Grindr launched in 2009 and has since grown into the largest social networking app for bi, gay, lesbian, and trans identifying people. Grindr brags about the “millions of daily users who use our location-based technology in almost every country in every corner of the planet.” However, Grindr doesn’t allow gay men and lesbians to filter for cisgender, i.e., those whose identity matches the objective reality of their gender. In doing so, Grindr leans into the fallacy that trans identifying individuals are the gender they claim they are. Is this company engaged in deceptive practices that puts personal security at risk by obscuring reality?
Here are the FAQs announcing the policy change:
Grinder explains that one can choose from a list of more than fifty gender identities. The identities are culturally specific. The user can selected the gender identities of those he’d like to see appear on his grid, which can be saved to his preference. However, users cannot filter for “cis men” or “cis women,” the queer theoretical designation for the two and only genders of the human species.
“When designing gender settings on Grindr,” the service explains, “it was important to us to not further perpetuate discrimination and harm for the trans and nonbinary community. For this reason, we allow filtering based on gender—you can specify that you want to see men or women—but this will include all men or all women, because trans men are men and trans women are women.”
The reality is that trans men are women and trans women are men and acknowledging that reality is not discriminatory—truth is not discriminatory. These are objective mind-independent facts—incontrovertible, unchangeable, and eternal (at least until a molecular reassemble machine is invented that can change genotypic and phenotypic sex).
Humans are mammals and, as such, natural beings with a natural history. A man who appears as a woman, no matter how sophisticated the simulation is, is still a simulation of a woman. No simulated appearance can change the reality the appearance seeks to obscure. So when a trans identifying man claims to be a woman he is engaged in deception.
Grindr risks an environment of deception by not allowing its gay users to search for other gay users. Presumably, a man producing a simulated sexual identity would not have to tell other users the truth about what and who he is. That’s a problem. A lesbian would not being able to filter out trans women who claim to be lesbians. Etcetera.
If a man seeks intimate experiences with other men simulating women (or any other being or object), then this is something no government should regulate. In a free country, men are allowed to appear as women, and other men are allowed to seek intimacy with them, etc. But such intercourse must be voluntary and consensual. If a man lures a heterosexual man or a lesbian on a date posing as a woman, this should carry criminal penalties; it is, at bare minimum, fraud; if intimate contact occurs, rape or sexual assault. Not being able to filter out people who are engaged in deception risks fraud and assault.
Why this isn’t obvious with rules rendered in black letter law everywhere is Exhibit A in the success of the progressive war on justice, rights, science, and truth. It’s a signal that we’re in the grip of a new religion, one that, because the government stands behind it, has become the official dogma—the state religion.
The same libertarianism that decries government regulation of consensual individual sexual conduct is the same libertarianism that finds unacceptable the union of state and religion in a secular republic that forbids such circumstances.
Corporations should be made to follow by law the logic of democratic-republican government, which is ruled by reason and dependent on evidence.
freedom and reason 