if the BEST examples of our work are getting algorithmically hidden by Medium, and if we aspire to be professional writers, who are attempting to build a portfolio here that we hope will get discovered.... then how crummy is it when our finest work is purposely snuffed?