Twitter appears to have removed its ban on using the former names of transgender people. Called “deadnaming” by transgender activists, it was banned in the pre-Musk era, when Twitter’s woke censorship regime was at its height.
The former policy, which has now been removed, banned “targeted misgendering or deadnaming of transgender individuals.” It came amid a wider rollback of Twitter’s censorship policies, including the greater use of labeling vs. outright removal of “hateful” tweets.
We’re adding more transparency to the enforcement actions we take on Tweets. As a first step, soon you’ll start to see labels on some Tweets identified as potentially violating our rules around Hateful Conduct letting you know that we’ve limited their visibility. …
— Twitter Safety (@TwitterSafety) April 17, 2023
But it was the removal of the “deadnaming” policy that led to howls of outrage from the woke left.
The president of the leftist LGBT advocacy group GLAAD said it was the “latest example of just how unsafe the company is for users and advertisers alike.”
The reference to advertisers is another sign that the left’s longstanding tactic of using the threat of reduced ad revenue to pressure social media companies for censorship.
While it was in force, Twitter’s ban on “misgendering” led to some high profile acts of censorship.
One, a permanent ban of Canadian feminist and blogger Meghan Murphy, led to a lawsuit against Twitter over censorship. Murphy was banned for referring to “Jessica” Yaniv, the infamous Canadian trans activist and troll, by his real name of Jonathan.
The prominent anti-woke psychologist and author Jordan Peterson also faced a lengthy ban from Twitter last year after he referred to Hollywood celebrity “Elliott” Page by her real name of “Ellen.”
“I committed the fatal crime of what has come to be known in the appalling censorial terminology of the insane activists as ‘deadnaming,’ which is the act of referring to someone who has ‘transitioned’ — another hated piece of jargon and slogan — by the name and by the inference – by the gender, really the sex, that everyone knew them by previously, and in the case of Ellen/Elliot that millions of people recognized and new,” explained Peterson after the ban.
Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News. He is the author of #DELETED: Big Tech’s Battle to Erase the Trump Movement and Steal The Election.