Twitter has finally banned misgendering and deadnaming transgender people

28 November 2018, 11:21

By Jazmin Duribe

It's a step in the right direction.

Twitter has (finally!) updated its hateful conduct policy and now misgendering transgender people is banned. The update also bans deadnaming, which is the act of calling someone their birth name after they've changed it. The new policy finally acknowledges that certain LGBTQ groups may be more susceptible to online abuse and now there are more measures in place to protect them.

Twitter's old policy was much more general, banning "repeated and/or non-consensual slurs, epithets, racist and sexist tropes, or other content that degrades someone." However, the new update is far more specific in what it considers to be a threat.

As well as using new wording to protect our trans brothers and sisters, "media that depicts victims of the Holocaust, media that depicts lynchings and images depicting others as less than human, or altered to include hateful symbols. This includes altering images of individuals to include animalistic features" are also prohibited.

The change happened last month, Pink News reported, following the suspension of of radical feminist writer, Meghan Murphy. Meghan was locked out of her Twitter account after tweeting: "What is the difference between a man and a trans woman?" She had a long history of being offensive, tweeting "males can’t become female" and making an effort deadname transgender people, or use incorrect pronouns.

"Targeting someone because of their gender identity has always been a violation of our Hateful Conduct policy," a Twitter spokesperson told The Verge. "We updated our Terms of Service earlier this year with more specifics on this type of speech to ensure our rules and how we enforce them are clear to everyone."