Introduction

Disclaimers

Histories

Community

Internet

Norms

Conclusion

Glossary

Bibliography

The Internet

A drawing of a dog sitting at a computer from the New Yorker. The dog at the computer turns to another dog next to them and says 'on the internet, no one knows you're a dog'

As a trans person, the internet is a goddamn blessing.

The internet enables people to stay anonymous. No one knows who you are, or what you look like, or where you live, or any other information about you apart from what you volunteer. All that you can be judged by is your words. To quote the eponymous cartoon pictured above, "on the internet, no one knows you're a dog."

The internet enables people to connect with millions, if not billions, of other people from around the world. I can log into Discord or Skype and hold a live conversation with people thousands of kilometres away from me. Other sites, such as forums and social media, show posts being made in real time. Communication is cheap, easy, and instantaneous.

The internet enables people to access a wealth of information within seconds. If I want to know something, I can get an answer in seconds from typing a question into a search bar. If I want to learn how to do something, I can find a thousand tutorials in video and text forms across diverse websites.

These three factors allowed trans people to form whole new communities, all within the primarily visual medium of the internet. Trans communities were suddenly made accessible, even to those who were otherwise deep in the closet, enabling more people to engage with trans communities and even realize that they're trans. This then meant that community discourses around identity started accelerating, along with the development of new language for ourselves. Trans people on the internet started inventing new words for themselves and their identities, and came up with more inclusive and gender neutral language. Many flocked to Tumblr in particular, which was where the acceleration of identity-making peaked.

I personally ended up on Tumblr and Discord, after having realized that I was trans through Reddit. Tumblr and Discord are now my primary social media and where I interact with other trans people on the internet. Previously that was Reddit, though I joined before I realized I was trans and even after never really felt like I was part of a community.

On Discord, users can create and moderate "servers," which are essentially several groupchats (called channels) contaiing the same people bundled together and moderated as a whole. These channels are often divided into groups and dedicated to specific subjects or functions, such as a channel for posting selfies or a channel to list the rules of a server. A message in a channel can be edited or deleted by the person who sent it, and can be deleted by moderators of the server. Otherwise, a message is kept forever. This means that server members can go back and read any conversation had in the server, not just the ones they participated in.

There's also a voice chat function, but voice dysphoria is a thing, and I live with my parents.

Tumblr, on the other hand, is made up of blogs. Users post stuff to their blogs, and other users can "reblog" to put that post on their blog or add more stuff to the post. I use the incredibly unspecific "stuff" for what gets posted because what gets posted is a massively eclectic mix of jokes, essays, memes, vents, videos, and almost any other format that can be conveyed by audio, video, image, or text. I have, while scrolling through my "dash" (the feed of all the blogs I follow), seen shitposts about fruit (derogatory) next to longform essays about queerbaiting in a show that should have ended ten seasons ago.

When it comes to matters of privacy, Tumblr is worse. Discord's servers can be accessed by invitation only, but any post made on Tumblr is considered to be public according to Tumblr's privacy policy.