An open letter to Apple and Google
Butterfly founder David Minns wrote to Tim Cook and Sundar Pichai about offensive terms being used to market dating apps. This page preserves that campaign document. It does not imply either company endorsed Butterfly or adopted its proposals.
The original letter reproduces offensive words to identify and challenge their use.
Transgender offensive search results: open letter
Dear Tim Cook & Sundar Pichai,
I would like to draw to your attention that a number of terms found to be offensive within the transgender community are being used to market and brand dating apps within the Apple App Store and Google Play Store. For example:
- Shemale
- Ladyboy
- Tranny
Whilst I appreciate Apple and Google are both advocates of free speech, would you consider any of the following options within your stores?
- Returning zero results if any of the above terms are used
- Informing users that they are searching for an offensive term
- Swapping the meta data to ‘transgender’ before processing the results
- Something else you consider suitable
Your support in this matter would be greatly appreciated.
Yours sincerely,
David Minns - Founder of Butterfly Dating
#transgenderoffensiveterms
From a campaign to practical tools
Butterfly’s private-chat language tool recognises offensive terms, strikes them out, adds replacement wording and marks the message as edited. The original feature explanation shows the correction in action.
The goal is a dating environment where a person’s identity is respected. Our research-informed article on language discusses why wording and behaviour need attention together.
