When I changed my sex to female on Tinder, I suddenly got a lot more action on the popular dating app. I was doing research for an article and had a theory that straight men didn’t actually look at profiles, but instead swiped right on each one and then filtered their matches after someone matched with them.

Turns out I was correct. Most of the men I spoke with while I was “female” on the app said they always swiped right because it’s easier, and then they decide to block or just not write to women they aren’t interested in after the match. This went on for a few days, and I matched with almost 100 men in Chicago.

During this period, I suffered the usual digital homophobia and racism spewed at me when lazy men swiped right – and were then offended that we had been matched. But most men whom I matched with while using Tinder as female would just not engage me or message me and suggest a glitch happened but wishing me luck on the app.

Then Tinder banned me, probably because the service has developed quite the reputation for being unwelcoming to people who don’t fit into our society’s conventional gender binary. And it is starting to seem that Tinder is much more interested overall in protecting the ways in which users block and discriminate against others – and in upholding strict gender roles – then in making the app a welcoming space for all.

“Everyone is welcome to use Tinder,” company spokesperson Rosette Pambakian told me last week over email. But over the past year, reports of transgender people being banned or temporarily kicked off the app have bubbled across the internet.

In June, the website Mic did an article pointing out this seeming phenomenon. And that same month, Business Insider interviewed 20-year-old college student Sol Solomon, who was kicked off the app after matching with a man she believes flagged her account once realizing she identifies as transgender.

In her interview she also pointed out the irony of Tinder using Facebook profiles to verify Tinder accounts when Facebook currently has 58 gender options for users to pick, while Tinder remains only at two both for selecting your own gender and for selecting the gender you’d like to see.

“Unfortunately this can lead to some users reporting other users when they unexpectedly appear in their recommendations,” Pambakian told me.

“If a user feels like their account was wrongly deleted,” she continued, “they can reach out to our support team with additional details and we’ll investigate if they provide enough evidence to show that this might have been a mistake.”

While there is no public data on the reinstatement rates, I can say from personal experience that it’s not an easy process: I am currently on my second week of trying to have my account brought back, but all the representatives have stopped answering my emails. I guess it’s safe to assume that Tinder has swiped left on me indefinitely?

Having access to a dating app may pale in importance to other things, considering that the transgender community is currently dealing with an epidemic of violence with historic homicide rates across the US. Trans people in Houston, Texas, were told just last week that they don’t even have the right to use the bathroom that matches their gender identity.

But Tinder’s exclusionary policies are still important. When the company bans people for something so ridiculous as not presenting in a way that another user is comfortable with, this is a reminder that we still live in a world where, if you can’t place your life in a carefully defined box, you are treated as less-than.

And in the arena of online dating, fellow users can do more than swipe left to indicate their lack of interest – they can completely erase you from the mix simply by complaining and without giving any thought to how their own disregard affects others. Sounds rather like how the rest of the world functions: while I and many trans app users stay banned, Tinder continues to uphold the right of straight-identifying men to lazily swipe right without considering who else they’re impacting. They don’t have to, because their decisions are continuously validated.

“Tinder recognizes and believes the importance of being inclusive of all gender identities and is working on optimizing the experience for everyone,” Pambakian told me at the end of our correspondence. From my experiences and so many others around the globe, this appears questionable.

If Tinder wants to truly be for “everyone” they need to ensure that everyone can be on the app without fear of being kicked off. The app should immediately stop banning profiles and stick to its original design of just swiping left for “no” and right for “yes”.

Because by allowing people to be banned for just being themselves doesn’t promote a world for “everyone”, but rather quite the opposite. And I swipe left on any app that wants to continue to perpetuate that.