"Trans Enough" for Tumblr? Gender Accountability, Identity Challenge, and the Duality of Sociotechnical Affordances in Online Communities for TNB+ Emerging Adults

Abstract

Today’s digitally-mediated “networked publics” (boyd 2014) afford users unprecedented opportunities to explore self-presentation, to learn about TNB+ identities (away from the prying eyes of parents), and to connect and forge community with others around the world. Online communities and social media sites offer TNB+ youth opportunities to craft representations of self that would be unintelligible in analog domains. So profound has been the impact of the Internet on TNB+ community building that some have hailed these online spaces as “utopian” in nature, asserting that the expansion and mobilization of today’s TNB+ community could not have taken place without its influence (Giardina 2019). In my own research with trans and non-binary young people, participants often spoke with great enthusiasm about their preferred trans-focused spaces online, asserting that they would not have found the courage to actualize their identities -- or, for that matter, even have come to recognize their identities -- without the resources these spaces provide. Yet, at the same time, these same participants emphatically refuted the “utopian” visions enshrined in the literature: while social media had enabled them to explore new identity labels and to connect with other trans people, it had also exposed them to waves of harassment and abuse, propagated both by cis-het Internet “trolls” and by other TNB+ people. Their responses paint a portrait of social media use as a double-edged sword, both a source of empowerment and a source of new interactional risks. Drawing from a total of 67 in-depth interviews collected longitudinally from a cohort of 49 trans, non-binary, and otherwise gender-expansive young people (and coupled with textual analysis of their social media profiles), this research examines the strategies and tools that TNB+ young people leverage to construct, represent, and account for their gender identities online. Remaining “accountable” to gender online necessitates no small amount of creativity and adaptability on the part of social media users -- particularly those who disrupt gender norms. As users and their online audiences strive to negotiate the terms of what “authentic” gender identity narratives look like, open questions about which identity claims should be considered reliable incentivize intra-community factionalization and boundary policing. The structure and affordances of specific online communities have the potential to amplify these processes, in that many of the very same features that many trans users find most compelling — for instance, anonymity, the ability to construct trans-exclusive “safe spaces,” and decentralization of the body — may also increase users’ exposure to risk (for example, the risk of having one’s identity claims rejected online, or of being harassed or rejected by other users). In this dissertation, I assess the implications of these “double-edged” design choices for both (A) the identity projects of individual TNB+ users, and (B) coalition-building and community mobilization among TNB+ young people as a collective. I also discuss how these findings can be utilized to inform platform design, shaping the architecture of these online spaces in ways that support and protect TNB+ people.