Facebook's real name policy is a drag, and not just for the performers it outs

Photograph: Eric Risberg/AP

Recently, hundreds of drag performers found their Facebook profiles deactivated, a result of the social network's policy that users must go by 'real names'. Some were vocal: Sister Roma of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, spoke out about her experience and started a hashtag to declare #MyNameIsRoma. Others took to Change.org to petition for redress, garnering 30,000 signatures on their demand that Facebook allow drag queens to run profiles with their chosen names.

In the end, Facebook agreed to temporarily reinstate the profiles - but only to give the performers a chance to 'confirm their real name, change their name to their real name, or convert their profile to a Page.' (Pages are distinct from personal profiles in two ways: one, they are intended for use by companies, organizations, and public figures; and two, unless you pay to promote a post, most people won't see a Page's content.)

Facebook's policy is wrong-headed, and its justifications mostly fallacious. In a statement provided to me this week when I asked for comment, Facebook noted that 'we've seen situations where people have used fake names to engage in bad behavior online', but that completely misses the point. Seeing 'situations' where fake names enable bad behavior isn't a reason to crack down on pseudonyms. It's a reason to crack down on bad behavior.

On the other hand, we've also seen situations where people have used names that don't appear on their legal documents to escape bad behavior, both online and off. In the wake of similar rage over Google+'s now-defunct policy, there's no excuse for your ongoing ignorance that users have many valid reasons to choose their own names - including gender transition, hiding from abusers, or simply protecting their privacy by isolating their social selves from their professional ones.

But this isn't a case of discrimination by Facebook, not exactly. It's a case of Facebook offering a platform for its users to bludgeon those who don't conform.

The company has always had a little-enforced 'real name' policy, which relied on users to report 'fake' profiles, and Facebook says that its employees still 'don't proactively search for profiles to take down.' So if there's been an uptick in reporting, that may not be due to any change in the top-down procedures: it's likely the result of a coordinated campaign by nasty users to flag profiles of people using something other than their legal names. Facebook itself is probably not singling out drag entertainers, it's probably just reinforcing other people's prejudices against them - and leaving an inviting door open for anyone who want to bully others on the site.

A 'real name' policy is fundamentally an appeal to authority - we outsource the ability to determine 'real names' to parents and parent figures in the government. So when Facebook allows users to report 'fake names', it is giving them permission to enforce other people's identities that they think are not sufficiently ratified by existing government authorities.

But there's nothing objectively true about nomenclature. Only two things can reasonably be said to distinguish a 'real' name: whether it's the name you use, and whether it's been signed off on by a recognized agency. When people contradict a name you've chosen - when they tell you that the name you go by is 'not your real name' - they mean that your name is not 'approved', and that your identity doesn't pass external muster.

That doesn't only happen on Facebook. Last Friday, the Texas Observer reported that a woman who moved to Houston with her wife was denied a driver's license because the Texas Department of Public Safety won't recognize her married name. Even after Connie Wilson showed her Social Security card, California license, and financial and medical records - all sporting her legal name - a DPS employee insisted that only her maiden name was 'real'. 'She told me I would never get a license with my current name, that the name doesn't belong to me', Wilson told the Observer.

People will find a way to undermine identities they don't approve of, and there will always be ways to write them off as insufficiently authoritative, 'made up' or 'fake'. It's not about bad behavior, or even about official sign-off. It's just about making yourself the arbiter of someone else's self.