It didn't have to be this way, Twitter.
Maybe if Twitter had actually enforced its policies, it wouldn't have become the type of hellhole a guy like Elon Musk would want to buy.
In September 2018, Twitter announced a major expansion of its Trust & Safety guidelines, establishing for the first time that harassing trans people by “deadnaming” and/or “misgendering”1 At the time, I noticed a lot of the online discourse about the decision being about how this was an “attack on free speech,” and thought that it might be worthwhile to offer a counterpoint: no, it doesn’t.
That November, after the policy had been implemented by Twitter, I decided to pitch the New York Times on an opinion piece making my case. To my surprise (they’d only published me once before and then rejected my pitches about 12 after that), they accepted it, posted it, and even got it in the physical copy of the paper (the first op-ed I had published by the Times was online-only).
Below is the op-ed in its entirety (you can also read it here):
In September, Twitter announced changes to its “hateful conduct” policy, violations of which can get users temporarily or permanently barred from the site. The updates, an entry on Twitter’s blog explained, would expand its existing rules “to include content that dehumanizes others based on their membership in an identifiable group, even when the material does not include a direct target.” A little more than a month later, the company quietly rolled out the update, expanding the conduct page from 374 to 1,226 words, which went largely unnoticed until this past week.
While much of the basic framework stayed the same, the latest version leaves much less up for interpretation. Its ban on “repeated and/or non-consensual slurs, epithets, racist and sexist tropes, or other content that degrades someone” was expanded to read: “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 final sentence, paired with the fact that the site appeared poised to actually enforce its rules, sent a rumble through certain vocal corners of the internet. To trans people, it represented a recognition that our identity is an accepted fact and that to suggest otherwise is a slur. But to many on the right, it reeked of censorship and “political correctness.”
Twitter is already putting the policy into effect. Last week, it booted Meghan Murphy, a Canadian feminist who runs the website Feminist Current. Ms. Murphy hasn’t exactly supported trans people — especially trans women. She regularly calls trans women “he” and “him,” as she did referring to the journalist and trans woman Shon Faye in a 2017 article. In the run-up to her suspension, Ms. Murphy tweeted that “men aren’t women.” While this is a seeming innocuous phrase when considered without context, the “men” she was referring to were trans women.
As a transgender woman, I find it degrading to be constantly reminded that I am trans and that large segments of the population will forever see me as a delusional freak. Things like deadnaming, or purposely referring to a trans person by their former name, and misgendering — calling someone by a pronoun they don’t use — are used to express disagreement with the legitimacy of trans lives and identities.
Defenders of these practices claim that they’re doing this not out of malice but out of honesty and, perhaps, even a twisted sort of love. They surely see themselves as truth-tellers fighting against political correctness run amok. But sometimes, voicing one’s personal “truth” does just one thing: It shuts down conversation.
At The Guardian, Kenan Malik argued that banning misgendering will shut down debate on trans issues and strike a blow to free speech. But in fact, the content free-for-all chills speech by allowing the dominant to control the parameters of debate, never letting discussion proceed past the pedantic obsession with names and pronouns.
I tend to be somewhat shy about media appearances, especially when it comes to TV. In the back of my mind, whenever I’m invited on, I wonder whether I’ll be able to discuss the day’s topic or whether I’m going to get roped into a debate over my own existence. I know many trans people who feel the same. If [deadnaming, misgendering, and “debating” the legitimacy of another human’s existence] isn’t harassment, I don’t know what is. Aside from the harm it does to trans people, it also impedes the free flow of ideas and debate, in the same way that conservatives often accuse student protesters of shutting down speech on college campuses.
Sometimes, as the logic behind the campus speaker argument would dictate, we have to set parameters on speech if we want to actually have a debate on the issues, which, in the case of trans people, are certainly not in short supply.
There’s another free-speech argument in favor of Twitter’s policy. Consider what the conservative commentator Ben Shapiro wrote about the propensity to label President Trump “racist” in a January editorial for National Review:
Is this framework useful? Perhaps Trump is a racist. Perhaps not. Either way, we can have a productive conversation about whether particular Trump statements or actions are racist. But we can’t have a productive conversation that starts from the premise that Trump is a racist overall, and that every action he takes and every statement he makes is therefore covered with the patina of racism. That conversation is about insults, not truth.
Sadly, this is what passes for “debate” on trans issues: less a look at what any proposed policy would actually accomplish and much more of a focus on trans people as a concept.
But we’re not concepts, ideologies or philosophical questions to be pondered. We’re human beings, and we’re more than eager to engage in good-faith discussion about policies that affect us: what role trans people can or should play in the military, what rules should exist on the topic of trans athletes, what steps trans people should have to take to update our legal identity documents or what needs to be done to ensure the safety and privacy of all people in sex-segregated spaces like bathrooms or shelters.
These are all debates that can, and should, be had in a reasonable, respectful, policy-oriented way. Instead, through misgendering and deadnaming, each conversation is handled as a referendum on our legitimacy and existence. The truth is that I’m unlikely to ever persuade people dead set on the idea that I am not who I know myself to be, and there’s virtually zero chance of someone else convincing me that I’m not.
We need to come to terms with the fact that we won’t understand what the “other side” feels or believes, and maybe that’s O.K. But that doesn’t relieve us, as a freewheeling democratic public, of the responsibility to hash out thorny policy issues. By setting guardrails for that conversation, Twitter’s new policy points us in that direction.
Nearly four years later, I still agree with my argument, but my faith in Twitter’s commitment to actually facilitating conversation has all but vanished.
Last month, I wrote about the Mississippi politician who called for trans people to be lined up and executed by firing squad… yet didn’t have his account taken away. It turned out that Twitter has been mostly useless. The ban on harassing trans people via deadnaming and misgendering became a rule so seldom enforced that it was easy to forget that it was a rule at all.
And with Elon Musk soon to be in charge, people on the right are ready to do what they do best: shit on trans people. Examples (warning: transphobia) from 2 minutes of looking at Twitter:
And honestly, I’m sick of this stuff. I’m not planning on quitting Twitter, but having to deal with constant, unending transphobic garbage isn’t my idea of a good time. I don’t go on social media sites “to debate.” I go on to see what people are up to, find new and interesting music, to share my work, etc. If my time on Twitter increasingly becomes filled with people calling me a “man” or whatever, I’m just not going to use it anymore after a while.
Maybe if Twitter’s employees hadn’t made the platform such an accommodating place for goons like Trump and Musk, who regularly broke the rules without ever actually facing consequences (Trump did, but only after Twitter changed the rules in his favor a number of times and then told him that only a handful of rules applied to him anymore… and then he broke one of those rules), then maybe it wouldn’t be something that this 50-year-old man-child would see and think, “I should buy that.” But they did, and now he’s (almost certainly) going to own it. Great work, employees of Twitter.
“Deadnaming” is the act of knowingly referring to a trans person by a name they no longer go by. This is generally frowned upon and should be avoided if possible. “Misgendering” is the act of referring to someone by the wrong gender. That is, calling a trans woman “he” or “him,” or calling a trans man “she” or “her.”
I switched to Twitter after abandoning Facebook over a year ago because the House of Zuck is a garbage fire. But twitter is raising my blood pressure of late, and even though the platform is huge, Musk's probable purchase is sucking all the oxygen out of the room. If I'm on it for more than an hour, I get physically sick from all the transphobia, news from Ukraine, and stories of racist medical malpractice. Some of this is my own doing, by cultivating follows (including the amazing Parker Molloy! it's how I found The Present Age!) that keep me informed and enraged at the same time. For example, the trans activist Katy Montgomerie does an excellent job detailing how terrible the UK government is treating trans citizens in its country, as well as documenting the harassment she suffers online and off. I feel more informed knowing what's going on, but I feel powerless and angry.