Transgender Social Media Isn’t Just Toxic, It’s Necessary

Hazel McLaughlin

This op-ed is the third writing assignment given to my students in WR 120: Sexuality and  Gender in the City. This course seeks to develop and practice rhetorical writing skills in both academic and public-facing genres about gender and sexuality, a topic that is not just timely, but also very deep, fraught, political, and personal. This assignment particularly asked students to write an op-ed on a topic of their choice, engaging with the course themes and assigned scholarship about gender, sexuality, and place. Hazel McLaughlin’s piece explores the struggles and vulnerability of trans people’s existence in both the physical and digital worlds, balancing a double-edged sword that tips towards the possibility for realizing trans community within turbulent social media. Hazel’s writing expertly incorporates academic and media sources alongside her personal experience—adeptly capturing the nuance of informed and inviting public writing, especially for such a personal and political topic. Hazel’s op-ed also underscores a much broader significance. At the time of Hazel’s op-ed, anti-queer violence and rhetoric hit and continues at an all-time high in recent memory, especially given the mass shooting in November 2022 at Club Q, an LGBTQ+ club in Colorado Springs. Hazel’s op-ed is a reminder that queer voices and experiences are often silenced (even by those within LGBTQ+ communities). Thus, Hazel’s op-ed stands as a potent reminder of how important public rhetoric is, especially during times of persecution. Far from being safe, where can we be not just ourselves, but also be together?

Landon Lauer

From the Writer

In the modern era,  transgender young adults typically begin the cultivation of their new identity online, looking for information and socializing in spaces where they can be themselves for the first time. Regrettably, much of the trans social media spaces, or “Transborhoods” this generation enters into are notoriously toxic. Plagued by chasers, platform instability, and the general bullying that comes with anonymity, some sites can be characterized more by self-hatred than by self-help. All of this is compounded by the deep racialization of access to social media, reflected in the vast over-platforming of white trans voices. However, this toxicity is made unfortunately necessary by the growing anti-trans sentiment in the outside world. The criminalization of transition and the ever-present threats of violence drive our youth away from physical spaces which can provide the care they need, forcing this group back onto the platforms that hurt them.

Transgender Social Media Isn’t Just Toxic, It’s Necessary

Transgender social media is, in a word, problematic. In many more words, it’s a problem made necessary by the greater dangers of the outside world.

If you’re a trans person, especially a younger trans person born after, say, the late 90s, it’s not an unreasonable assumption that you didn’t discover yourself in a physical space. Many trans youth don’t have trans family to guide them, or some habit of playing in mom’s wardrobe that might tip others off. Instead, transness sits and waits, until it is stumbled upon. It’s increasingly common for that discovery to occur on social media, or some other digital platform where identity can be explored without fears of reprisal from one’s family or peers. Unfortunately, many of these spaces are critically flawed, replicating much of the broader societal stigma. However, the greater threats of physical spaces make digital trans spaces the lesser of two evils, often a poor option made necessary by being the only game in town.

Twitter, Reddit, Tumblr, Facebook, Instagram, and many other social media platforms have all seen the rise of a burgeoning digital trans community. Throughout the past decade or so, there has been explosive growth in Facebook groups, subreddits, Tumblr pages and other dedicated forums for trans people to meet, share their experiences, swap resources, commiserate over struggles, and otherwise find strength in others- an opportunity often denied to trans people, especially trans youth.

However, many of these spaces are quite flawed. Perhaps most critically, access to these spaces is deeply racialized. Jonathan Jimenez, a doctoral candidate at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, wrote extensively about this issue, detailing how membership of digital trans spaces trends heavily white, reflecting real life in their prioritization of white voices over those of trans people of color (poc). More often than not, platforms such as YouTube or Instagram where white trans people can amass large followings often see trans poc struggling to get their foot in the door. And even when they do, they are often met with much of the same racial backlash as in broader society.

Additionally, the low barrier to entry that allows access to trans people without the means for physical spaces has the unfortunate effect of making these spaces open to “chasers,” cis people, often men, who seek out trans people for the perceived sexual taboo of trans bodies. Speaking from personal experience, on the rare occasions I found myself posting (strictly safe-for-work) selfies online to reap a bit of gender euphoria from compliments, I was inundated with messages from men containing such classics as “dick or no dick?,” “are you owned?,” and other such unsolicited solicitations. These sort of responses serve to remind trans people that our communities aren’t private, and our spaces are far from safe.

Another fundamental flaw of digital trans spaces is the lack of stability. Platforms come and go, forums get shut down, server owners get banned, and there’s always the potential for entire communities to disappear overnight, with all their information vanishing into digital ether. This was most recently highlighted by Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, where the site was sent into freefall due to the loosening of restrictions on hate speech and unbanning of many far-right figures. Trans twitter went into crisis mode under the constant fear that existing communities would be subject to a deluge of harassment, or deleted outright. Although there is still a trans community on twitter, the event was a heavy blow, and served as a sharp reminder of the vulnerability of digital trans communities.

So why do we put up with it? If social media is so bad, why not turn off the computer and “touch grass,” as it were? Unfortunately, no matter how bad trans social media gets, it can’t begin to compare with the dangers of real life. Targeted fatal violence against trans people in America is commonplace, harassment and physical assault taken as a given, the price of public visibility. As of writing, we’re right in the middle of 2022’s Transgender Awareness Week, with Transgender Day of Remembrance just around the corner. It’s more than a little telling that there’s a nationally recognized holiday just for remembering the fallen members of our community. Anti-trans stigma is disturbingly wide spread in this country, and even more disturbingly taken as a given. 

However, a key difficulty for trans people trying to find physical community is not simply harassment by cishet society, but the consistent exclusion of trans people from broader queer community. The LGBTQIA+ movement should be unilaterally welcoming to trans people, but we’re often told to swallow our tongues, stay out of the limelight, and leave dedicated queer spaces. This exclusion of trans people in service of, for lack of a better phrase, the marketability of gay rights, is, in my opinion one of the most deeply-cutting harms to trans people, and a major source of the stigma pushing us away from public action.

For those trans people among us not rich, pretty, white, or meek enough for acceptance by the broader queer community, digital spaces are made into an unfortunate necessity. Despite their instability, their lack of privacy, and their replication of harms, they are more often than not the only sources of community available to far too many trans youth. Fundamentally speaking, attempts to rectify this issue cannot start with attempts to repair digital trans spaces, but instead to cut out the roots of transphobia within broader society, especially physical queer community, that makes a mockery of our rights to visibility and drives us further into toxic spaces which bring us more harm than help.

Hazel McLaughlin is a freshman in Boston University’s College of Arts and Sciences. Born and raised in Boston Massachusetts, she’s a child of the city who made her way up through Boston’s public school system and into our great university. She’d like to offer special thanks to Landon Lauer, her WR120 instructor who provided invaluable guidance on the piece.