How Twitter’s Ban on ‘Deadnaming’ Promotes Free Speech
Trans people are less likely to speak up if they know they’re going to be constantly told they don’t exist.
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.
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 this 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.
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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.
Mr. Shapiro, who is himself a critic of trans individuals and policies that support us, makes an excellent argument for finding a productive framework for useful conversation. Just as we can’t actually address the merits of any particular policy proposed by Mr. Trump if our focus is solely on the man himself, we can’t address the merits of policies that affect trans people if debate starts from the premise that trans people are and will always be whatever happens to be stamped on our original birth certificates. And as Mr. Shapiro notes, while there may or may not be truth to the statement that Mr. Trump is a racist, any discussion had through that lens will be “about insults, not truth.”
If we want more and better speech on this topic, even among trans critics, Twitter’s policy gives us the framework we need to reset our thinking. To date, we’ve put semantics over substance.
Take the discussion following
The Times’s Oct. 21 report that the Trump administration was contemplating changes to federal policy that would effectively have trans people “defined out of existence.” The response from trans people and our allies was that “we won’t be erased”; the response from social conservatives tended to be that the administration was making the right call.
In both cases, the focus was almost universally on whether or not trans women are actually women and trans men are actually men. Rather than having a robust discussion about what practical effects a change to the Department of Health and Human Services definition of sex and gender might have — for instance, it could give rise to even more rampant discrimination than trans people already face, an uptick in gender-specific exclusions from insurance policies and more — we found ourselves mired in the same stalemate.
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.
@ParkerMolloy) is a Chicago-based writer and editor at large at Media Matters for America.
