Meta pledges to stop censoring gender-critical speech
Mark Zuckerberg has announced that Meta, the company that owns Facebook and Instagram, is taking steps to protect free expression, admitting that its previous approach to content moderation was too heavy-handed.
“What started as a movement to be more inclusive has increasingly been used to shut down opinions and shut out people with different ideas and it’s gone too far. So I want to make sure that people can share their beliefs and experiences on our platforms.”
As well as replacing its army of “fact-checkers” with a community-notes system, Meta says it is simplifying its policies regarding “hateful conduct”. The biggest changes concern sex and gender, and they are a big improvement.
The way things were
Meta’s previous policy (look at the 29th February 2024 version) didn’t exactly ban “misgendering” or gender-critical speech, but it left enough ambiguity to make users who didn’t venerate gender identity vulnerable to vexatious complaints. This in itself had a chilling effect.
The rules were vague and vulnerable to overzealous moderators and algorithms, and to exploitation by individuals seeking to shut down gender-critical speech.
In June 2024, in the run-up to the UK general election, Sex Matters was notified, out of the blue, that our Instagram account had been “permanently disabled”. So were the accounts of several other groups, including Fair Play For Women, Woman’s Place UK, FiLiA and Our Duty, as well as individuals such as Milli Hill, Birdy Rose, WildWomynWorkshop, Claudia Clare, Women are People Too, Louise Woodward Styles, DittanyRose, Meghan Murphy and GCFeminista. A video made for Sex Matters by gay-rights activists Mr Menno and Malcolm Clark on male violence against women was removed from Facebook for inciting violence against women.
We wrote to Instagram to appeal our ban. There was no response to our letter but eventually we got our accounts back.
GLAAD calls for more censorship
While we were struggling with Instagram’s review and appeal processes, American transactivist lobby group GLAAD was lobbying for Meta and other social-media companies to go even further and ban “targetted misgendering and deadnaming”.
Its call was backed by 250+ celebrities, including Ariana Grande, Billy Porter, Cynthia Nixon, Dakota Fanning, Demi Lovato, James Blake, Jameela Jamil, Judd Apatow, Laverne Cox and Jamie Lee Curtis. GLAAD published a report calling for the censorship of social-media content such as calling Rachel Levine, then US Assistant Secretary of State, a man.
Meta’s policy turnaround
The updated policy Meta published this week is a significant change. It has firmly rejected the call from GLAAD to cosset sexual fetishists and gender ideologues and ban clear sex-based language.
- It emphasises up-front that people “use sex-or gender-exclusive language” when discussing “access to spaces often limited by sex or gender, such as access to bathrooms, specific schools, specific military, law enforcement, or teaching roles, and health or support groups”.
- It says it will permit users to “use insulting language in the context of discussing political or religious topics, such as when discussing transgender rights, immigration, or homosexuality”.
- It has removed the prohibition against “statements denying existence” of protected characteristics. These could include simple statements of disbelief in gender identity, such as “trans women are men” or “there is no such thing as a trans child”. People who hold gender-critical beliefs are frequently accused of “denying the existence” of transgender people. In fact, what we are saying is that we do not believe in gender identity. This is not denying the existence of people who do, just as atheists don’t believe in gods but don’t deny the existence of religious people.
- It has removed its prohibition against mocking people on the basis of their protected characteristics. Mockery can be an important part of political speech.
- It recognises that calling for sex-based segregation or exclusion can be legitimate in areas such as “military, law enforcement, and teaching jobs” as well as “spaces commonly limited by sex or gender, such as restrooms, sports and sports leagues, health and support groups, and specific schools”.
- It explicitly allows “allegations of mental illness or abnormality” in relation to transgenderism. This could include, for example, points that come up in discussion of the Cass Review of child gender services, which demonstrates strong connections between trans identification in children and a variety of mental-health issues.
The way things are
Although the new policy is much improved on paper, practice is still lagging behind.
It should now be safe to post messages like this one by Colette Colfer, a writer and lecturer in world religions and social ethics.
But even though her post came after the new policy was announced, she was immediately suspended from Facebook.
Mark Zuckerberg says protecting freedom of expression is important. He needs to follow up his words with actions.
What will the Oversight Board say?
The other big test of whether this is a genuine turnaround is how the Meta Oversight Board responds.
The board is a self-regulation initiative set up by Meta, with serious resources behind it. Founded on human-rights principles, its aim is to apply Meta’s content standards “in a way that protects freedom of expression and other global human-rights standards”. It is made up of the great and the good: law professors, ex-prime ministers, senior editors and human-rights professionals. It has a careful, formal process for considering issues and cases, and it makes recommendations to Meta that it can’t ignore.
Last year the Oversight Board asked for public comment on the issue of how Meta deals with gender identity.
Sex Matters sent in a submission. We told Meta that being able to speak truthfully and frankly about men and women is fundamental to freedom of expression. Separate-sex facilities are often necessary for privacy, dignity and safety, as separate-sex sports are for safety and fairness. Separate-sex associations are matters of freedom of association. Women can’t defend their rights and advocate for themselves unless they can say these things clearly in public.
GLAAD also sent in a submission. It said:
“Trans people’s existence and identities are not a subject for others to ‘debate.’ Specious rhetorical constructs seeking to delegitimize who we are (such as right-wing efforts to mischaracterize trans identity as an ideology) are well-known strategies that go hand-in-hand with other types of fear-mongering, scapegoating, and manufacturing of false narratives to legitimize violence and other harms against historically marginalized groups.”
The Oversight Board has yet to publish its findings.
Yesterday it broadly welcomed Meta’s announcement of the new approach to content moderation, saying:
“The Oversight Board looks forward to helping to shape Meta’s renewed push for free speech in 2025 through our standard case decisions, policy advisory opinions and white papers. As the Board has repeatedly highlighted, it is essential that decisions on content are taken with maximum input from voices outside of Meta, including of the people who use its platforms every day.”
But it hasn’t said anything specific about the big changes concerning the gender debates. The Oversight Board includes people such as Helle Thorning-Schmidt and Alan Rusbridger, former editor-in-chief of The Guardian, who despite their words of approval about the general principle of freedom of expression seem to have no stomach to stand up to organisations like GLAAD, or to the individuals who demand adherence to trans ideology, including celebrities, younger colleagues and sometimes their own children.
Most professionals who work in the human-rights field have been either missing in action or actively involved in shutting down debate.
When JK Rowling published her famous essay on the topic in 2020, the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Foundation condemned her with the familiar deepities that “trans rights are human rights” and “women’s rights are not degraded by the recognition of trans rights”.
When Maya Forstater won her employment appeal tribunal against the Center for Global Development, demonstrating that gender-critical beliefs are worthy of respect in a democratic society, 87 of her colleagues wrote a letter proclaiming their disappointment. It said:
“We believe the original verdict was correct when it found that this type of offensive and exclusionary language and action causes harm to trans people and therefore could not be protected under the Equality Act.”
When Reem Alsalem, United Nations Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women and Girls, drew attention to the intimidation and threats experienced by women who express gender-critical opinions, 844 human-rights organisations and professionals signed an open letter condemning her.
When Baroness Falkner, chair of the UK’s Equality and Human Rights Commission, acknowledged that there are conflicts of rights she faced the familiar backlash. Stonewall tried to get the UN-linked Global Alliance of National Human Rights Institutions (GANHRI) to censure her and remove the EHRC’s “A” status.
Western human-rights leaders who are willing to speak up when dissidents in foreign countries are persecuted are strangely silent about persecution within their own networks, funding streams and career structures.
Equally Ours, a charity that brings together UK equality and human-rights organisations, tried to write a submission to GANHRI in defence of Baroness Falkner and the EHRC. But it was unable to achieve consensus, and so did not speak up.
The organisations that tried to get her fired remain within Equally Ours. When Sex Matters asked to join the group so that the conflicts of rights could be discussed, we were told the board had temporarily decided to suspend the admission of new members, but that it would get back to us. That was over 18 months ago. Without taking up our offer to talk through the issues, they found enough consensus to tell the EHRC that “some groups” were putting the UK’s equality and human-rights framework “under threat” by campaigning to clarify the interaction between the Gender Recognition Act and the Equality Act so that sex retains its ordinary, biological meaning.
The question of whether the UK’s legal gender-recognition regime undermines its protections for women’s rights has remained firmly unanswered by respectable professionals whose job it is to think about such things. Instead it has fallen to small, largely unpaid, groups of women (and some men) to research, raise the issue in Parliament and crowdfund and organise a long, complex and costly litigation process to bring the matter before the Supreme Court. It is a rare – and brave – human-rights professional who has deigned to notice this upstart movement, let alone to take it seriously. Yet this is a very serious matter: according to law lecturer Claire Methven O’Brien, by conflating women and the men who want to be women, the UK is in breach of its international human-rights obligations.
The Meta Oversight Board’s own strategic priorities show the intellectually lazy approach taken by almost everyone who works on human rights. It addresses women and trans people under “gender” and states:
“Women, non-binary and trans people are among those who experience obstacles to exercising their rights to freedom of expression on social media. We are exploring the obstacles faced by women and LGBTQIA+ people, including gender-based violence and harassment, and the effects of gender-based distinctions in content policy.”
This fails to recognise that men who identify as trans or non-binary are still men, and do not have the same interests or experiences as women. “LGBTQIA+” conflates lesbians and gay men with cross-dressers, transsexuals and the never-defined “plus”. Many lesbians and gay men object to being bundled under this umbrella.
Meta’s new hateful-conduct statement is as “hateful” and “transphobic” as many of the statements that get people socially cancelled and investigated at work: for instance that it is fine to say that “transwomen” are men; that trans-identifying men shouldn’t be in women’s toilets, changing rooms or sports; that specific trans-identifying individuals such as Rachel Levine and Munroe Bergdorf are men; that it may be impolite to use insulting language or to question the sanity of men who claim to be women, or women who claim to be men, but it should not be forbidden and sometimes needs to be said.
The members of Meta’s Oversight Board will now have to either stand up for the new policy on human-rights grounds or resign. At the very least they, and the rest of the human-rights establishment, will have to talk seriously about a subject they have spent years trying to avoid.
Those who have kept quiet on the topic, while sympathising with the cancelled, could break their silence by posting what Colette Colfer said. Or if that is too brave they could share this article.