Twitter banned hate speech some time ago, but there was one form of hate speech and harassment Twitter continued to allow: misgendering and deadnaming. Misgendering is calling a person by the wrong gender or wrong pronouns. Far-right conservatives primarily use this to attack transgender people, but some butch lesbians and gay femme men are also aware of this particular form of harassment as well. Deadnaming is exclusive to transgender people. This refers to using the “dead name,” or their name from before they transitioned.
Harassers use misgendering and deadnaming to dehumanize and silence transgender voices on the platform. Many trans people have left the platform, and therefore public discussion, simply because the harassment, doxxing, and threats became too great. With this new rule, Twitter took the primary tool of harassers away. Now they can’t misgender or deadname someone in an effort to harass or threaten them.
Someone, quick, go get Ben Shapiro a box of tissues, he’s incapable of using pronouns correctly* and will surely be crying his eyes out.
*Warning: linked video contains language, sexual content, dark humor, and dirty jokes. It also contains some pretty amazing logic.
Twitter’s Updated Guidelines
“We prohibit targeting individuals with repeated slurs, tropes or other content that intends to dehumanize, degrade or reinforce negative or harmful stereotypes about a protected category. This includes targeted misgendering or deadnaming of transgender individuals.“
The excerpt from Twitter’s new rule, emphasis added, included misgendering and deadnaming explicitly. Twitter no longer leaves this up to the interpretation of whoever works on the reported tweet or direct message.
Before, deciding whether or not a post was harassment was up to the person responding to the harassment message. According to transgender people, the Twitter employee usually sides with the harassers. With this rule in place, there’s a line in the sand. Now the decision is simple: if a person intentionally uses the wrong gender or an old name, Twitter will remove their post. Depending on how often the harasser has done this, Twitter may ban or suspend their account.
Trans people and others in the LGBTQ community, as well as its allies will be pleased with Twitter’s decision. It’s late, but it’s better than never. Free speech proponents, too, will be happy about this. Since hate speech was silencing voices, Twitter was not a bastion of free speech, debate, or discourse. Instead, the voices of the marginalized were silenced by hate and harassment. Going forward, that won’t be the case.
It’s rare that a social networking site does the right thing these days, but it looks like Twitter may capitalize on Facebook’s current bad press with a little good press of their own. Their inaction on hate speech in the past has bitten them before. With today’s announcement, Twitter will be in slightly better standing with its critics and trans people will be less fearful of using the service.
Source: Josh Jackman, Pink News