Trans people are already frightened, and have seen a lot of hate
Gender Identity in Dating Apps after the Trump-Carrying Executive Order: Meta, Feeld and Community Notes in the Post-Trump Era
Trump said during his Inauguration speech that his child would not exist, since he signed an executive order requiring the end of trans care, when he was still in office.
The executive order only affects federal policy but the broader implications are huge. It was difficult for people to keep their accounts under different names because of Facebook’s “real name” policy. As companies like Meta clear the way for users to claim trans people have mental illness, there seem to be dwindling digital safe spaces for LGBTQ+ people. Except in one arena: dating apps.
Following the executive order that was issued by Trump, Match Group and Feeld told WIRED that they had no intention of reversing course when it came to gender identity options on their platforms.
It’s not known how other tech companies will respond to the executive order. Before this week, Meta seemed to be making overtures to the Trump administration. In the past, the company has been using third-party fact-checking, but CEO Mark Zuck said that the company would be using Community Notes.
The reversal was a bid to scale up free speech across Facebook in order to allow for more political content. The announcement also includes a video with a promise to simplify content policies and eliminate restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are out of touch with mainstream discourse.
Why do non-Binary children walk in a hallway? When Donald Trump won the November election, Carolyn Fisher’s family and his girlfriend, Allison Chapman, called out
Over a decade ago, in 2014, OkCupid expanded its gender options for users to include identifications such as transgender, pangender, intersex, agender, and genderqueer. It was among the first dating apps to capture an accurate picture of identity online, and the different ways it was evolving. Currently, Tinder provides an option for “beyond binary” and Hinge allows users to select “nonbinary” on their profiles.
Carolyn Fisher was in a living room in Alabama last November when her non-Binary child walked in and said that they were going to kill themselves if Donald Trump won the election.
Fisher and her husband were both Republicans. Holding a spiral notebook, Carolyn’s 16-year-old, who uses the pronouns he and they, made a case against voting for Trump.
He explained why we should not have voted for Donald Trump as our child because he should never be president. He kept notes of everything Trump and other Republicans had been saying about people with mental illnesses. We both looked at each other and started crying, when he laid all that out.
When a bishop at the National Cathedral service for the inauguration this week asked Trump to protect “gay, lesbian, and transgender children” the president dismissed her pleas in a Truth Social post and called her “nasty in tone, and not compelling or smart.”
Allison Chapman, a trans rights activist, says that there’s a lot of fear about it. It takes a long time, energy and resources to enforce, so it is important to notComply in advance. There needs to be an active resistance to these things.
The Rainbow Youth Project, an organization focused on helping young LGBTQ+ people, received over 6,000 calls in just the first couple of days after Trump’s November election win. The normal number of calls is 3,600 a month. The hotline received thousands of calls in December.
