 One reason to direct our attention towards the constitutive harms of hate speech is its potential to productively advance the debate over the legitimacy of potential restrictions. Mary Kate McGowan (2009) has made this case most explicitly. “Rather than focus on what a certain category of speech causes,” she writes, we ought to be “interested in what such speech actually does, in and of itself” (2009, 389–90). The idea here is that by focusing only on the harms caused by hate speech, we are inevitably drawn into a debate about balancing the costs and benefits of permitting or regulating speech, which often leads to an impasse. Alternatively, turning our attention to the acts hate speech constitutes can reveal features that help us avoid question of balancing harms, and opens the door to regulation. On this approach, some instances of hate speech can be seen to constitute acts of (verbal) discrimination, and should be considered analogous to other acts of discrimination—like posting a ‘Whites Only’ sign up at a hotel—that US law recognizes as illegal. As a speech act, hate speech can enact discriminatory rules in much the same way the physical sign does, and so ought to similarly be restricted (McGowan, 2012). This argument proceeds by a development of Austin’s notion of “exercitives,” which are speech acts that enact rules in a given domain, and is one example of the fruitful use of speech act theory to the philosophy of hate speech.