In a move to make its service friendly to transgender and nonbinary users, Tinder has modified its platform so that users can identify their own genders instead of choosing between a male and female option.
Previously, trans or gender nonbinary people who wanted to use Tinder had to pick a gender category that might not have fit their identity, then explain their real deal in the limited profile space Tinder allows. Tinder CEO Sean Rad told the New York Times that trans people reported persistent harassment from other Tinder users. Some trans users reported abuse from people they’d matched with, once their matches found out they were trans; others were the targets of abuse reports from users who claimed trans people on the app were lying about their identities to manipulate potential dates. Once those trans users got reported a certain number of times, they’d get blocked from the platform.
Some semi-high-profile trans people—many who work onscreen or behind the scenes for Transparent—filmed an ad for the app explaining their negative experiences with Tinder and how that might change with the new update.
Tinder’s new system for gender identification rolled out on Tuesday with dozens of new gender options, including transgender, trans woman, trans man, transmasculine, and nonbinary. Users can also choose to fill in a blank with their own identification instead. With this update, Tinder is taking a tack similar to Facebook’s gender solution, which launched with about 50 gender options in early 2014.
Facebook, of course, doesn’t need to know its users’ genders for any reason other than targeted advertising. Tinder does—gender is how it matches its users with people they want to date, and who want to date them. For trans people and users outside the gender binary, that gets complicated. I know one trans man who usually dates queer women, for instance, who’s had to label himself a woman on Tinder to get matched with people he’s interested in dating. Then, sometimes, women-seeking-women who match with him get weirded out that a man they assume is cisgender has seemingly hacked Tinder’s gender-preference system. Tinder’s new gender structure will hopefully solve problems like this one by allowing users to choose which searches they’ll appear in (so my friend can identify as a trans man and still show up in women-seeking-women searches, since that’s his usual dating pool) and display their genders in their profiles so matches don’t get confused.
This is a fantastic, much-needed update, but it’s worth questioning why it’s come so late. According to the Times, Tinder executives learned of their platform’s anti-trans harassment problem seven months ago—whatever happened to the agility and iterative updates that supposedly define the tech ethos? And it’s hard to believe that Tinder only noticed this problem in April. Trans and nonbinary people have had trouble using the app since it launched four years ago. Those four years have been marked by a rapid crescendo of trans visibility and activism, meaning Tinder employees would have had to work really hard to ignore the troubling implications of its own strict gender binary. Facebook expanded its gender options almost three years ago; OkCupid followed suit two years ago. Did neither of those developments raise alarms at Tinder? Do no LGBTQ people work there? For its four years of existence, Tinder accepted the fact that it was not an app for trans people or anyone whose gender doesn’t conform to one of two artificial categories. The overdue change a hopeful sign, at least, that it’s getting harder for mainstream businesses to ignore trans needs.
