Tinder is making changes to improve the treatment of transgender people on its app.

[DeRigueurMortis]

Tinder seeks to tackle trans harassment www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-50390028

Given I'm on a strike I'll leave it here fir discussion.

Dating scenes are tough. Trans people need to stop acting like they are the only ones who face these issues.

Short men struggle to get the interest of women.

Older women struggle to get the interest of men.

Overweight people of both sexes struggle to get dates. Similarly for people who are considered unattractive.

You don't improve your chances by lying or deceiving people or taking away their choice to avoid you. It only makes people even less likely to date you.

People who have a lot of tattoos or piercings aren't going to be attractive to the vast majority of people. Attitudes do change a bit over time so most people these days aren't too bothered about the odd tattoo or piercing, but extreme body modifications always puts off the majority.

Taking hormones and having surgery is extreme body modification, in addition to attempting to be a facsimile of the opposite sex. This isn't going to appeal to the overwhelming majority of the population.

People not happy with this will just stop using Tinder. In droves. Rather like changing rooms. The forced compulsion is never going to win hearts and minds, it's just going to hugely piss people off.

This is one of the issues that every adult in the UK will have a stake in: it's now openly being said that excluding someone from your body because of their biological sex is unacceptable. The massive majority of people are quite clear on their sexuality, it is absolutely biologically sex based, and they will not find this acceptable or tolerable. Many people started to see the issues when they discovered about the cotton ceiling.

This is where people see this is anything but a live and let live agenda, and the demands being made are not reasonable, or even basically sensible or respectful of others.

FWRLurker

"I don’t even know why the F trans people (or really anyone) would want to get matched with people who are not and will never be attracted to them."

Entitlement, power and control.

Arnold I know it wouldn't be perfect and women above average height and men below average would be excluded too but if I was dating I'd do it.

People could also disregard any profiles with pictures that have filters

I think Tinder is right to address trans people being banned because people complained about them being trans.

However I also agree that whether or not someone is trans is relevant to a lot of people’s decisions to want to date someone and people are entitled to know. I also agree with PP that surely as a trans person you wouldn’t want to put yourself in the situation of meeting someone who won’t want to pursue things once they know? Especially trans women who are meeting straight men, because there is a real risk of a bad reaction. TW are sadly not infrequently assaulted when men find out their transgender status.

Also I don’t think you can filter by age on tinder, only if you’re looking for a man/woman, age and distance.

I don’t remember there being an option to filter out trans people but it’s a few years since I used it.

This is one of the issues that every adult in the UK will have a stake in: it's now openly being said that excluding someone from your body because of their biological sex is unacceptable. The massive majority of people are quite clear on their sexuality, it is absolutely biologically sex based, and they will not find this acceptable or tolerable. Many people started to see the issues when they discovered about the cotton ceiling.

Indeed. Want to shift the "debate" from a few brave women versus every corporation and political party to the general public versus the system? Tell straight men they don't get to decline sex with people who they aren't attracted to.

Are they actually complaining about them being trans or are they complaining about people being homophobic and misrepresenting themselves?

It also makes plain the agenda of returning of homosexuality to being unacceptable and wrong. And the refusal to permit women any sexual preference that excludes people with biologically male bodies.

Sunlight. Plenty of it.

I think Tinder is right to address trans people being banned because people complained about them being trans.

I also think it needs to be addressed. But the correct way to address it is surely to return to people being allowed to filter by biological sex.

HappyPunky as far as I can tell the complaints seem to be about misrepresentation. As in 'heterosexual man seeks woman' then a male human being in a dress shows up. The heterosexual man not being interested in other males quite reasonably complains then because the algorithm bans people with multiple complaints the trans people misrepresenting their sex end up banned.

The answer to this is very simple. Don't lie about your sex and allow people not interested in dating trans identifying people of either or both sexes to filter them out from the start. Then no one is duped and no ones feelings get hurt.

I've used Tinder before and when I've put the settings as 'woman looking for women' I find around 25% of profiles are of men (not trans) - I know not whether they are fantasizing they can 'convert' you, are trolling or getting a thrill from being invasive. I always report these male profiles stating the reason for the report that they are not women. I also see a few transwomen, some with quite aggressively written profiles. I'm not surprised men are also reporting transwomen's profiles for the same reason ie. they are not what they are looking for and their creeping into the category of 'women' which doesn't define them correctly is a nuisance, a waste of time and at worst feels coercive. What Tinder are attempting is social engineering, based upon an ideological belief that people should disregard physical attraction when deciding who to date! It may work out for the best, I can't imagine men will tolerate this for very long, and they are more likely to be listened to than women.

Surely in the interests of everyone's safety, it's best to be as transparent as possible.

Arnold I suspected that's what it was. I wouldn't waste 30 seconds of a lesbian's time.
Upfield I agree that it won't go well if a lot of men start complaining.
The algorithm isn't going to work

Also if the suspension happens after multiple complaints, how many? If one goes on one or two dates and encounters a person who's very unhappy that one chose not to reveal one's sex and who then ends the date on those ground would one not at some point conclude that withholding that information was counterproductive?

I've just had a look at Tinder Support on Twitter and they seem to have been inundated with complaints from people saying they were automatically blocked.

It's not clear to me from the article, how Tinder is going to address it. Are they going to change it from an automated process to one that needs staff involvement? So a staff member will determine that the complaints are about misrepresentation and then leave the account active rather than it being automatically banned because it's received numerous reports?

I'm not sure it has to get to the date stage for people to complain. It may be most complaints are about profiles rather than actual dates. There are a lot of trans people around who are remarkably unaware of how obvious their sex is to others even in a photograph.

Yes, the complaints are at the initial stages when looking through people's profiles.
If transwomen keep popping up in the app and men have no way of filtering out that they have zero interest in trans people, then I can see a lot of annoyed men reporting such profiles because it's not what they signed up for on a dating app.

I suppose that makes more sense but still, do the users who're complaining think Tinder has the power to change the sexual preferences of its users?

I'm not sure if they want to stop the reports or if they just want the reports not to lead to an automatic ban.

Well the whole premise of Queer Theory and trans theology is that sexual orientation is decoupled from biological sex. That the only reason people don't date and have sex with trans people is because of 'prejudice' rather than biological reality in terms of attraction.

Tinder thinks it can help trans people by removing any ability for users of their app to exclude trans people in their search criteria, which means people are forced to swipe through profiles of trans people. Inevitably, this means users are annoyed and frustrated and use the 'report' functionality to flag the profile of the trans person. If a profile is flagged enough times, the system automatically blocks or bans that profile because the assumption made is that this person must be annoying or harassing users for multiple people to report it. Usually that's a correct assumption, but in this case the trans people weren't doing anything wrong, but the system is automated and responds to profiles that are reported as expected.

So really, Tinder brought this upon themselves and trans people by forcing an ideology upon the general public.
If there was an option to filter out trans people, then the only people who do select trans profiles are the ones who are genuinely open to dating them.

I can't see it being a commercially successful approach, to disallow users of a dating app to filter the profiles they see based upon the user's sexuality (and thus also physical appearance). In fact, it's the antithesis of what dating apps are used for. Sounds like Tinder are the next business likely to go woke, go broke.

It's not clear to me from the article whether trans people can actually mark their status, but the policy : "Tinder's policy that its users should not be able to filter out trans people from the profiles they are shown as potential matches." surely endangers even those TW and TM who actually want to be filtered out and not exposed to rejection (or worse)!

If it doesn't even work for the people Tinder is trying to court ['scuse the pun], Tinder's model is bad customer service at best and actively harmful at worst.

If trans people are not able to mark their status surely Tinder's policy is knowingly and deliberately putting them at risk. It is hardly a secret that the vast majority of people, including trans people themselves, do not wish to date trans people.

Why would Tinder choose to expose them to rejection, ridicule, humiliation and potential violence?

Quite, Arnold! Does anyone know whether there is actually a data field for gender identity?

There are other MN threads about this sort of wilful IT-assisted incompetence. Now, the worst scenario has got to be an NHS trust simply changing a field from "sex" to "gender" instead of creating a separate field (thereby cutting TM off from cervical screening and transgender health, cutting TW off from prostate screening and transgender health... see? this is absolutely a discriminatory consequence of TRA radicalism, and transpeople should be fucking furious about this)... but Tinder's ideologically-driven negligence in matching people up to be vulnerable with is still pretty bad.