Trailblazing transgender dating app automatically corrects transphobic language
New dating app Butterfly puts transgender people first (Butterfly.dating)
Butterfly, a dating app aimed at trans people, automatically censors messages that contain transphobic abuse in an effort to better protect its users.
The app features an auto-correct feature which prevents people from sending transphobic abuse to trans users, Metro reports.
The app, which was started by David Ronald Minns, aims to educate cisgender users about hurtful and degrading language through the auto-censor feature.
Dating app Butterfly caters specifically to trans people and automatically censors transphobic abuse.
Minns has been developing dating apps for 13 years and decided to start Butterfly to cater specifically to trans people, who can face abuse and discrimination on other dating apps.
“It wasn’t sufficient to simply add transgender as a gender option,” he told Metro.
“Trans people on other dating apps either have to send a lot of messages and expect high rejection rates or sit back and wait to be contacted, either scenario is far from ideal.”
He added: “On Butterfly, transgender folk can take the lead.”
It wasn’t sufficient to simply add transgender as a gender option.
The app – which has more than 40,000 users – encourages people of all genders and sexualities to sign up. It also allows users to select from a wide array of gender and sexual identities.
“Users can select every gender of interest for potential matches and once set, can pick other preferences such as distance, age and activity,” Minns said.
He has also written to Apple and Google to raise concerns about apps in their stores which use and allow transphobic language.
Dating apps are popular in the LGBT+ community, but some face discrimination and abuse.
Dating apps are more popular among LGBT+ people than their straight and cisgender counterparts, research suggests.
A survey conducted by Tinder last year found that 80 percent of LGBT+ people think dating apps have positively benefited the community.
However, queer people can also face issues on dating apps, including discrimination and abuse. A study from late last year revealed that queer people of colour face significant levels of racism on dating and hook-up apps.
The researchers found that race-based preferences are, as expected, most often expressed by white people on dating apps who work to exclude people of colour from their spaces.
They wrote that race-based partner selection has become “the new face of racism in online sexual and dating networks of gay/bisexual men.”
