Twitter quietly edited its hateful conduct policy to drop transgender protections

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Stable Diffusion)

Earlier this month, Twitter quietly removed transgender-specific protections from its hateful conduct policy, drawing criticism from advocates who say there has been a spike in anti-LGBTQ rhetoric since Twitter CEO Elon Musk took over the platform last year.

An archived version of Twitter’s prior policy, dated April 7, clearly stated that Twitter prohibited “targeting others with repeated slurs, tropes or other content that intends to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.” (“Deadnaming” refers to calling a trans person by their former name.)

But on April 8, the policy language changed to strike that last line. That edit effectively removed transgender-specific protections that were first implemented in 2018 to address a disproportionate amount of hate speech targeting transgender users, The Verge reported that year.