Descripción del caso
These two cases concern content decisions made by Meta, on Facebook and Instagram, which the Oversight Board intends to address together.
In the first case, a Facebook user in the United States posted a video of a woman confronting a transgender woman for using the women’s bathroom. The post refers to the person being confronted as a man and asks why it is permitted for them to use a women’s bathroom.
In the second case, an Instagram account posted a video of a transgender girl winning a female sports competition in the United States, with some spectators vocally disapproving of the result. The post refers to the athlete as a boy, questioning whether they are female.
Both posts were shared in 2024 and received thousands of views and reactions. They were reported for Hate Speech and Bullying and Harassment multiple times, but Meta left both posts up on Facebook and Instagram, respectively. After appealing to Meta against the company’s decisions, two of the users who reported the content then appealed to the Oversight Board.
Following the Board’s selection of these cases, Meta considered both posts under its Hate Speech and Bullying and Harassment policies and concluded that neither violated its Community Standards. Both posts remained up. Meta’s Hate Speech Community Standard prohibits direct attacks targeting a person or group of people on the basis of protected characteristics, including sex, gender identity and sexual orientation, with “exclusion or segregation in the form of calls for action, statements of intent, aspirational or conditional statements, or statements advocating or supporting [exclusion].” The Hate Speech policy does not include misgendering as a form of prohibited “attack.” Misgendering means referring to a person using a word, especially a pronoun or the way in which they are addressed, that does not reflect their gender identity. Meta informed the Board that neither post violated its Hate Speech policy, adding that even if the post in the first case could constitute a call for exclusion, it would still be kept up under the newsworthiness allowance, given “transgender people’s access to bathrooms that correspond to their gender identity is the subject of considerable political debate in the United States.”
Meta’s Bullying and Harassment Community Standard prohibits “cognizable attacks and calls for exclusion” targeted at a private minor, private adult (if reported by the targeted person) or an involuntary public figure who is a minor (including statements advocating or supporting exclusion of a person). The public-facing language of the Bullying and Harassment policy does not consider misgendering a person to be a cognizable attack or call for exclusion. Meta informed the Board that the content in the first case did not violate the Bullying and Harassment policy as there was “no explicit call for exclusion present in the post and because the post was not self-reported by the person depicted in the video.” The company stated that although the second post targeted a minor who Meta considers to be an involuntary public figure, it did not contain a “cognizable attack or call for exclusion” so did not violate this Community Standard. Meta explained that the company allows “more discussion and debate around public figures in part because – as here – these conversations are often part of social and political debates and the subject of news reporting.”
In their statement to the Board, the user who appealed the post in the first case explained that Meta allowed what in their view is a transphobic post to stay on its platform. The user who appealed the post in the second case said that the post attacks and harasses the athlete with language that in their view violates Meta’s Community Standards.
The Board selected these cases to assess whether Meta’s approach to moderating discussions around gender identity respects users’ freedom of expression and the rights of transgender and non-binary people. The cases fall within the Board’s Hate Speech Against Marginalized Groups and Gender strategic priorities.
The Board would appreciate public comments that address:
- The impacts of Meta’s Hate Speech and Bullying and Harassment policies on freedom of expression around gender identity issues, and the rights of transgender people, including minors.
- Technical challenges in enforcing bullying and harassment policies at scale, the effectiveness of self-reporting requirements and their impacts on people targeted by bullying or harassment, and comparisons to alternative enforcement approaches.
- The sociopolitical context in the United States concerning freedom of expression and the rights of transgender people, especially for access to single-sex spaces and participation in sporting events.
As part of its decisions, the Board can issue policy recommendations to Meta. While recommendations are not binding, Meta must respond to them within 60 days. As such, the Board welcomes public comments proposing recommendations that are relevant to these cases.
Comentarios
Dear Oversight Board,
I support the submission of WoLF (The Women’s Liberation Front) on the the impacts of Meta’s Hate Speech and Bullying and Harassment policies on freedom of expression around gender identity issues, and the rights of transgender people, including minors.
Sex is objective and immutable, while gender is socially constructed and is harmful and oppressive to women and girls. Liberal democracies are founded on freedom of expression in word and deed. Women and men can believe whatever they like, but no-one should be forced to go along with it. Gender Identity Ideology is not something everyone believes in. Allowing men in women's spaces creates unfairness in sport and a lack of privacy in healthcare. Eradicating the social contract of no men in women's spaces creates potentially dangerous situations in many areas of life (toilets, prisons, rape shelters, accommodation/residential settings) and women must always be permitted to call out danger when they see it. Forcing girls to deny the facts before their eyes teaches them to ignore their intuition about dangerous situations. Women's safety matters more than men's feelings. Gender ideology must not be elevated above biological fact. With freedom of speech comes the right to potentially offend. Offence is not harmful. Rape is.
Tone policing women and shutting down conversations women and men are having around the negative effects that the incursion of men into women’s spaces will have, will create an environment that fuels misogyny. It will also mean that speaking the truth will become impossible.
As a biological woman, and as a mother and grandmother of girls, I feel completely threatened and unsafe with a man, even if he is dressed as a woman, or is taking medication to mask the fact that his biology makes him stronger than I am, in private spaces such as dressing rooms, locker rooms and bathrooms. The videos which reflect the fear and insecurity or other biological women in places where they should feel safe are a Constitutionally protected expression of their feelings and thoughts and should not be censored because others disagree with them.
Sex-based speech and debate, and any speech for that matter, should be not be banned or kept from the public space.
As a woman, an adult-human-female, I support women’s safe spaces and speech to protect those spaces.
Our 1st amendment protects Free Speech, so as a American company, please safe guard this public space so that we can all continue to encourage debate and discussion over any and all issues but especially on the sex-based speech and debate.
I urge Meta to recognize the real and meaningful distinction between biological sex and gender identity as you craft your misgendering policy. A fair policy around misgendering cannot and should not make it difficult or impossible to have open conversations on the subject of sex or sexual orientation.
In practice, misgendering is often a euphemism for identifying sex. This places Meta in the position of deciding when it is acceptable to say that a male person is male or a female person is female. Meta’s policy should take care to avoid outcomes that impede both ordinary and socially-important conversations.
Policies against misgendering can limit our ability to talk about sex, but sex is real and significant: anyone able to dismiss the impacts of biological sex is privileged not to find themselves female in Afghanistan or unexpectedly pregnant in Nebraska. For most of human history, perfectly obscuring our biological sex from our immediate community was not a reliable possibility. A preference not to encounter any reference to our sex is not an innate right that supersedes the right of all others to talk openly about the impact of sex in the public sphere.
Further, any policy that makes it harder for female people to talk about the relevance of female sex to their lives and identities is sexist. While the opposite is also true, it is female spaces that are censored with the most scrutiny and intensity. Any policy that makes it difficult for same-sex attracted lesbians to express same-sex attraction is likewise sexist and homophobic.
Meta must craft policy that allows lesbians to say if they prefer female sex-partners, allows women to express an honest opinion on women’s sports, and allows any female person to say if her lifetime lived experience as female is relevant to her understanding of womanhood.
As in the case of religious faith, when it comes to gender expression it would be wrong to restrict an individual’s ability to live according to the dictates of their will, conscience, and personal choice. But like religious faith, it would violate the free expression of others to insist that all speech must either align with one person’s explanation of reality or else be silenced - no matter how sincere and identity-defining that person’s conviction may be. In the case of religion, we understand that passionate sincerity and passionate disagreement can co-exist. In the case of gender identity, we should recognize the same.
It is reasonable to protect users from targeted abuse. Teenagers should not be humiliated by adults at school and shoppers should not be harassed by neighbors at the mall. But everyday words like “male,” “female,” “man,” “woman,” “he,” and “she,” are not slurs or hate speech and are not enforceable as such. Misgendering in order to belittle, shame, or abuse is bullying. Accurately identifying sex in a conversation where sex is a relevant topic is not misgendering, not bullying, and not wrong. A responsible policy must make this distinction clear.
Meta’s policy should avoid enforcing ideological thought-conformity around how users understand gender and gender identity in our ideologically-diverse modern world. It should not limit our ability to speak freely across disagreement or to emphasize the role of either biological sex or gender identity in our lived experience. And it should not imply a faulty assumption that gender identity is meaningful and worthy of public conversation but biological sex is not.
Not all speech is easy, but the right to have difficult conversations is more pressing and profound than the right to avoid them. A misgendering policy is only meaningful if it ensures that uncomfortable conversation about sex and gender are still allowed to happen respectfully, seriously, and openly.
There are only two sexes in humans. Some humans wish they were the other sex and may go to great lengths to alter their appearance to look more like the desired sex. However, no human can change their sex and no one else should be forced to pretend that they have. As free individuals we must retain the right to speak the truth about what we see with our own eyes. When we see a man dressed as a woman, it is not hateful to say so; it is truthful.
Your proposal to treat so-called "misgendering" as hate speech IS a form of bullying. If you implement this misguided policy, Meta's will institute an official policy of bullying women into silence.
The entire history of women's liberation, from servitude into emancipation, has depended on our ability to have a voice -- to express our thoughts, to state our truths, to insist on the authority of our experience. Since Mary Wollstonecraft wrote "A Vindication of the Rights of Women" in 1792, women's thoughts and words have made our freedom and independence possible.
If you deprive of us of our thoughts and voices, you deprive us of our ability to name our oppression. You undo the hard work we women have done to break centuries upon centuries of silence. You once again tell women to shut about the reality of sexual violence, sexual harassment, sexual objectification, economic disempowerment, cultural and political subordination.
A policy forbidding women from expressing their thoughts is an anti-woman policy.
Recently, as part of their enslavement of women, the Taliban have made it illegal for women to use their voices in public. Meta, are you going to implement the Taliban's playbook?
Dear Meta Advisory Board.
I am writing to you in defence of freedom of speech, freedom of religion, including freedom FROM religion, in defense of sanity, Science, and Nature, and in defence of true kindness.
You are proposing a ban on free speech for those of us who use your platforms. Millions and millions of us. We use your platforms to connect with friends and family, to share with and learn from each other, to commiserate with and gain support from each other, and for many of us; to make the world a better place and gain meaning for our lives.
We engage in economic activity, often locally through Facebook Marketplace, but also learning about businesses that we might otherwise not have known about. We share Art, our own and that made by others. We safeguard each other’s children through warnings about dangers in our local communities and the wider world. We plan events and learn about jobs. We gain information, knowledge, and Wisdom from the other people that we meet and interact with. And I myself have made deeply meaningful relationships with other people who really, truly matter to me. These are people that I truly love and that I would not have had the blessing of knowing if not for Facebook.
No, Facebook is not perfect.
I for one REALLY miss gift apps and I wish I could still throw a sheep at my friends. Also, can we PLEASE get rid of that “relevant comments” default? PLEASE! Everyone I know hates it and having to turn it off to read a full commentthread is super annoying. But still, Facebook is incredibly important to me and I just do NOT want to have to live without it. But what you’re proposing? Would mean that I would have to leave Facebook.
To ban people from Facebook if we don’t call a man “she”? That is completely intolerable.
I happen to know quite a bit about what gender transition looks like and how incredibly destructive it is to the people that undergo it. About fifteen years ago my eldest daughter had a best friend, several years older, who was in the beginning of the process of a gender transition.
Because I was confronted with the situation in my own life, I began to do rather a lot of research on the topic. I knew that you can never change your sex. And so this young man could never be a woman. With my daughter’s help he dressed in skirts and other clothing stereotypically associated with females. He began hair removal on his face and started taking hormones. My daughter eventually moved in with him and he was very good to her. We all loved him in my family. He spent time with my younger children and was always on my house. We all loved and still do love him.
My daughter went to Montreal with him for several weeks when he went to have his surgery. We had all worried that the surgery was the wrong choice but we didn’t want to hurt his feelings so we had kept our fears to ourselves.
While he was in the hospital there was a sixteen year old boy in the bed next to going through with the same surgery. I have learned through personal experience that this horror is being visited upon vulnerable children who probably would have grown up to be happy, healthy gay people. I have always fostered an attitude of acceptance in my family and that includes gay people. I’ve always been friends with gay men and Lesbians. And my eldest daughter is bisexual. That’s how she met this young man, in a support group for gay youth. But this young man was heterosexual and he was in love with my daughter.
This all could have turned out wonderfully. He could have married my daughter, I would have sewn him a wedding gown to wear! I don’t care what people wear and even as a heterosexual woman myself, I think a man can look fantastic on makeup. But we didn’t speak up and tell this young man not to go through with the surgery. We didn’t tell him the truth, that you can NOT change sex.
Long story short, the surgery was a huge mistake. Although the surgeon considered the procedure to be successful and healing was swift and complete, and even though the young man, (in his late twenties at the time) retained some feeling and function, he very quickly came to regret it. And eventually he moved back to the United States where he was born and far away from us, his adopted family. He also lived far away from his birth family.
My heart has been absolutely broken by listening to him tell me how he felt and that he wished there had been a good therapist available who would have talked him through his issues rather than pushing him into transition like he was pushed. He came from a wealthy family and all they wanted to do to help him was push to transition. The part that broke my heart most of all was when he said he wished I had spoken up and talked him out of the surgery. He tried not to make me feel guilty, he is a truly good person, but I feel just AWFUL that I didn’t say anything. I didn’t want to hurt his feelings and so I played along. I called him another daughter. I called him by his new name. I called him she. And I did all of this against my own gut instincts too.
My religion is based on a reverence for Nature. We worship Mother Nature as our Goddess. And yet I had been talked into going against Nature, playing into a mental sickness, because I was trying to be kind to someone I loved. And I ended up allowing a horrible injustice, seeing someone I loved being poisoned and mutilated, because I didn’t have the moral courage to speak up. Because I didn’t stand up and say what I knew to be true.
I learned so much about the history of transgenderism during those years. And I witnessed so much of the fight to destroy any and all opposition to the imposition of this ideology on everyone. I now know that there are multi-millionaires paying for the supposed activism which has seen the triumph of this ideology over any and all who speak out. There are a lot of people making a lot of money off the suffering of the people they claim to be helping. And those of us who know the truth? We are being threatened and coerced into not speaking out. It’s like a cult that is being forced on us! Sometimes even by government. And I refuse to believe in the miracle that they are selling. Humans can not change sex.
I won’t keep my mouth shut.
It’s so sad that we all had to learn this the hard way and I wish I could change the past. But I can change the future. I can speak up and save other children and young people. But now you’re saying that I can’t speak up on Facebook? Facebook, where I connect with my dearest friends and family around the world.
Please don’t do this to me.
Or to the few doctors and scientists who are speaking up to tell the truth. Or to those of us whose religious Faith won’t let us lie and say that we believe in something that is simply not real. Humans can never change sex. It is not hate to state reality. And it is the ONLY kindness that is real enough to save people from this horrible industry bent on destroying lives.
Let Facebook remain as a place where we can change the world for the better, a place where we can find meaning in our lives, a place where we can connect and learn and grow. A place where we can save those we love with the truth.
Censoring women from speaking about their own bodies and lived realities is incredibly misogynistic.
I've seen horrible, violent comments directed at women on your platform, and nothing was done to intervene. I've seen questionable pedophilic FB groups sharing pictures of underage girls, and nothing was done about it even after mass reporting.
It's obvious you pick and choose what is deemed "offensive", and you target women. Shame on you.
Unless people on the platforms are directly bullying the trans-identified people featured in the videos, discussing the realities of biological sex (as opposed to "gender" which is a social-construct, and likewise "gender identity" and "misgendering") is neither "Hate Speech" or "Bullying and Harassment". For years now FB/Meta has been allowing a very vocal minority of trans-identified/allied "influencers" to rally their well-intentioned followers to actually harass/bully anyone who disagrees with their perspective, which directly conflicts with most platforms' supposed commitment to "free speech", never mind States' Constitutions. In fact "free speech" was vocally championed by and instrumental to the Human Rights gains of the gay/lesbian, Women's Rights, and other Civil Rights movements since at least the 1960s. It is not "transphobic" to speak the truth (or express one's personal belief) about immutable biological SEX, which is a protected characteristic in all progressive Western societies/cultures, along with "freedom of expression", and Meta should not allow either to be further undermined.
This is absurd. Pointing out biological fact is NOT hate speech or anything of the sort.
Women have spent too many years fighting for equal rights and safe spaces. It's ridiculous that we're now expected to put the feelings and preferences of men above ourselves and our safety. My sex/gender is not a costume that can be put on and taken off on a whim. If you're born a man, you don't become a woman simply by claiming it.
Ultimately, if someone wants to live a certain way, that's their decision, and they can make it. But they don't get to force their choice on others as reality. And they certainly don't get to invade women's personal and/or safe spaces.
Misgendering someone is not hate speech, it's not bullying, it's not genocide. As a Jewish, Israeli, lesbian, immigrant I believe I have some insight about the above. I also know that just because someone has a feeling about something doesn't mean that they are actually threatened or being discriminated against. Please don't fall for these false, divisive, irrational arguments of folks who have usurped so many spaces with their ridiculous and often harmful ideaology. Do not include misgendering as hate speech.