LinkedIn removes hate speech protections for transgender individuals
LinkedIn ▪ Community Guidelines ▪ July 29, 2025
LinkedIn removed transgender-related protections from its policy on hateful and derogatory content. The platform no longer lists “misgendering1 or deadnaming2 of transgender individuals” as examples of prohibited conduct. While “content that attacks, denigrates, intimidates, dehumanizes, incites or threatens hatred, violence, prejudicial or discriminatory action” is still considered hateful, addressing a person by a gender and name they ask not be designated by is not anymore.
Similarly, the platform removed “race or gender identity” from its examples of inherent traits for which negative comments are considered harassment. That qualification of harassment is now kept only for behaviour that is actively “disparaging another member’s […] perceived gender”, not mentioning race or gender identity anymore.
The “last update” date of the Hateful and Derogatory Content was updated, but the service did not otherwise communicate publicly on this change in its Trust & Safety blog, like it did for example to describe how it improved enforcement of its community guidelines at scale.
At the time of writing, this change is only visible in the English version of LinkedIn’s Community Guidelines. The other languages, in particular the French, German and Spanish versions have not evolved in the last 3 years, according to the company. Open Terms Archive data confirms that no other change was recorded since May 8, 2023, where tracking started.
This change in the social network policies makes its owner Microsoft join a broader trend among U.S.-based platforms of scaling back hate speech protections, in particular for transgender users. Meta made a similar move on January 7, 2025 by removing a number of hate speech protections, including for gender identity, as Open Terms Archive had reported. This shift aligns the tech sector’s policies in the United States of America with the Trump administration that has implemented an “all-of-government approach to target [the] transgender community”, as CNN recapped last week.
Misgendering is the act of referring to someone with a gender that does not match their gender identity. ↩︎
Deadnaming is the act of calling a transgender or non-binary person by their birth name or other former forename (their “deadname”) after they have chosen a new name. Many transgender people change names as part of gender transition, and wish for their former name to be kept private. — CC-BY-SA Wikipedia ↩︎
