Short-form video app TikTok is updating its community guidelines and introducing new features to curb hate and harmful content, by clarifying that hateful ideologies prohibited from the platform include deadnaming, misgendering, misogyny and content that supports or promotes ‘conversion’ therapy.

These changes are being implemented following recommendations by advocacy organizations Ultraviolet and GLAAD, which listed TikTok as “effectively unsafe for LGBTQ users” in its social media safety index that found an incomplete hate speech description in the platform's user-reporting process.

Trans folks are often read as ‘hyper-sensitive’ because of misperceptions about the significance of names and pronouns. These misperceived notions grow into a generalization towards all people – automatically dismissing the multitudes of transness.

There is no one-size-fits all guide to pronouns – some folks might use any or all pronouns, and might feel that pronouns can be done away with altogether. The relationship with pronouns, and their significance may change over time. The baseline should be respecting the right to self-determination.

Cisgender folks sometimes seem to forget that they have pronouns too, and that being misgendered stems from a violent, binary policing of all bodies.

When you misgender or deadname someone on purpose, it basically means that you are reducing that person to your perception of their body, and claiming that they don’t deserve the right to self determination.

It continues to feed into the harmful narratives that perpetuate cisgender-heterosexual inscurities painting our bodies as controversies, and leading to fatal violence that is increasingly used again trans women and femme folks at intersecting marginalized identites.

TikTok’s algorithm is infamous for promoting anti-trans violence, homophobia, anti-Black racism, dangerous movements by far-right accounts, and disordered eating content.

Although the app ‘removes content that promotes eating disorders’, it’s been criticized for how its algorithm uplifts content that glorifies disordered eating, and how this loop of repetitive content puts users at risk.

The new policy updates include removing the promotion of disordered eating: “Our aim is to acknowledge more symptoms, such as overexercise or short-term fasting, that are frequently under-recognized signs of a potential problem,” TikTok released in the statement.