Yesterday, writer Ana Valens reported that fellow journalist Danielle Corcione’s Twitter account has been suspended. Why? Corcione posted a tweet that read, “If any TERF likes or retweets this I’m shoving a foot up your ass.” Somehow, Twitter interpreted this '70s Show reference as a concrete threat of violence, and this got Corcione booted from the site. That outcome is particularly ironic, given that the Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists who were the target of Corcione’s ire routinely express themselves in ways that threaten and degrade trans people. The only difference is that TERFs get away with it, because we live in a cisgender-centric world that neither accounts for nor values how trans people are harmed.

The degrading language I’m talking about is how TERFs maliciously misgender trans people without consequence, despite our stated wishes and the fact that malicious misgendering among the trans community functions as a slur. So far, Twitter and other social platforms have refused to treat misgendering as hate speech, and they must begin to do so if they take seriously their policies around preventing online abuse and the targeting of marginalized groups.

To be clear, Twitter’s own rules contain a clause that reads as follows:

Examples of what we do not tolerate includes, but is not limited to behavior that harasses individuals or groups of people with:...

repeated and/or non-consensual slurs, epithets, racist and sexist tropes, or other content that degrades someone.

Presumably, this covers slurs directed against minority groups, whether racial minorities or LGB people. But somehow, Twitter and other platforms are unable to grasp the idea that calling a trans woman a man and using male pronouns to repeatedly refer to her harms that trans person in a way that’s equivalent to using a slur.

Take this concrete example, from Meghan Murphy, founder and editor of the trans-exclusionary site Feminist Current.

Murphy was reacting to a situation in which Clymer was allegedly asked for ID to use a restroom, and then kicked out of a restaurant. Murphy calls Clymer a “dude” and repeatedly uses the pronoun “he” to refer to her despite Clymer's own stated identity. Murphy’s use of “dude” to refer to a trans woman clearly functions in a similar way as a slur against her, a way to question the validity of her identity and degrade her in the process. The fact that the misuse of pronouns also function in this way is even more pernicious, because people can and do repeatedly insult trans people without any consequence by using the wrong pronouns to refer to them.