A popular lesbian dating app has one message for users who don’t want transgender people on the platform: “Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.”
HER, a global dating and network platform for lesbians and other queer people looking for love and friendship, sent a mass notification to its users on Wednesday: “A Message for Transphobes: Time to delete HER,” it said, in part.
“We have a very big thriving lesbian community on HER, and so we want to make that message really clear,” Robyn Exton, who founded the platform in 2015, told NBC News on Friday. “All lesbians are welcome and celebrated on HER — trans lesbians, nonbinary lesbians.”
Exton, who said the app has 20 million users globally, 12.5% of which identify as transgender or nonbinary, said she and her colleagues at HER are determined to push back against the narrative that lesbian identity is “owned by cis[gender] lesbians,” meaning lesbians who do not identify as transgender.
“We are cis women, and we just fundamentally do not agree with that,” she said.
In honor of Lesbian Visibility Day on Wednesday, the HER team published a blog post titled: “This Lesbian Visibility Day, We Are Reclaiming ‘Lesbian.’” The post, which was written by Exton, expresses support for trans and nonbinary lesbians and pushes back against those who don’t.
“There’s no such thing as a ‘real lesbian.’ But being a genuinely lousy human? Oh, that’s a thing. Join us in honoring trans and non-binary lesbians today and forever,” the post said.
Following the publication of the post, HER’s Twitter account received a tidal wave of backlash from those who disagreed with it. The HER Twitter account pushed back, and, shortly after the heated exchanges, Twitter temporarily suspended the HER account.
Exton said the 24-hour suspension, which occurred on Lesbian Visibility Day, was “largely because of the interaction with the ‘TERF’ audience, who then just kept repeatedly reporting our account.” (TERF is an acronym for transgender-exclusionary radical feminist.)
Twitter responded to a request for comment with the “Pile of Poo” emoji, which, as Elon Musk announced last month, is now the automated message sent to press requests.
As NBC News reported last week, Twitter has quietly changed its hateful conduct policy, removing language that protected transgender people from online harassment. The advocacy group GLAAD condemned the move, calling it the latest in a series of changes that have made the platform less safe for people and advertisers.
Exton said the HER app seeks to minimize transgender discrimination on the app by, among other things, suspending the accounts of those who publicly post preferences that exclude transgender users.
“When you are explicitly stating that you will not consider a whole identity group, that tosses discriminatory behavior.”
After the restoration of the HER Twitter account, Exton shared a video on the platform in celebration of Lesbian Visibility Week, saying HER wants to make it clear that “lesbians exist in all different kinds and types; there is no one way to be a lesbian.”
