Dating Apps as Digital Hades for Gender Identity: Comments on the Donald Trump Term, OkCupid, Feeld, and Hinge
During his inauguration speech on January 20, Trump said that his child doesn’t exist, and that he had signed a sweeping executive order that calls for trans women to be housed in male prisons.
Should online life become even less inclusive for LGBTQ+ people during Trump’s term, apps like OkCupid, Feeld, and Hinge could become digital havens, places to connect. According to Apryl Williams, a professor of communication and digital studies at the University of Michigan, dating apps can serve as important spaces for gender, racial, and sexual inclusivity in today’s society.
Feeld and Match Group told WIRED that they have no intentions of reversing their stances regarding gender identity options offered on their respective platforms.
It remains to be seen how other tech companies will respond to the executive order. Meta appeared to be making overtures to the Trump administration before this week. Earlier this month, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that the company would end its third-party fact-checking program and transition to a Community Notes model, à la X.
Zuckerberg peddled the sudden reversal as a bid to scale up free speech across Facebook, Instagram, and Threads and allow for more political content. “We’re going to simplify our content policies and get rid of a bunch of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are just out of touch with mainstream discourse,” Zuckerberg said in a video accompanying the announcement.
The First Day of Trump’s Campaign: a Call to Stop Using OkCupid, Hinge, and Tinder to Identify Transgender Users
Over a decade ago, in 2014, OkCupid expanded its gender options for users to include identifications such as transgender, pangender, intersex, agender, and genderqueer. It was among the first dating apps to capture an accurate picture of identity online, and the different ways it was evolving. Currently, Tinder provides an option for “beyond binary” and Hinge allows users to select “nonbinary” on their profiles.
Carolyn Fisher’s child walked into her home in Alabama and said he was going to commit suicide if Donald Trump won the election.
Fisher and her husband were both lifelong Republicans and supporters of Trump. Holding a spiral notebook, Carolyn’s 16-year-old, who uses the pronouns he and they, made a case against voting for Trump.
He explained why our vote for Donald Trump was against us as children and why he shouldn’t be president. He had literally been keeping notes of everything Trump and other Republicans had been saying about trans and nonbinary people, how they were mentally delusional and mentally ill. When he laid all of that out, my husband and I, we both just looked at each other and started crying.”
The president dismissed the pleas of the bishop to protect Gay, Lesbian, and Transgender children in a Truth Social post, calling her nasty in tone.
“I think there’s a huge amount of it that is just about fear, and a part of it is trying to scare people into compliance” Allison Chapman, a trans rights activist, tells WIRED. Enforcement takes time, resources, and energy, so it’s important for people to not willingly comply in advance. There has to be resistance to these things.
The Rainbow Youth Project, an organization focused on helping young LGBTQ+ people, received over 6,000 calls in just the first couple of days after Trump’s November election win. That’s up from the usual 3,600 calls a month. It didn’t stop: The hotline received over 8,000 calls in December.