IFTAS Takes Stance Against Misgendering and Deadnaming
A new covenant to improve instance policies.
IFTAS, the new Trust & Safety organization we wrote about a while back, has a lot of interesting projects in development in service of their mission statement. Their goal? Raise the quality of life for users, moderators, and communities alike by providing tooling, resources, and processes to the community.
Recently, IFTAS has been in contact with Gay And Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, more popularly known as GLAAD. Together, these organizations want to codify policies against deadnaming, misgendering, and promotion of Conversion Therapy within the Fediverse.
…the focus is not about accidentally getting someone’s pronouns wrong…our concern centers on deliberate and targeted acts of hate and harassment rooted in gender identity discrimination…
IFTAS, Official Statement
IFTAS believes specific prohibitions can strengthen these commitments.
Why is this important?
At first glance, it might seem like the policy is redundant to what’s already standard language in the Mastodon Server Covenant:
1. Active moderation against racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia
Users must have the confidence that they are joining a safe space, free from white supremacy, anti-semitism and transphobia of other platforms.
Here’s where things kind of get complicated, however: not every social provider has treated deadnaming or misgendering as transphobic in the past. Twitter, notably, has been inconsistent in their enforcement of protecting users from this very kind of harassment, even prior to rolling back protections under Musk.
In their official statement, IFTAS goes on to highlight how bad faith arguments can undermine broad policies intended to protect trans, queer, and non-binary community members. As an alternative, IFTAS instead advocates for targeted policies that call out the behavior specifically.
Will it help people?
At the moment, it’s hard to measure the potential impact that this effort might bring. The Fediverse is a space with thousands of independent operators, with varying opinions on how authority and governance between communities ought to work.
Important note: our server has signed this pledge from @iftas and updated our existing policy on prohibiting transphobic content to also include this specifically: "including misgendering, deadnaming, or promotion of so-called "conversion therapy."
We were curating that before, but a good reminder from IFTAS and GLAAD to make that specific and clear in our server rules!
https://about.iftas.org/2024/01/30/targeted-misgendering-and-deadnaming-in-the-fediverse/
Some parts of the network will likely adopt the policy change with little fanfare or any noticeable changes, whereas other communities may not think it’s necessary to adopt these additional provisions. It will be interesting to see how this shakes out.
How can communities support this?
For the time being, the organization is offering a pledge for admins to sign, and provide sample policies for instances to formally adopt into their Code of Conduct and Terms of Service.
It would be interesting to see if the existing Mastodon Server Covenant might be adjusted to include the new language, and provide a template for existing Covenant communities to build on. For now, we’ll see where this effort goes.
