Twitter quietly removes hateful conduct ground

Twitter changed its Rules again, quietly removing a rule against calling a person by birth gender or birth name.

Twitter will not enforce…

The old Rule applied if the person involved had opted for sexual reassignment and especially for change of name. The current hateful conduct policy does still say,

We prohibit targeting others with repeated slurs, tropes or other content that intends to degrade or reinforce negative or harmful stereotypes about a protected category.

But as recently as 7 April 2023, at 2:09:23 p.m. UTC, the policy included this sentence directly after that above:

This includes targeted misgendering or deadnaming of transgender individuals.

To misgender a person is to speak of that person as of that person’s birth gender. This applies if and only if the person has elected to change genders. Likewise, to deadname a person is to call or refer to that person by his or her birth name. Again, this applies if the person involved has asked people to call him/her by a different, usually opposite-gendered name, whether or not the person has asked a court to change the name legally.

Note that the Wayback Machine capture of this page on 8 April at 11:59 a.m. UTC is defective and will not render properly. The next capture, at 1:52:25 p.m. UTC, agrees with the current version. This suggests that Twitter’s team changed the policy at or about noon UTC on 8 April – while the Wayback Machine was crawling it.

Reaction

A user finally noticed the policy change and reported on it here.

The user cited the Associated Press but provided no link. The Daily Caller reported on it here.

Reaction included these two threads that did not comment on the policy specifically, but expressed disfavor over the widespread prescription of hormonal regimens and/or surgery for sexual reasssignment.

This thread made the point that those having epicene names (that could apply to either gender) have faced “misgendering” for decades and never thought to complain about it.

The old Trust and Safety Team used this policy to block The Babylon Bee, Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk, and commentator Allie Beth Stuckey, among others. Examples of violations included:

• Calling Richard “Rachel” Levine the Man of the Year, after USA Today named him (her?) Woman of the Year.
• Referring to a biologically male weightlifter as a man, following his (her?) transition.

Separately, Elon Musk expressed his support for a total ban on sexual reassignment treatments for minors.

Five days ago he made an even stronger statement:

And the Swedish government stated that sexual-reassignment hormones should be “experimental,” not routine.