TikTok explicitly bans “misgendering” and “deadnaming” with new policy

TikTok has updated its “hateful ideologies” policy with new speech restrictions to specifically include a ban on “misgendering,” and “deadnaming.”

The term “misgendering” on social media often means referring to someone as a gender with which they do not identify – for example calling someone that sees themselves as a transgender woman a “man.”

“Deadnaming” refers to using the birth name or former name of a person that they no longer use.

Cormac Keenan, the head of trust and safety at TikTok, said in the post that these “ideologies have long been prohibited” on the Chinese-owned social platform, but that the company wanted to make it more explicit.