Web filtering
Content Warning: mentions of transphobia
A little while ago I registered the domain transgirl.fr1, mostly for fun but also because I wanted a separate domain to host some public services on, in the vein of catgirl.cloud, private.coffee, projectsegfau.lt and many others.
A sizable fraction of web content filtering systems have classified transgirl.fr as porn and blocked it.
Oops, my bad, I forgot, us trans women can’t have nice things, all
we’re good for is being degradingly fetishized – oh except of course
when we’re to blame for checks notes
everything from misogyny to child
abuse2. Scapegoating is straight out
of the fascist playbook, but that’s a conversation for another
day.
I did actually wonder before registering the domain if something like this would be an issue. But when I asked one of my trans friends whether she thought transgirl.fr sounded like a porn site, she quite rightly responded that it didn’t matter, because not registering it on that basis would be letting those captitalising on fetishisation win.
Incorrect legal analysis (because I was missing information)
But I really didn’t think that it would be this bad. As is, there is a strong argument that this filtering is actually illegal in the UK – the filter has no evidence that transgirl.fr should be blocked other than the reference to a trans person, and “Gender reassignment” is a protected characteristic under the Equality Act 2010.
Even the argument that these filters are just statistical systems, and in the real world “trans girl” is a phrase commonly associated with porn (and the further stretch that this somehow absolves the designers of the system) falls flat – the Equality Act 2010 further protects against “indirect discrimination”, i.e. discrimination caused by systems that are applied equally but put some people at a disadvantage based on a protected characteristic.
I’m not a lawyer, but any potential litigation would probably hinge on 2010 c.15 s.19 2.d: whether the web filtering designers can show their discriminatory system to be “a proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim.”
It’s not.
EDIT: Cadence swiftly pointed out that according to the Internet Archive, the previous owner of the domain did actually host porn on it, and that’s probably why it’s been blocked. Which makes this a somewhat less interesting post than I had hoped. Oops. Well, not the first or last time I’ve been wrong on the internet.
Does this mean the world is less fucked up, because content filters aren’t quite as discriminatory, or more fucked up, because a trans girl can’t register a cool domain name without worrying about whether it used to have fetish porn on it? You decide.
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.fr is technically for France, but in this context should be read as “for real” (something something english person erasing the french) ↩︎
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this is SARCASM. I have never done anything wrong and I never will 😇 3 ↩︎
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this is ALSO SARCASM, but I do limit myself to victimless crimes 😇 4 ↩︎
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this is plausibly sarcasm and should not be used against me in court ↩︎
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