Digital Me: Trans Students Exploring Future Possible Selves Online 1978822782, 9781978822788

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Digital Me

The American Campus Founded by Harold S. Wechsler The books in the American Campus series explore recent developments and public policy issues in higher education in the United States. Topics of interest include access to college and college affordability; college retention, tenure, and academic freedom; campus l­abor; the expansion and evolution of administrative posts and salaries; the crisis in the humanities and the arts; the corporate university and for-­ profit colleges; online education; controversy in sport programs; and gender, ethnic, racial, religious, and class dynamics and diversity. Books feature scholarship from a variety of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. For a list of all the titles in the series, please see the last page of the book.

Digital Me Trans Students Exploring ­Future Pos­si­ble Selves Online

Z NICOLAZZO, ALDEN C. JONES, AND SY SIMMS

Rutgers University Press New Brunswick, Camden, and Newark, New Jersey, and London

 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Nicolazzo, Z., author. | Jones, Alden C., author. | Simms, Sy, author. Title: Digital me : trans students exploring future possible selves online / Z Nicolazzo, Alden Jones, Sy Simms. Description: New Brunswick : Rutgers University Press, [2023] | Series: The American campus | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022009349 | ISBN 9781978822788 (hardback) | ISBN 9781978822771 (paperback) | ISBN 9781978822795 (epub) | ISBN 9781978822818 (pdf) Subjects: LCSH: Transgender college students. | Internet in higher education. | Identity (Philosophical concept) Classification: LCC LC2574.6 .N5142 2023 | DDC 378.1/98267—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022009349 A British Cataloging-­in-­Publication rec­ord for this book is available from the British Library. Copyright © 2023 by Z Nicolazzo, Alden Jones, and Sy Simms All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is “fair use” as defined by U.S. copyright law. References to internet websites (URLs) w ­ ere accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Rutgers University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared. The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—­Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992. www​.­r utgersuniversitypress​.­org Manufactured in the United States of Amer­i­ca

 Z: For you, Mom. Alden: For Preston, Torynn, Grayson, Athena, Darren, and Emmitt. May the world we are building be big enough to hold all of you. Sy: For anyone who has found themself a glitch in a system never built for them. This one’s for us.

Contents Part I  Logging On Introduction 1

Searching for Ourselves Online

3 27

Part II  Trans(form)ing Online 2

The Internet as Spatial

43

3

The Internet as Temporal

56

4

The Internet as Affective

72

5

The Internet as Sartorial

89

6

The Internet as Communal

108

7

The Internet as Visual

127

Part III  Prismatic Possibilities 8

The Multiplicity of Trans Life Online

145

Acknowl­edgments 165 Notes 169 References 173 Index 183

vii

Digital Me

Part 1

Logging On

Introduction What w ­ ill be in the times to come? What w ­ ill I be in the times to come? What w ­ ill we be in the times to come?

Who we are as individuals and as populations is becoming increasingly enmeshed with virtual landscapes. We carry ourselves not only in public, social spheres but also in our pockets, purses, and backpacks, where digitized versions of our multiple selves exist on our phones, laptops, and other varied technological equipment. Beyond being a medium for self-­expression, the Internet has become a digital meeting place, providing platforms through which ­people can come together and cultivate communities. For queer and transgender communities, online spaces have long held promise as sites for developing community. Given the ongoing foreclosures of public spaces to the profusions of queer life (e.g., Delaney, 1999; Hanhardt, 2013), the cultivation and maintenance of online communities act as an underworlding practice (Gossett and Huxtable, 2017), or a way queer and transgender p­ eople can build worlds just beyond the grasp of the current social world that regularly threatens their—­and ours, as queer and trans authors—­existence. For example, speaking of YouTube, Raun (2016) wrote, “Although data is scarce, ­there is ­little doubt that, ­today, YouTube provides the most vivid visual culture of trans self-­representation, and is the archive that many—­trans or not—­turn to for information” (p. 6). Clearly, the Internet is a potent site from which to not only theorize but also imagine, invest in, and explore the prismatic possibilities for life. For t­ hose of us who occupy vari­ous marginalized positionalities socially, t­hese possibilities are not idle desires but signal intensely palpable realities to exist in ways we may not be able to in material spaces. 3

4  •  Logging On

In many ways, the Internet and transgender ­people hold similar spaces in the social imaginary. Specifically, the Internet and transgender p­ eople are both held as unreal, false, or not who we assert to be. The Internet and online spaces are discussed in opposition to that which is “in real life,” or IRL; in the same way, transgender ­people—­and, in par­tic­u­lar, transgender ­women—­are discussed in opposition to who we know ourselves to be. ­These shared unrealities, then, become an animating feature of this text. We take seriously the online places, platforms, and times through which transgender ­people have cultivated lives, regardless of how “real” nontrans p­ eople have supposed t­ hese spaces/lives to be. Our text asks questions central to the construction of selves as a techno-­ ontological proj­ect. We ask: How does the Internet operate as a site for creation and curation of the self? How does gender move online, and how have trans ­people imbued online spaces with gender? What are the possibilities of constructing prismatic notions of selves, of developing community for and among trans ­people in online spaces? It bears noting up front that this book is not an attempt to create a flat narrative about the Internet being always already a good, liberating space ­free from reproach for trans ­people. Indeed, the Internet can be treacherous for many marginalized p­ eople, a real­ity to which trans p­ eople are not immune. Not only do individual ­people target trans ­people with hateful, toxic, and violent content, but certain platforms like YouTube and Tumblr have also been accused of targeting queer and trans populations through their policies and actions (e.g., Bensinger and Albergotti, 2019; Reynolds, 2018). This, however, does not mean the Internet cannot or does not already hold multiple possibilities for how trans ­people come to understand themselves and their worlds. As a result, we encourage readers to think about the Internet and its possibilities not through an either/or framework (e.g., e­ ither the Internet is wonderful or it is horrid) but through a prism that reflects multiple (im)possibilities. That is, the Internet can be both a space for trans p­ eople to explore and understand themselves in safer, unique ways while also being a space framed by surveillance and imbued with toxicity t­ oward t­ hose of us who are trans. Moreover, despite the ways toxicity, threat, and surveillance permeate both on-­and offline social worlds, the trans participants readers w ­ ill meet in this book have found ways to harness and (re) craft the Internet in ways that promote their own needs in terms of gender exploration and community building. Their experiences, and how they have used the Internet for their own needs, is what is impor­tant in this text, all while recognizing the Internet is far from a benign or wholly supportive space—­a real­ity the participants know well, and many speak of, as is discussed l­ater in the book. As an ethnographic text, this book is especially interested in notions of place and how place mediates experience. Of importance, then, is the fact that the proj­ect described in this book specifically addresses institutions of higher

Introduction • 5

education as a site of cultural production. This book takes seriously the idea that education is a social institution where much of the current (re)learning of gender both congeals and emanates out into the world. ­There is perhaps a paradoxical relationship that is then created in relation to gender and education, which is that ­there has been a rapid increase in queer and trans theorizing from institutions of higher education while at the same time, this theorizing has yet to significantly change the course of such institutions (Lange, Duran, and Jackson, 2019; Renn, 2010). Similarly, t­ here has been a significant investment in trans ­people setting up homes online—­sometimes, but not always, as a way to seek life beyond the impossibilities of such in material, offline spaces—­while at the same time, such investments may not have yielded the sorts of increased life chances one may hope to see for trans ­people in sociopo­liti­cal spheres. In fact, at the very time we are revising this introduction in the summer of 2022, it may seem as though such possibilities for trans life offline may be constricting for most trans p­ eople. This is particularly true for t­ hose of us in the United States who experience multiple marginalized subjectivities, including trans ­people, especially trans w ­ omen, and most especially trans p­ eople and w ­ omen who experience the ongoing press of dispossession, dehumanization, and palpable harm due to the pernicious effects of anti-­Black racism, white supremacy, and settler colonialism. Simply put, possibilities for navigating life as a Black, Indigenous, Asian Pacific Islander Desi American (APIDA), or Latinx trans person/woman are always already tenuous due to how structures of vio­lence continue to haunt the past/present/future of the U.S. sociocultural context. To that end, this book has several questions to address from the outset, including the following: What can a proj­ect rooted in higher education do in addressing the (im)possibility of trans life in the social sphere? How does what happens online “­matter” to the increasing of life chances for trans ­people offline? What might ­future imaginings of trans life look like in on-­and offline spaces, and how is this germane to ­those invested in creating higher education as a site for the ongoing “practice of freedom” (hooks, 1994, p. 12)? While we address ­these questions through the analy­sis of our data throughout the book, we first turn to elucidating the place of trans ­people in the two major arenas for this research: online spaces and institutions of higher education. We then introduce the proj­ect this book details as well as ourselves as researchers, with par­tic­u­lar attention paid to our own investments in being trans online.

Being, Thinking, and Exploring Trans Online It is no hyperbole to suggest that the Internet is as much a space dedicated to cat memes as it is a space for trans p­ eople to find each other, come together, and collectively understand our/their genders. Online environments have become vital spaces for sharing, learning about, and exploring pos­si­ble gendered

6  •  Logging On

f­ utures. Despite the importance of the Internet in the lives of trans p­ eople, however, Stryker and Aizura (2013) claimed t­ here has been an “unfortunate lacunae [regarding] the relative absence of students of transgender phenomena in relation to . . . ​new media” (p. 10). In some senses, this absence makes sense; trans ­people have been more focused on creating lives rather than studying them. Additionally, with the nascence of transgender studies as an academic discipline—to say nothing of other fields’ incorporation of trans-­centric frameworks and research—­there is still room for growth when it comes to trans-­related research. To that end, this book adds to the work that a variety of trans/gender studies scholars have begun ­doing to explore how transgender ­people have developed community with other transgender p­ eople through the Internet. For example, Raun (2016, 2018) and Horak (2014) have been instrumental in understanding the depth and extent to which trans ­people have used YouTube to develop community. Their work shows how the online video-­sharing platform has become a staple for trans ­people, especially trans men, who are seeking transition-­related stories and information. Additionally, M. Y. Chen (2017) discussed how trans Asians are using the Internet to find and develop senses of selves, including YouTube as a place through which to do so. Paired with Nicolazzo’s (2016b, 2017b) work, one can understand YouTube as a vibrant platform across which trans p­ eople are using tags to find each other, share information, and fill gaps in transphobic medical care. It is further striking that even in empirical research not specifically focused on trans ­people and their use of the Internet, online spaces and platforms leak into view. For example, in Van Asselt’s (2019) study on trans and queer youth of color in secondary schools, Sam, a mixed-­race trans participant, stated: “I’m a weirdo. Like, no ­matter where I am, I’m prob­ably the minority. I figured that out a while ago. . . . ​ I have so many weird ­things that it’s hard to be not the weird one. If I found someone just like me, I ­don’t even know if I’d like them. My ex Caitlin, we had the sexuality weirdness and we had the mixed-­race, we both have that in common, but I got my weird religion, all my hobbies that are strange, like I sit at home and watch YouTube forever” (p. 615, emphasis added). While Sam used “weird” as a descriptor of difference rather than abjection, they may not have been as unusual as they thought . . . ​or at least not when it came to their use of the Internet. In fact, the aforementioned research, the current proj­ect, and the theorizing being done by cárdenas (2016, 2022) offers broader possibilities and conceptions of trans ­people on the Internet that include trans ­people of color, who are often framed out of such discussions. Trans ­people have also made impressive use of social networking like Facebook and Instagram (Miller, 2017; Nicolazzo, 2016b, 2017b), blogging sites (Miller, 2017), crowdfunding sites (Barcelos, 2019a, 2019b; Barcelos and Budge, 2019), dating/hook-up apps (e.g., Scruff; Friedler, 2019), and

Introduction • 7

microblogging platforms like Tumblr (Cavalcante, 2019; Haimson et  al., 2019). Far from suggesting the use of such online platforms are without critique, several scholars have pointed to the complex and conflicting nature of trans ­people’s engagement with them. For example, Cavalcante (2019) discussed how Tumblr acts as both a “queer utopia” and a “queer vortex” for trans ­people. Articulating an impor­tant notion we come back to l­ ater in this text, Cavalcante (2019) stated: “Tumblr creates a kind of vortex for its users defined by short periods of intense social interactions that do not sustain over time, information ­bubbles, and dark and potentially harmful niche communities. Crucially, the user experience on the site underscores the profound vulnerability of queer individuals and communities in digital, corporatized space” (p. 1716). Thinking about Tumblr as a specific online platform, Haimson et al. (2019) also argued it represented a trans technology, or a technology that trans p­ eople use “to communicate, or­ga­nize, and access key resources” and that “became central to trans life” (p. 2). Although Haimson et al. (2019) argued Tumblr has ceased to function as a trans technology based on its shifting administrative policies and monetization—­something the participants discussed through our proj­ect, and to which we come back to as authors when we detail what we call the “death of Tumblr”—­the development and real­ity of it once having been such is indeed a power­f ul statement about the place and primacy of online space for trans existence. In a parallel fashion, Barcelos’s (2019a, 2019b) and Barcelos and Budge’s (2019) work underscores how crowdfunding sites are liberating for trans p­ eople, while at the same time reifying oppressive discourses of race, masculinity, and “deservingness” for biomedical transition ser­vices. Given the realities of trans-­ exclusive health care in the United States, trans ­people often need to turn to crowdfunding to cover biomedical transition costs. However, through their research, just who gets their campaigns fully funded is often determined through the dominant ideologies of whiteness, masculinity, and notions of who is “deserving” of such procedures (i.e., ­those who view transness as moving from one supposedly fixed gender to another). In many ways, t­ hese discourses match ­those Spade (2000) discussed, pointing to how on-­and offline cultures may mirror, speak to, and in many ways reinforce each other. Taken together, Barcelos’s, Cavalcante’s, and Barcelos and Budge’s work shows that despite the adaptation of online spaces to fit the medical and community-­based needs of trans ­people, the ways trans p­ eople take them up may often reify similar inequities and oppressive ideologies pre­sent throughout the social sphere offline. It would, therefore, be foolhardy for readers to understand the adaptation of the Internet as always already good or as ­free from complications. ­These spaces, while offering incredible possibilities, are still connected to, influenced by, and mediated through discourses that pervade the material social sphere and, thus, re-­present some of the same stratified realities.

8  •  Logging On

One of the main benefits of the aforementioned research is that it stretches previous conceptions of “community” as occurring just in physical/material spaces (e.g., Putnam, 2001). Due to the ongoing vio­lence and harassment of trans ­people by nontrans ­people, the turn to online spaces for trans ­people has been one that is mediated by need, not just interest or desire. The continued gender-­based oppression trans ­people experience in the social sphere (e.g., Catalano and Griffin 2016; Grant et al., 2011; Hayward, 2017; James et al., 2016; Jourian, 2017b; Nicolazzo, 2016a, 2016b, 2017b; 2021b, 2022; Snorton and Haritaworn, 2013), trans p­ eople have oftentimes had to go online to explore their own senses of selves as well as build community with other trans ­people. As a result, it behooves researchers working alongside transgender populations to follow them online and think about how the Internet—­both as a cultural site as well as a method of connection—­mediate transgender ­people’s senses of selves and community. By recognizing the centrality of the Internet, and by showing the online platforms transgender ­people use to create and maintain connections with ­others, the lit­er­a­ture has provided a basis from which further exploration is required. Specifically, how transgender ­people make meaning of themselves as a result of their engagement in online spaces (e.g., how they develop and maintain senses of digital selves), how transgender p­ eople make meaning of online spaces in relation to offline/physical spaces, and how transgender ­people make meaning of their digital selves in community (both with other trans ­people and other nontrans ­people) are questions that have yet to be investigated adequately. While research has placed transgender ­people in online communities and has discussed the central role the Internet has in being able to connect the transgender community, ­there has yet to be a thorough investigation of how transgender ­people develop senses of digital selves via their engagement online; nor has ­there been any discussion about how transgender p­ eople think of the multiple selves—­digital and analog—­they have developed over time, including how t­ hese multiple iterations of selves reinforce and/or are dissonant with each other. Trans students exploring their identities through online platforms may engage vari­ous performative, paradoxical, disjointed, and multiplicative iterations of who they are and could become in the f­ uture, which is precisely what this book seeks to find out. Thus, this book takes seriously the malleability of identity and explores how trans ­people manifest this malleability as they come to know themselves (through) online (spaces). This research picks up on the work of Nicolazzo (2016b, 2017b), who detailed what she called virtual kinship networks among trans college students. ­These virtual kinship networks w ­ ere connections between and across transgender ­people in online spaces that allowed the students to navigate other­wise chilly and hostile campus environments. While Nicolazzo was able to uncover this  phenomenon in her research, this book takes an in-­depth look at how

Introduction • 9

transgender ­people use the Internet, curating their digital selves in ways that could help them explore vari­ous pos­si­ble gendered ­futures for themselves.

Schooling Gender This book focuses on transgender students, as educational institutions and the schooling pro­cess are primary locations for the regulation of gender (Marine, 2017a; Nicolazzo, 2017b; Pascoe, 2011; Spade, 2015). According to the 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey, “54% of respondents who ­were out or perceived as transgender in K-12 schools ­were verbally harassed, and 24% ­were physically attacked,” while “24% of p­ eople who ­were out or perceived as transgender in college or vocational school w ­ ere verbally, physically, or sexually harassed” (James et al., 2016, p. 131). The rates of Black transgender p­ eople who ­were verbally, physically, or sexually harassed in college (28%), transgender w ­ omen who left college or vocational schools due to harassment (21%), and Black transgender p­ eople who left college or vocational schools due to harassment (21%) are alarming (James et al., 2016). The Association of American Universities (AAU) also commissioned a study showing over 24 ­percent of transgender undergraduates and 15.5 ­percent of transgender gradu­ate students reported being sexually assaulted, while “three-­quarters of [transgender] students reported experiencing sexual harassment . . . ​[and transgender] undergraduates also had the highest rate of stalking (12.8 ­percent) and intimate partner vio­ lence (22.8 ­percent)” (New, 2015, para. 8). All educational institutions, including higher education institutions, are not immune to—­and in fact are complicit in furthering (e.g., Nicolazzo, 2021b, 2022)—­larger discourses and cycles of harm and vio­lence ­toward transgender p­ eople. Beyond the vio­lence of schools, the schooling pro­cess related to gender provides further rationale for the centrality of educational contexts in this book. As scholars have addressed (e.g., Patel, 2013), schooling is a pro­cess through which students are socialized to vari­ous norms and standards, including t­ hose related to gender (Wolley, 2015). As Nicolazzo (2016b, 2017b) has detailed, higher education institutions are awash in gender-­binary discourse, which circumscribes opportunities for transgender students. Moreover, as Nicolazzo (2021a) argued, “Due to the instantiation and perpetuation of the gender binary discourse (Nicolazzo, 2016b, 2017), as well as its collusion with state systems of gender vio­lence, I argue that postsecondary education is also complicit in epistemological trans* oppression” (p. 18, emphasis in original). Moreover, ­because “higher education institutions are heralded as the spaces in which knowledge for the consumption and benefit of the larger society are centrally produced” (Patton, 2016, p. 321), it becomes imperative to investigate how gender-­based knowledge is (re)produced through higher education contexts, perhaps with unintended—­and yet still palpable and deleterious—­consequences.

10  •  Logging On

And yet trans students continue to craft the worlds they need to navigate the vio­lence of schools (as a place) and schooling (as a pro­cess). Embodying a set of lit­er­a­t ure Lange, Duran, and Jackson (2019) described as the House of Flourishing, or scholarship “that illuminates the success and thriving of queer and trans ­people in higher education” (p. 517), a group of scholars have recently been dedicated to creating a more nuanced narrative about trans ­people in higher education. In so ­doing, the scholars that comprise what Lange, Duran, and Jackson (2019) noted as “the House of Flourishing look to both how queer ­people grow, develop, and become successful according to their own terms and standards and how institutions support ­those conceptions of success” (p.  517). Scholars(hip) like that of Catalano (2015a, 2015b), Duran (2018), Jourian (2017a, 2017b, 2018), Nicolazzo (2016a, 2016b, 2021a), Nicolazzo, Pitcher, et  al. (2017), and Simms, Nicolazzo, and Jones (2021) make a compelling case for how trans p­ eople continue to make the worlds they need and consolidate in communities with and alongside each other in power­f ul ways, regardless of the chilliness of their educational contexts. That is, while ­there is no getting outside the vio­lence (re)produced through schools/ schooling, trans students continue to cultivate spaces and communities that allow them to practice resilience in new ways and as a means to be successful on their own terms (Barr, Budge, and Adelson, 2016; Bowling, Schoebel, and Vercruysse, 2019; Budge, Orovecz, and Thai, 2015; Budge, Chin, and Minero, 2017; Nicolazzo, 2016b, 2017b). While a growing body of scholarship is developing around trans and gender nonconforming p­ eople in school settings, ­there is a significant absence of work that stretches conceptions of educational environments to the virtual. ­There are studies about trans ­people in school, the schooling pro­cess of gender, and the ways t­ hese spaces and pro­cesses mediate trans student experiences, but ­there is a noticeable lack of empirical data focused on the interaction between physical and virtual spaces in relation to education. If the material social world is becoming more entangled with virtual spaces and content, it would stand to reason that such a chasm between physical and virtual understandings of education, schooling, and gender is impor­tant to address, and not just b­ ecause t­ here is a gap in the lit­er­a­ture. Instead, the (dis)connections between physical and virtual spaces belie misunderstandings about who trans students are and can be and m ­ istake their trans becomings as only occurring “in real life” or “in real time.” Indeed, as we detail in this book, trans ­people are using the Internet to (re)craft themselves in power­f ul ways that they then take into their physical worlds. Thus, the trans students in the Digital Me proj­ect highlight that what education scholars have long held to be “school settings,” or “educational environments,” must shift dramatically and must do so by recognizing the agentic power of the Internet.1

Introduction • 11

The Digital Me Proj­ect We collected the data for this book during the spring 2018 academic semester. They are composed of ethnographic interviews (Boellstorff et  al., 2012; Heyl, 2001) and digital ethnographic observations (Boellstorff et al., 2012; Pink et al., 2016). Similar to Hine’s (2000) work on virtual ethnography, the methodology “is useful in exploring the ways in which the Internet is (and becomes) socially meaningful, allowing researchers to examine the Internet as both culture and cultural artifact” (Egner, 2019, p. 131). Although the subfield of digital ethnography is in its nascence, its newness allows for a flexibility and nimbleness that attends to the pace of change for digital worlds (Pink et al, 2016). Stated another way, the newness of digital ethnographic practice is a benefit in that it allows for researchers to approach the method in novel ways that adapt to the shifting nature of how online spaces are consistently (re)articulated by ­those who use them. Moreover, we anticipate trans p­ eople w ­ ill continue to (re)craft the Internet spaces in which they spend time between our writing this text and its publication. We do not state this to suggest our text w ­ ill already be out of date; instead, we view the book, and the data contained herein, as part of a trans archive. That is, this book is part of a broader constellation of sources that, taken together, act “si­mul­ta­neously as a resource, a productive narrative, a set of repre­sen­ta­tions, a history, a memorial, and a time capsule” (Halberstam, 2005, p. 23). We do not seek, nor do we claim, to produce a definitive text on the experience of being trans on the Internet or of how trans students use the Internet. Instead, we offer our data and analy­sis as part of a burgeoning discussion regarding trans ­people, educational contexts, online (re)pre­sen­ta­tion, community building, and the interconnections between and across ­these sites of techno-­ontological presence. In this sense, we envision this proj­ect as one of many components that make up what Fabian (2008) described as a virtual archive. As Fabian (2008) stated, “In many ways that are not quite clear to us, a decidedly modern technical development, the Internet-­connected personal computer, may invigorate our commitment to ethnography” (p. 4). While Fabian (2008) was articulating an argument for the digital warehousing of ethnographic data sets, thus providing trails for the readers of ethnographic texts to which one could return, review, and re-­present, we assert t­ here is overlap with our proj­ect. Essentially, although we have not put our data online, we view our text as yet another point of entry into and component of the virtual archive that re-­presents how transness circulates online and how its circulation mediates life experiences, chances, and realities in digital and material spaces for trans students. That is, our book is a further contour in the ongoing understanding of how the Internet has always already been transed, with specific attention paid to trans ­people and their (dis) connections to the educational spaces in which they engage.

12  •  Logging On

The Participants The participant pool for the Digital Me proj­ect contained twenty-­six trans participants (see t­able  1), all of whom ranged in age, gender, race, and other personally identified salient identities and w ­ ere all located in the United States. The national nature of the proj­ect allowed us as researchers to think across both geographic and online spatial locations. While this is not a requirement of rigorous ethnographic studies, we made this choice to think through how, if at all, engagement online shifted for ­people living in vari­ous regional locations. For example, as we ­were developing the study, we wondered ­whether participants from disparate geographic locations ended up in similar places online and what that may mean regardless of the answer. In looking at the participant pool, three unique facets surface. First, most of the participants ­were white (seventeen), and slightly more than a fourth (seven) w ­ ere p­ eople of color. Additionally, almost half (twelve) of the participants named having one or multiple disabilities. Third, while the number of participants who ­were (trans) ­women2 is slightly less than a quarter of the overall pool (five), eigh­teen named being genderqueer, genderfluid, agender, or nonbinary. Th ­ ese demographics allowed us as researchers to glean a rich data set that explored trans experiences online in conjunction with vari­ous other subject positions. Furthermore, t­ hese demographic characteristics deserve several impor­tant notes before moving forward with describing our data collection and analy­sis methods. First, we anticipated we may have a participant pool that was overrepresented by white p­ eople, despite our efforts to promote our work in ways that amplified participation from trans ­people of color. Some of this may have been in relation to how race circulated across the bodies and experiences of us as researchers (see the research positionality statements below for further exploration of our racialization and how it may have mediated the research pro­cess), and, as we discuss ­later in the book, it may also have to do with how the Internet is a racially segregated and balkanized space. Thus, while we attempted to reach a broader audience, we did not attend to promoting our proj­ect in spaces that may have been curated by and for p­ eople of color (e.g., Black Twitter; see study limitations for further discussion). That said, we still wanted to think about the effects of racialization and trans becoming online and so crafted our interview protocol in ways that invited our white participants to explore their (dis)connections with race, gender, and how they managed their online selves. ­A fter our interviews, we also made sure to attend to how race was shaping online discourse and movement through our digital participant observation. As the extant lit­er­a­ture on white ­people suggests (e.g., Ozias, 2017, In review), most of the white participants ­were unable

­Table 1

Digital Me Research Participants Pseudonym

Age

Gender identity

Race

Other salient identities

AB

20

Andie

22

Nonbinary // Masculine of center Masculine // Nonbinary

White/ Mestizo White

CO

23

White

Eddie

23

White

Erin Estelle Gabe Jamie Jonesy

21 33 21 18 19

White White Asian White White

N/A Pansexual, autistic N/A N/A N/A

Jordan JR

19 24

White Asian

Bisexual Chinese American, queer, butch, a­ dopted, disabled

Karen Kaspy

33 22

Genderqueer // Transmasc Trans // Nonbinary // Gender nonconforming // Transmasc (Male to) Female Trans ­woman Male (FTM) Female Transmasculine // Nonbinary Genderqueer Genderqueer // Transgressive // Expansive // Dimensionless Butch trans ­woman Agender // Genderfuck

Latinx/Chicanx, queer, first generation Disabled, in poverty, recovering from addiction Queer, living with anxiety and depression Queer

White White

Lab LE LP Mark Mavyn Ororo

18 18 20 23 18 29

R

22

N/A Borderline personality disorder, depression, anxiety, ADHD, bipolar 2 N/A N/A Bisexual, autistic Disabled African, disabled Indigenous, disabled, survivor Chinese, pansexual

Sam Sativa

20 22

S. H.

21

Nonbinary // Genderfluid // Agender

Spence

22

White

Theo

22

Nonbinary // Maverique // Unaligned nonbinary person Nonbinary // Still exploring

Xena

21

Agender // Gender alien

White

Nonbinary Female Male Trans man Nonbinary Two spirit // Nonbinary // Agender // Transfemme Gender nonconforming // Nonbinary Nonbinary Nonbinary // Questioning

White White White White Black Black Asian White South Asian White

White

Chronically ill Punjabi, Sikh, first generation, queer Ashkenazi Jew, disabled (mentally ill, chronic ill, physically disabled, and autistic) Queer, ace, able-­bodied Pansexual, polyamorous, living with m ­ ental illness, first-­generation student Fat, queer, nonbinary, and agnostic

14  •  Logging On

or unwilling to address how their whiteness mediated their gendered experiences online; however, as we discuss through the chapters that follow, we w ­ ere pleasantly surprised to have several white participants who ­were rather thoughtful about their whiteness, particularly as it acted in relation to their ability to curate their online life. Second, the relationship between gender, race, and sexuality (Nicolazzo, 2016a, 2017b), as well as gender, sexuality, and disability (Nicolazzo, 2016b, 2017b; Miller, 2017), has been explored in higher education studies, with Miller’s (2017) study standing out as exploring t­ hese connections solely within virtual space. However, at the time of writing this book, ­there has yet to be work focusing specifically on the entanglements of ­these subjectivities (a) specifically for trans students and (b) with virtual environments as the primary location ­under exploration. As is the case with most research in higher education studies, ­there is an almost exclusive focus and reliance on material spaces as the environment in which students come to understand themselves, ­others, and their social worlds. This book invites a stretching of such a bounded view, ­doing so through a participant pool with expansive understandings of who trans ­people can be(come). Fi­nally, while it behooves us as scholars to caution against furthering the false trap of a binary/nonbinary binary (Jourian and Nicolazzo, 2019), t­ here is something impor­tant about recognizing the place of (trans) ­women and nonbinary participants in our work. That is, the place of (trans) w ­ omen and nonbinary participants is impor­tant in its own right, not “in opposition to” that of trans men and “binary” trans ­people. Indeed, as Jourian and Nicolazzo (2019) wrote, the false dichotomy of binary/nonbinary trans ­people only serves to benefit and make more palatable the complexity of trans lives—to say nothing of the analytic power of trans as moving beyond embodiment (e.g., Green, 2014, 2016)—­for nontrans ­people. Speaking to the ways such a false binary harms trans communities, Jourian and Nicolazzo (2019, para. 2) stated: “Beyond conveying a lack of understanding of what trans is, does, and can do as a way of being and thinking, the supposed nonbinary/binary trans dichotomy relies on normative judgements about who/what is ‘trans enough’ and/or ‘­really trans.’ We ­don’t reach gender liberation by prioritizing cis understandings of trans and gender nonconforming identities and experiences. Rather than push for more fluid, dynamic, and intersectional notions of gender expansiveness, the ‘binary v. nonbinary trans ­people’ fallacy keeps our most simplified and palatable narratives front and center” (emphasis added). That said, the experiences of (trans) ­women and nonbinary trans p­ eople continue to be highly undertheorized and ostracized in higher education studies lit­er­a­ture. In relation to trans ­women, much of this is likely due to the social realities that attenuate their life chances, including increased rates of housing and job insecurity, as well as the intensity of poverty many trans w ­ omen face (James et al., 2016).

Introduction • 15

Further, the machinations of cultural sexism, transmisogyny, and transmisogynoir, and then how ­these realities exist at institutions of higher education (e.g., Nicolazzo, 2021a, 2021b, 2022; Nicolazzo, Marine, and Galarte, 2015), pose existential threats to trans ­women before and beyond their gaining admittance to college. Thus, the possibility of college is an ongoing impossibility for many trans ­women, and as such, their participation is something to which we invite readers to pay careful attention. If, as Hayward (2017) has stated, ­there is an ontological cultural press for trans w ­ omen to not exist, then it behooves us all—­authors and readers alike—to think about what it means when trans w ­ omen do exist, as well as to think about where, how, and in what ways trans w ­ omen’s existence continues, despite sociopolitical desires and claims to the contrary. Taken in total, the participants’ experiences allow us all—­researchers and readers alike—an opportunity to keep thinking about how gender moves, both across the body as well as in relation to o­ thers and the social world. That is, while trans ­people are often squarely planted in our genders (e.g., “she is a trans ­woman”), gender is always already relational in nature (Jaekel and Nicolazzo, 2017; Meadow, 2018) and thus should be understood as both how one understands their own self as well as how o­ thers (mis)understand them. Overall, the proj­ect participants invite readers to continually engage in critical explorations of not just what gender is but what gender does across spatial, temporal, and affective dimensions of life.

Research Questions and Study Design The research proj­ect we elucidate in this book sought to address the following research questions:

• How do transgender students make meaning of themselves / their digital identities? • How do transgender students make meaning of digital spaces in relationship to physical/nondigital spaces? • How do transgender students make meaning of digital selves in community with other transgender p­ eople? With nontransgender p­ eople?

To address ­these questions, we used a digital ethnographic study design that comprised two, sequential components of data collection. First, we held semi­ structured, sixty-­to ninety-­minute ethnographic interviews (Heyl, 2001; O’Reilly, 2005, 2009; Wolcott, 2008) with all participants. Described by Heyl (2001) “as a way of shedding light on the personal experiences, interpersonal dynamics and cultural meanings of participants in their social worlds” (p. 372), ethnographic interviews act as a compliment to the participant observation that

16  •  Logging On

is foundational to the research methodology. ­These interviews covered five broad topical areas: Participants’ introduction to the Internet, including how often they spend time online 2 The sites/locations participants spend time online, including how they found t­ hese spaces 3 Participants’ understandings of their own genders, including how they express their genders online (and how such expressions may be multiple or dif­fer­ent from their offline selves) 4 Participants’ experiences with finding and forming supportive community online 5 The complexities and (dis)connections of living on-­and offline lives 1

Following our ethnographic interviews, members of the research team spent time in ­those online spaces participants named as places they went to often. Due to the emerging nature of digital ethnography, t­ here is a distinct incoherence in approach and study design (Pink et al., 2016). Rather than being destabilizing, this lack of uniformity in approach offers ­those interested in digital ethnography flexibility to pursue data collection in ways that make the most sense for their proj­ect. As we w ­ ere concerned with how trans ­people w ­ ere using online spaces to craft senses of self and cultivate community, we felt it impor­ tant to exist online in the places our participants ­were, taking cues as to how ­people ­were engaging with each other. Consistent with ethnographic participant observation (Wolcott, 2008), we developed a set of analytic memos about our observations, which we paired with screen captures of online spaces that elucidated the notes we took. While we w ­ ere not sure w ­ hether we would use ­these screen captures beyond our own internal discussions as a research team—­ and, indeed, we had ongoing conversations and misgivings about ­doing so based on the perceived (non)public nature of ­these spaces—­they ­were an essential ele­ment of our participant observation, especially as they provided a rich platform to explore and theorize how gender discourses circulated online for trans ­people. We eventually de­cided to use several of ­these screen captures throughout this text, ensuring the ones we used did not have any identifying information for individuals, be they participants of the proj­ect or other trans Internet users.

Limitations/Boundaries As with ­every proj­ect, Digital Me had several bound­aries delimiting how readers can understand the data represented in this book. Of par­tic­u­lar note, our participant pool has a lack of trans p­ eople of color and trans w ­ omen. While ­there could be an argument made for the lower proportion of such populations

Introduction • 17

in higher education, thus their being represented in lower numbers through the participant pool, d­ oing so would belie our responsibility as researchers in recruiting potential participants. Notably, and as we discussed previously in this introduction, we could have done a better job sharing our call for participants in areas of the Internet where Black, Indigenous, APIDA, and Latinx trans ­people and trans ­women tend to gather. For example, finding ways to share our call through networks that interconnected with Black and Native Twitter or posting our call in chat forums led by trans ­women could have yielded a markedly dif­fer­ent participant pool. Specifically, our d­ oing so could have stemmed the overrepre­sen­ta­tion of white participants, as well as trans men and trans masculine participants. Creating the relationships that would have yielded ­these opportunities, too, could have helped us as researchers recognize and work through nuances related to whom we remain answerable through our work (Patel, 2015). In other words, continuing to invest in t­ hose trans communities we sought to explore the Internet alongside of could have been an impor­tant moment for us as researchers to think about how our research, analy­sis, and writing may have needed to shift ­were we to think about being answerable to t­ hose populations, and not the institutional structures through which we are enmeshed as academics (and benefit from in the writing of texts like this one). We remain steadfast in thinking through how, to whom, and in what ways answerability guides our work, and, following the line of inquiry Simpson (2014) opened, how we can do our work in ways that allow us to come home to our trans communities. Additionally, t­ here are complications that arise when d­ oing research about online spaces when all researchers are not highly fluent with such spaces. That is, given that qualitative researchers are the instrument through which their data are analyzed, ­there are limits of our abilities given our vari­ous levels of (not) knowing what to ask during interviews or how to make sense of the data once collected. As we discuss below, each of us as scholars, as well as each member of the research team that conducted interviews, had vari­ous (dis)connections to Internet cultures. Thus, the questions we knew to ask, the follow-up probes we thought—or did not think—to ask, and the ways we made sense of our online participant observation ­were filtered through ­these (dis)connections. Also, the speed at which Internet culture pivots and moves makes fluency even more difficult. As such, we ask that readers be generous with us as scholars and our vari­ous understandings of t­ hese data, as well as recognize that the pace of the Internet (which we discuss more in chapter 3) creates bound­aries around the data. Specifically, it ­will be impor­tant for readers to remember t­ hese data represent a time capsule of online engagement, with specific events, happenings, and spaces that (do not) appear throughout (e.g., Tumblr changing their user guidelines, TikTok not yet being a widely used platform). That said, we argue that ­these moments, however fleeting or “in the past” they may seem to

18  •  Logging On

be, speak to broader discourses of gender online, and we encourage readers to approach ­these data and our analy­sis with this broader perspective in mind. Fi­nally, we find it impor­tant to note we did not address privacy issues through our proj­ect, as we felt that ­doing so would have deviated markedly from the research questions we sought to answer. That said, we encourage fellow scholars to take this up in f­ uture research.

Introduction of Authors As is true with all qualitative research, the researchers are the instruments of the research itself (D-­L Stewart, 2010). For this reason, it is impor­tant to elucidate who we are and how we came to the work itself. Far from an indulgent practice, our discussions of who we are in relation to this work become an impor­tant lens through which readers can understand our own investments as the ­people who analyzed and developed the findings and implications from the research that follow. Moreover, being honest about ourselves as instruments of the following research can aid in recognizing the possibilities and limitations of the work itself, as well as what ­future work may need to be done that can complement and build out from the pre­sent text. In what follows, we introduce ourselves, with attention paid to what drew us to this work, and how we (do not) use online spaces to recognize our own trans lives.

Z I am slowly getting over the fact that I am now, in my forties, considered a “trans elder.” I start with this not to bemoan the aging pro­cess but as a marker of how I began interacting with online platforms, as well as the limitations I have in continuing to do so. For example, I can recall being in high school and getting dial-up Internet in my ­house for the first time. I remember opening the CD-­ROM drive on my desktop computer tower, dropping the AOL CD in the tray, and hearing the familiar sound—­that all ­people of my age range can likely replay in their memory—as my computer connected to the Internet. I also have palpable memories of entering chat rooms and trying on dif­fer­ent genders as I introduced myself and interacted with o­ thers. At the time, I was unaware of the unconscious work I was d­ oing or who I was seeking—­either in my own self or in the other ­people I was chatting with—­but ­there was something subtly transgressive about ­these early forays into my online spaces, much of which I am only now coming to think through in relation to my ongoing understanding of my relationship with gender. I did not think much of the Internet as I grew into early adulthood, including when I came into my own transness. Perhaps it was the quotidian nature of the Internet, or perhaps it was connected to my being a quasi-­Luddite—​ I admit I still love ­actual books over e-­books and become easily overwhelmed

Introduction • 19

with technology—­but I did not think online spaces had much to offer as I became more acquainted with myself as a trans girl. This all changed, however, when I was completing my dissertation. During this research, I mistakenly assumed that, like me, the participants with whom I was in community would find themselves in the pages of books. (The books most meaningful to me as I began to inhabit my transness w ­ ere Julia Serano’s [2007] Whipping Girl, Susan Stryker’s [2008] Trans History, and Mattilda’s [2006] Nobody Passes.) Instead, when I asked participants how they came to understand their own transness, they said they went online. One participant, Sylvia, told me she “went online, Googled ‘agender,’ and found Tumblr.” Kade told me he “­wouldn’t even know where to look for books” and so went online, and Jackson stated, “I exist primarily on the Internet, you know? That’s pretty much my hometown.” Clearly, I was out of my ele­ment. Through our ethnographic work, the participants and I came to understand the importance of what I termed virtual kinship networks, or ­those online places and methods through which they cultivated community, especially community with fellow trans ­people. As a result of this research, I began to poke around a bit more online, trying to find ways I may be able to use some of what I was learning to increase my own trans community, as well as to find ways to retreat and heal from the toxicity of a social sphere imbued with systemic trans oppression (Catalano and Griffin, 2016; Harris and Nicolazzo, 2017; Nicolazzo, 2016b, , 2017b, 2021a) and transmisogyny (Nicolazzo, 2019b; Serano, 2007). Admittedly, my own investments in online spaces w ­ ere, at best, still quite thin; however, I have become utterly fascinated at how trans ­people have taken hold of the Internet—­which was not necessarily created by us—­and continue to (re) fashion in ways that make it work for us. Be it YouTube, Instagram, Facebook groups, multiplayer gaming sites, or platforms like Discord—­which, despite multiple participants bringing it up, I still know woefully ­little about—­I am in awe of trans p­ eople who are (re)crafting spaces as they need and see fit. In this way, I come to this proj­ect as much as an audience member, and someone who is utterly transfixed with the twisting and reworking on online platforms by trans ­people, as I am a researcher exploring the efficacy and possibilities therein.

Alden I remember my first foray into the Internet as an experience of CD-­ROMs and connection noise. I went to the Internet to find what I could not in the books around me. In t­ hose early days, it was m ­ usic and lyr­ics I was looking to find. Not just any m ­ usic would do; it had to be queer m ­ usic or musicians, even though I ­wouldn’t have known to call them that at the time. Artists that my local m ­ usic store at the mall d­ idn’t (or w ­ ouldn’t) carry w ­ ere my almost singular focus. At the top of that list of artists was Ani Difranco, whose song “Not a Pretty Girl” struck a chord that I did not know existed ­until I heard it. It was only years

20  •  Logging On

l­ater, ­a fter recognizing my queer and transness, that I understood what the chord had been. When DiFranco sang, “I am not a pretty girl, that is not what I do,” it was the first time I heard someone reject the gendered expectations in a way that d­ idn’t seem to be reifying some other gendered expectations. It was simply “I am not that.” I d­ idn’t go to chat rooms in t­ hose days b­ ecause ­there was already (in my social world) a clear and per­sis­tent narrative of the “danger” of chat rooms. I was (and am) generally a rule follower, and so I avoided them. They w ­ ere prob­ably right; chat rooms might have been dangerous to the status quo, but likely not to me. My early days on the Internet w ­ ere almost entirely about m ­ usic: Limewire for the m ­ usic and Ask Jeeves, Lycos, and Google for the lyr­ics. However, college is where the Internet became a place for me, somewhere to go. It was a g­ iant, endless library. While I was not exploring gender so much in my early Internet days, this all changed dramatically once I recognized my queerness. When I could not find a comfortable space in my own queerness, I looked to the Internet for explanations, help, information—­anything that would help explain why coming out as a lesbian ­didn’t help me feel settled in myself. This took years. And although I looked for answers in “the real world” first, I still ­couldn’t fathom the realness of transness (my own or ­others) b­ ecause it d­ idn’t exist IRL around me. Eventually, I worked through what I recognize now as my fear of finding ­those answers, and in so d­ oing, I was continually pulled back to the Internet. I found blogs full of stories, advice, p­ eople, connections, videos, and more m ­ usic, all of which put gender on my screen in new ways and in an incredible variety. I read all I could find about the physical pro­cess of medical transition, watched videos of trans masculine folks narrating their own experiences, and was shocked and unsurprised at how much of myself I saw on the screen. I started following trans bloggers, reading about trans history, and started to understand that I was part of a group when I felt the most isolated. Even though I mostly was a “lurker” (pre­sent but not participating), the Internet offered me digital kinship (Nicolazzo, 2017b) even though I w ­ ouldn’t have known to call it that. It made me feel real rather than alone in some incredibly outlandish and ridicu­ lous sense of myself that could not possibly exist. It made my own and other ­peoples’ transness become real to me. Intense isolation, what I felt in the real world, did not exist online. The opposite of isolation, how I experienced sorting out more of my own gender among trans folk online, felt like coming home to a ­house full of trans folk. In ­every (chat) room, a new group or topic or variety of transness was ­there for me to join in, even if it was just to be in the com­pany of ­people like me, as well as ­those trans ­people who understood their genders in very dif­f er­ent ways from me. The Internet prob­ably saved me and prob­ably more than once, b­ ecause the kind of intense isolation I had experienced “in real life” can (and did) lead to despair.

Introduction • 21

And despair can be dangerous for trans ­people. Trans spaces and ­people on the Internet acknowledged the despair (frequently a shared experience) but made it easier to see past it into something e­ lse; through the Internet, I began to see prismatic proliferations of trans possibility and positivity.

Sy I like to tell ­people I transitioned from analog to being of the Internet. I was in seventh grade when my parents let me have my own computer, and I quickly fell into all the Internet’s cracks and crevasses. I was an avid gamer and spent much of my time discovering and building new worlds online. In hindsight, as a young person of color who never felt like they belonged in any space (in real life), the Internet became the place where I not only belonged, but I got to be in control of what happened. I could make friends not based on what I wore or how I performed gender but in how much of a team player I was or how impressive I built my city. As I started to come into myself as queer (and ­later as trans), the Internet felt like a safe place for me to ask all my questions. Ironically, it was not u­ ntil I met someone who was trans that I even considered the Internet as a place to go. Someone outted him to me (I would ­later find out this practice was wrong), and while I knew better than to ask him outright, I was curious as to how transition could happen. Even more so, I wondered how he knew he wanted to transition, so I joined message boards and chat rooms and followed blogs written by p­ eople who described their pro­cess of social and medical transition. I watched YouTube videos of ­people talking about their experiences of being, ­doing, and living trans/gender lives in the public sphere. L ­ ater, I would document my own social and medical transition online for other folks to find, thus providing the same community to o­ thers I had found for myself. The Internet shifted from being a place where I existed in a solo universe to a place where I had community. As trans ­people have come more and more into the public sphere, I am left wondering how it is we find refuge from a world that continues to be hostile. For me and so many other trans p­ eople, I know the Internet is a space that allows us to feel, to laugh, to find love. It allows us to try on dif­f er­ent pronouns and to experiment with dif­fer­ent lipsticks. Our use of the Internet has shifted over the years, but its importance to trans communities has remained constant. Our Shared Positionality How we came to write this book together is a pro­cess well known to many trans ­people; we are engaging in the pro­cess of queer world making (Blockett, 2017), or what Gossett and Huxtable (2017) referred to as underworlding. With the ongoing attenuation of trans life, particularly for trans ­people of color, and most notably in the United States for Black trans w ­ omen (Jones, 2020), Gossett and

22  •  Logging On

Huxtable gave voice to the way trans p­ eople have always been active in cultivating worlds under­neath the physical plane. In essence, underworlding notes how we as trans ­people desire more not only from gender but also from the world. Indeed, our desires continually lead us to find pathways to imagine elsewheres beyond the vio­lence of racialized transphobia, neoliberalism, fetishization, and liberal humanist ideologies that aid in our destruction. The Internet is one such place in which trans ­people have been active in underworlding, and, in many re­spects, our coauthorship is a form of underworlding for the three of us. That is, this book is both an analy­sis and product of underworlding in that we seek to explore the possibilities of desiring elsewheres through the lens of gender, while also engaging in the practice ourselves. This, then, saturates this book with intimacy, as readers not only get a glimpse at how participants are making their own worlds but are also treated to how our desires for increased livability as three trans authors—­with vari­ous racialized, gendered, religious/ethnic, and disabled subjectivities, as well as multiple positionalities across the acad­emy—­continue to unfold and in many ways overlap with t­ hose of the participants who informed our work.

Format for the Book This book is broken up into three parts: “Logging On,” “Trans(form)ing Online,” and “Prismatic Possibilities.” In part I, “Logging On,” we set the stage for what follows, both in terms of the extant lit­er­a­ture germane to how trans ­people have carved spaces in higher education and online contexts as well as the theoretical under­pinnings for the book. Chapter 1 serves as a theoretical approach to trans searchings for selves online. Thinking trans as both embodied and analytic phenomena, this chapter uses Bitmoji, an online avatar creation platform, to push against the edges of the h ­ uman as singular or existing only “in real life.” The chapter invites readers to question what connotes what is “real,” for whom the “real” comes into view, and how what is deemed “real” is quite immaterial (in all senses of the word) for envisioning trans ­futures. In part II, “Trans(form)ing Online,” we elucidate our proj­ect’s findings. In ­doing so, we discuss how trans students are using online space as a radical site of potential and bodily autonomy. Not only are they celebrating the bodies and lives they have, but they are thinking beyond the bodies they currently have, as well as thinking of trans beyond the body itself. In this sense, the Internet is not just a space but a tool for world making through constructing the self as prismatic, as curatable, and, in some ways, as what we are calling strategically vis­i­ble. In this sense, the Internet acts as both a pro­cess and site(s) for imagining beyond the current sociopo­liti­cal conditions of trans life (e.g., as always in peril), as well as developing the communities needed to practice resilience (Nicolazzo, 2016b, 2017b).

Introduction • 23

In developing our findings, we identified six dif­fer­ent ways participants are using the Internet, which we have defined as “refractions,” and which we use as the foundations for each of the following six chapters in this section of the book. In ­doing so, we use the notion of prisms as a grounding meta­phor for this text. Prisms refract light into separate wavelengths, producing the rainbows that have become a recognizable symbol of queer life. While the colors of light through a prism look separate, they all cohere, blend, and are contained in, through, and on top of each other. While each refraction of light may look separate, they are each of each other at the very same time they have distinct wavelengths. Similarly, our chapters (each its own refraction with its own distinct wavelength) should be read as separate yet always already folding in on each of the other chapters. In d­ oing so, the chapters provide profuse possibilities for understanding a seemingly singular cultural happening: trans life online. To stretch the meta­phor a bit further, the six refractions we explore through this text signal prismatic possibilities for trans life online. While we attempted to provide structure for readers in separating each refraction into chapters, t­ here are clear interchapter references throughout. This, for us as authors, shows the complex nature of the experiences we explored with participants, providing a more representative vision of trans life online. We also hope reading each refraction as distinct yet overlapping ­will help readers recognize the elsewheres and other­wises ­toward which our analy­sis moves (and we take up in part III of the text). In chapter 2, we explore the spatial ele­ments of trans engagement online. Specifically, we discuss the Internet as a place where trans ­people go to learn about who they are and who they can become. We also discuss how the Internet mirrors the ways space is segmented, balkanized, and foreclosed offline. For example, as we discuss in this chapter, trans participants of color talked about vari­ous Internet spaces being white, which mirrors how race operates to cordon space “in real life.” In this sense, then, the Internet is not the completely free/liberatory space one may romanticize it to be, just as it is not the wholly despicable place some may claim, e­ ither. Of further interest is how our ethnographic data opened space for us to think about not just the whiteness of online spaces but the whiteness of the algorithms that drive ­people to ­those spaces (e.g., YouTube algorithms that attempt to increase watch time). That said, what is most impor­tant to note for this chapter is how trans participants are viewing the Internet as a space in which they exist and develop a life. In chapter 3, we discuss the temporal nature of trans engagements online. In so d­ oing, we note how the Internet has an enduring youth in that the Internet is where young p­ eople come to figure ­things out and to learn about self and communities. Through both interviews and ethnographic data collection, we found participants ­were ­going online quite early and, as a result, coming to senses of their trans selves quite young. ­There are also some age-­related patterns in terms of par­tic­u­lar online platforms (e.g., not as many trans participants ­were

24  •  Logging On

using Facebook, and if they w ­ ere, they ­were spending time in Facebook groups, whereas almost all participants talked about Tumblr or YouTube as early entry points for exploring gender online). Additionally, participants’ narratives surfaced how the Internet acts as an archive, which proved to be both exciting and troubling (e.g., transition videos on YouTube, post histories on Tumblr, Instagram and Facebook feeds). For example, ­there w ­ ere times when participants discussed having multiple accounts on a given platform b­ ecause some p­ eople (e.g., ­family) kept posting/commenting/seeing them in their “old selves,” whereas ­things like transition video archives on YouTube channels could give a sense of change/growth into one’s trans self over time. Also, as our ethnographic data demonstrate, ­there is a certain speed to the Internet that induced participants to stay current with their lives online, with the idea of being current transforming into a sort of online currency for community building. In chapter 4, “The Internet as Affective,” we explore the ways participants learned / tried on ­things online they (hoped to) moved offline, such as confidence, their ability to speak up, using their proper pronouns, using their proper names, and adopting senses of style. For participants, the Internet was both a location where gender feeling occurred, as well as the producer of such gender feelings. That is, the participants did not just feel on the Internet, but feeling accrued between their unfolding gendered senses of selves and the machines through which they engaged online. Participants’ engagement online, and their retelling of their ongoing engagement, denoted affective dimensionality, or the sensorium that was created between/among participants and their experiences in their online worlds. The re/de/fashioning of the body online was another particularly salient contour from this research, and in chapter 5, we elucidate how participants w ­ ere making sartorial choices due to their online engagement. Such choices resonate with and extend on previous studies, in that participants ­were finding ways of being and d­ oing trans online and then trying them out for themselves in both digital (e.g., creating avatars) and analog (e.g., changing dress or hair styles) ways. Additionally, how one can imagine looking is also a function of who one sees. The p­ eople who participants w ­ ere finding as possibility models for their sartorial becoming ­were often trans themselves but ­were not the trans icons widely known through broader publics. This perhaps signals a demo­cratizing aspect of the Internet or at least a broadening of who has an ability to generate a following or how p­ eople can build meaningful communities and envision their sartorial selves beyond fandom, idolatry, and fetishism. Of par­tic­u­lar note in this chapter, we also elucidate some unique differences related to how participants who ­were trans ­women and girls understood the re/de/fashioning of their trans selves. In chapter 6, we discuss the communal aspects of the participants’ lives online. Simply put, the data detail how the Internet exists to bring disparate

Introduction • 25

p­ eople who may feel isolated “in real life” together. Not only did multiple participants describe the Internet as “home,” but they also discussed not being alone when they are online. Throughout the ethnographic and interview data, we found the vari­ous ways trans p­ eople used the Internet to seek, build, and maintain community. Be it through Facebook groups, consistently returning to certain YouTube vloggers, or following p­ eople on Instagram, thereby creating a deep connection despite perhaps never meeting t­ hese ­people “in real life,” participants created virtual kinship networks (Nicolazzo, 2016b, 2017b). Thus, ­there was a way the Internet acted as a place for trans ­people to gather and convene that defied or other­wise extended their material realities. In the last chapter of this part, we take on the thorny topic of visibility as it relates to trans p­ eople’s engagement with online platforms. Specifically, we uncover how t­ here ­were indeed ways that being online made one more vis­i­ble; however, participants demonstrated ways to be highly invis­i­ble online. In essence, participants described how they used online spaces to engage in what we refer to a selective visibility, detailing the specific decisions they made regarding how, when, where, or if to share vari­ous iterations of selves that then they could leverage as foils for pre­sen­ta­tions of themselves in dif­fer­ent, safer spaces online. For example, we discuss how participants spoke often about their creating multiple accounts on the same online platform, allowing them to be selectively vis­i­ble to certain groups of p­ eople, such as f­amily or older friends. In this sense, participants used the Internet to hide in plain sight and to create multiple worlds in which they could explore senses of selves and build the communities they wanted and needed. In the final part of the book, “Prismatic Possibilities,” we discuss implications for researchers and f­ uture scholarship in vari­ous fields (e.g., trans/gender studies, higher education studies, disability studies). In chapter 8, we explore what the data show about the limitations of identity and identity development as stable, traceable, and solely happening within material—or “in real life,” to parrot Internet nomenclature—­realms. The notions of dis/embodiment we discuss throughout the book also provide a robust platform from which to address what work bodies can(not) do. In other words, thinking of gender as a discourse, in addition to how gender is enacted through bodies, allows for liberatory epistemological and methodological possibilities. As a result, the implications we derive from our work not only bridge multiple fields of study but also serve to extend the epistemological (Nicolazzo, 2017a) and methodological (Henderson and Nicolazzo, 2019) work being done regarding trans/gender p­ eople and topics.

Conclusion Regardless of one’s feelings about the ­matter, the way one understands life continues to be increasingly tethered to the Internet. Even the way many of us live

26  •  Logging On

“in real life” requires us to at least make conscious choices about how, if, when, and to what extent we engage with the possibilities of our online selves. For example, while some may choose not to use social media, it is an active choice one must attend to rather than its being an impossibility. How we come to understand the cultural significance of the Internet and how it has become a space marked by its pliability for marginalized populations seeking ways to exist beyond the consistent threat that is social life cannot be understated. In a sociocultural milieu marked by the ongoing impossibility of life for vari­ous dispossessed populations, the Internet allows an opportunity for ­doing the work of being, thinking, and seeking elsewheres and other­wises. As we demonstrate through our analy­sis, trans online life may also signal how one’s perceptions and engagements with material spaces (e.g., college campuses) might need to shift to embrace and reflect the possibilities of trans life online. The existence of trans p­ eople online is not a new phenomenon; nor is the way trans p­ eople have (re)crafted the Internet to move beyond the demands imposed on us by our physical environments. That said, what is a newer phenomenon, especially in higher education studies, is a wider understanding of how trans engagement online can—­and, as we argue, must—be attended to in order to increase for whom, how, and in what ways our existence, and t­ hose of other dispossessed populations, can be(come) all the more pos­si­ble amid the aforementioned ongoing social impossibilities. Log on with us; we have already been ­here, ­doing our t­ hing on the Internet.

1

Searching for Ourselves Online We want to want. We desire to desire. Maybe the internet raised us.

What does it mean to be(come) a trans w ­ oman in a digital age?1 Who is she, and how does one search for her in a world rife with proclamations that trans ­women should not exist? Hailing the words of the Black trans actress and activist Laverne Cox, Hayward (2017) wrote, “Trans ­women are d­ ying ­because they ­don’t exist—­for black trans ­women, this equation reveals a matrix of ‘gratuitous vio­lence’ forged in relation to ‘­don’t exist’ ” (p. 192). That is, nonexistence is made a social mandate: despite their literal existence, trans ­women, and particularly trans ­women of color, are caught in a necropo­liti­cal web in which they come into social being through/as a condition of their assumed and desired annihilation and death. The public then counts how many have died this year, which is always the bloodiest year on rec­ord for trans w ­ omen. Names are attached to hashtags, and our collective hearts break while our ­sisters are misgendered, misnamed, and further erased, even in death. So, we ask again, what does it mean to be(come) a trans ­woman in a digital age? We start with the death of our s­ isters, and primarily our s­ isters of color, not to further tropes of the tragic trans ­woman (Serano, 2007) or to suggest a simplistic success/failure binary. We start ­here ­because we must, b­ ecause in a field of education marked by an overt niceness that belies the ongoing presence of white supremacy and trans oppression (Ahmed, 2012; Ladson-­Billings, 1998; 27

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Nicolazzo, 2017b; Patton, 2016), we must point out how our trans becoming, especially for ­those among us who are trans ­women of color, is not all that easy. ­Because even in a college environment that is continually marked as a time of self-­exploration—so much so that this has become an often-­lauded trope in itself—­some of us are told, tacitly and other­wise, that to explore is to not exist. We start h ­ ere b­ ecause educators need to reckon with the ways they have continued to cut trans ­women and trans w ­ omen of color out of the frame (Nicolazzo, 2022). In a world in which trans w ­ omen are deemed nonhuman, where Blackness is made synonymous with being animalistic, where is the space to find and hold onto who we can be(come)? In a world dedicated to binaries—­gay/straight, cis/trans, accepted/denied, in/out—­who is responsible for changing the structures that deny humanity, worth, and existence to t­ hose most on the margins? And what role must educators play in this social transformation? We start with the death of our ­sisters ­because calling them back to existence, having them on ­these pages with us, is a refusal of the ongoing claims of our nonhumanity. By calling them (back) into existence h ­ ere—­even through the binary code of a computer screen—we can begin to search for our selves and our places among our communities.

Theorizing Trans Want Before exploring the above questions, we ­ought to talk about purpose and form. While this chapter was originally written and published by one of us (Z), we use it ­here as a theoretical guide to the book. Specifically, we seek to confront the following questions within this chapter: What is the “real”? How is the “real” uncomfortably sutured to normative/dominant/nontrans projections? And how might one begin to understand trans life online as symbolizing the potential to re­create the “real” from a mirage into an oasis, a source of life where some deemed it previously impossible? ­These questions not only expose core contestations over the false binary between existence online / “in real life,” but they also invite the sort of existential seeking that drove the creation of this entire proj­ect itself. ­These questions also belie a further supposition we make throughout the text: trans life online is a door through which we move to experience our selves due to the impossible conditions of material life. As mentioned above, each year is regularly recognized as the “most violent” or “bloodiest” for trans ­people, as if our becoming legible requires the ever-­increasing piling up of dead Black trans ­women. To be clear, we do not suggest honoring our dead is unimportant. Instead, we suggest the nontrans illogics that undergird the ongoing vio­lence, erasure, and illegibility of our lives as trans ­people, cohering as they do through the rubric of transmisogynoir and transmisogyny, are incapable of capturing the profuse possibilities of trans life. In other words, nontrans illogics suppose

Searching for Ourselves Online • 29

we as trans p­ eople become real only in death, and specifically through the death of Black trans w ­ omen. H ­ ere, the illogic suggests, the recognition becomes the real­ity: media coverage of trans death presupposes (and demands) the impossibility of trans life. Trans life, then, was over before it began. With this backdrop, we use this chapter to elucidate a trans theory of want and desire that seeks to unsettle the nontrans imaginary of the “real.” Indeed, the notion of the real, as understood through the knife of nontrans illogics, has severed possibilities, has literally cut our lives short. Instead of believing in the false promise that we could somehow leave and “start over,” we use this chapter to signal a theoretical intervention by which we can undermine ­those nontrans illogics that demand our attenuated existence(s). Put another way, we use this chapter as an intervention in beginning to trace a theory of trans want that envisions our livability and the myriad ways we seek and desire life. And while we do this in front of you as readers—­indeed, we are using this chapter as a base from which we ground our exploring the possibilities of trans life online—­the pro­cess of our searching is for us. Our searching, then, is both a pro­cess and a product, with the former being primary and ours, and the latter being secondary and, in some re­spects, albeit quite tentatively, “yours.” However—­and this is impor­tant—­it is only “yours” ­because we are allowing it to be. Again, we call on the work of Hayward (2008) as she wrote, “From the first, a transsexual w ­ oman embodiment does not necessarily foreground a wish to ‘look like’ or ‘look more like a ­woman’ (i.e. passing)—­though for some transwomen this may indeed be a wish (fulfilled or not). The point of view of the looker (­those who might ‘read’ her) is not the most impor­tant feature of trans-­ subjectivity—­the trans-­woman wishes to be of her body, to ‘speak’ from her body” (p. 72). That is, although Z slides between the false binary of public/private through her searching, she does so as a way to be “of her body, to ‘speak’ from her body.”

Autoethnography as Method Using the meta­phor of a camera lens, Chang (2008) described how autoethnography allows for the researcher to zoom in on personal experiences as a way of making meaning of broader cultural discourses, and vice versa. By moving back and forth between self and culture, autoethnography allows for deeper understandings not only of the cultural milieu but of who we are as individuals and how we may interact with each other across spaces and times. Situating the practice of autoethnography alongside trans selves, Hayward (2010) used the meta­phor of neighborhoods in her autoethnographic explorations of transsexuality, pointing out that our bodies are not just of our own making but are un/ re/done by our spatial locations. As she wrote, “If we set aside debates (without losing focus on their po­liti­cal import) about what sex/gender transsexuals have

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been or become, we might begin to recognize transsexuality as about more than gender/sex, conceivably about the profusive potential of bodily change, the ways bodies intensify (and are intensified by) habitats, environments, neighborhoods” (p. 227, emphasis in original). H ­ ere, autoethnography not only provides a lens through which to zoom out/in between culture and self but also marks an essential tethering of the two, signaling how one both produces and is produced by habitats, environments, and neighborhoods. Thus, too, autoethnography as method extends the self-­exploration, confession, and revelation of the memoir genre trans ­people have used to discuss our trans identities (e.g., Grace, 2016) via the cultural investigation of ethnography. Through Z’s own searching for her that follows in this chapter, her feminine gendered selves, she exposes the coded meanings of gendered ­futures that bleed across virtual and physical domains. Indeed, the primordial stuff of the digital world, binary code, the ones and zeros that serve as building blocks for our digital selves, are laced with gendered meanings. Described as transreality by the trans scholar and artist micha cárdenas (2016), the exploration of gendered futurities through digital spaces “is a ‘post-­post-­modern’ medium to explore the ‘mysteries and complexities of the flesh, the poetry of the flesh’ ” (Juliano, 2010, p. 25). The current autoethnographic investigation, then, is a meditation on how Z’s unfolding awareness of the mysteries and complexities of her own trans flesh, addressed through virtual platforms, can pry open f­ uture possibilities for trans life across multiple planes of real­ity. In writing this chapter, Z created an image of herself on the avatar creation platform Bitmoji. Once she did this, she de­cided upon several Bitmoji images about which to journal, choosing images that induced reflections on three aspects of her gender that her avatar—­which she refers to as her—­confronted Z with: questions of naming identity, exploring the monstrosity of gender, and the affective dimensions of (searching for) gender. Z’s journaling pro­cess allowed her to wander across personal and academic realms, as well as across time (i.e., her reflections discuss past and current experiences, as well as f­ uture possibilities). Between journaling about each of the three avatar images Z selected, she then connected t­ hese personal reflections with broader cultural discourses. Replicating Chang’s (2008) commentary about autoethnography as a way to zoom in and out between self and culture, she went back and forth between her own personal reflections and cultural explorations of gender. To honor the power of autoethnography, she also attempted to write in ­those places that scared her (Chödrön, 2001). That is, she attempted to not write a kind, easy, or polite narrative but took seriously Waheed’s (2013) maxim: “The ­thing you are most afraid to write, write that” (p. 233). She also shared her work with multiple ­people with whom she is in close relationship—­including Alden and Sy as coauthors—as a way to ensure she was being as honest as pos­si­ble with her

Searching for Ourselves Online • 31

analy­sis, thereby increasing the face validity (Lather, 1991) of her autoethnographic explorations.

In Search of Her Journal Entry #1: But Who Is She? ­Here she is. I am. We are? It’s strange to stare at yourself on a screen, especially as I think she is a much better repre­sen­ta­tion of me than many photo­graphs. But that said, I ­don’t ­really know what to call her. Does she have a name? Is she a trans ­woman? A trans girl? A trans femme? Does it even m ­ atter at this—or any—­point? And are we the same person? Or two dif­fer­ent ­people? Are t­ here moments where we converge and ­others where we are on our own? The more I look at her, the less I feel like I know about us both, and the more I feel the sedimented history of who I am stripped away. Looking at/for her has me thinking about pos­si­ble ­futures for her/me/us. Who may she/I/we be tomorrow? Next week? What possibilities exist? My mind wanders to Dean Spade’s (2002) statement: “So a part of this fashioning ­we’re ­doing needs to be about diversifying the set of aesthetic practices w ­ e’re open to seeing, and promoting a possibility of us all looking very very dif­fer­ent from one another while we fight together for a new world. I want to be disturbed by what ­you’re wearing, I want to be shocked and undone and delighted by what ­you’re d­ oing and how y­ ou’re living. And I d­ on’t want anyone to be afraid to put on their look, their body, their clothes anymore” (p. 15). Names cease to ­matter with her, in some senses. I mean, I get they are impor­tant, and I want to name and be named as I am. . . . ​But what if I ­don’t know how I want to be named? And what about the compulsion to name and be named may occlude or overshadow the “possibility of us all looking very very dif­fer­ent from one another,” from disturbing, shocking, undoing, and delighting ourselves and ­others by what we are all ­doing and wearing? Maybe my concern and fear and worry about naming is itself a reification of the binary; I am this, not that. But how I name my gender need not stay the same. Or perhaps it ­will . . . ​but it could shift and likely ­will as a result of the ongoing, negotiated relational nature of gender, mediated by the interactions I have with other ­people and the surrounding worlds in which we live (Meadow, 2018). Looking at her, t­ here with her cool pose as she leans against the margins, shows me a vision of possibility . . . ​or possibilities, r­ eally. If I follow her gaze, I think we can imagine them together. In the above journaling exercise, I come face-­to-­face (or face-­to-­screen?) with her. As with other avatar creation platforms, she is a self-­curated and fashioned version of me. She exists in multiplicity, representing who I may have always been, who I may currently be, and who I could possibly become. And when I look at her, when I ­really begin to explore who she/I is/am through my careful

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curation and ongoing attention to fashioning her/my self,2 I begin to realize I ­don’t even know how to name her/my self . . . ​or even if that is an impor­tant task. She is a mirror of my desires, a virtual manifestation of my sublimated dreams of selves. ­Going back to Spade’s (2002) writing, she disturbs, shocks, undoes, and delights me by what she is ­doing and how she is living. She is not afraid to put on her look, her body, and her clothes anymore. As a result, she is a reminder that perhaps, instead of thinking about how to name her/my selves—an internal/individualistic process—­she/I/we may do well to think more about how the gendering pro­cess operates as a discourse that mediates how we can even come to know ourselves. I am not suggesting ­here that names are unimportant or that they do not carry a specific weight. I am also not suggesting that it “­doesn’t ­matter” if I am a trans ­woman or trans femme. Instead, what I am saying is that the pro­cess by which she/I/we search for selfhood is itself a technology of the gendering pro­ cess, of the way that gender discourses mediate the choices we had / have / may have available to us at any given time. In this sense, what becomes impor­tant is not just who we ourselves are but how we come to know ourselves. That is, we do not just have genders, but genders are foreclosed, proliferated, and ­imagined in vari­ous permutations due to our cultural milieu. And, as my previous journaling elucidates, my virtual explorations unlock profuse possibilities for gendered selfhoods that previously felt off limits to me.

Journal Entry #2: Monstrous Bodies She is a monster. She destroys structures, stomps out antiquated and l­ imited modes of existence, and is the embodiment of futurity. Like other monsters who defy humancentric notions of gender by their simply being monsters, she gestures to a new terrain, one in which gender can mean more, where she/I/we can fall into our desires and where she/I/we are the destroyers, not the destroyed. What seems beautiful about her monstrosity, too, is that she wears it so dang well. She is not ashamed of being deviant, of the mess she makes of gender. Much to the contrary, she revels in it. She is intentionally making a mess and moving through the rubble. She ­will not clean up ­after herself ­because what is ­there r­ eally to clean up? Modernity? Racialized capitalism? Settler colonialism? ­These systems ­were never built with us in mind and are traps into which our life chances are increasingly surveilled, restricted, codified, and made abject (Gossett, Stanley, and Burton, 2017; Spade, 2015). In fact, ­these systems mark her/me/us as weapons set to destroy the state and, therefore, targets that must be destroyed, eradicated, wiped out, especially t­hose of us who are deemed nonhuman through the vio­lence of white supremacy (Puar, 2005, 2007; Beauchamp, 2013, 2019). When I see her knocking over a skyscraper, I imagine it to be a building emblazoned with a health insurance name across the top, maybe on one of the sides that is hidden from view. Maybe it is a governmental building, one that holds

Searching for Ourselves Online • 33

administrative rec­ords that categorize her/me/us as p­ eople who we are not, and therefore, which negatively influences the livability of our lives.3 In some ways, the exact type of building it is does not m ­ atter; it is metonymic of the barriers of everyday life and the choices we must make simply by waking up and living public lives. Knowing this, she has de­cided to not even seek admittance, to find a seat at one of the vari­ous t­ ables in any of the assorted “room[s] where it happens” (Manuel, 2015), ­because what­ever is happening is closely associated with the furthering of trans necropolitics. In ­those rooms, we do not exist and are again (and again) called on to not do so. Their panic about our desiring more, of wanting more from gender, is palpable, and so they bang on the ­table and kick their feet and find ways to administratively erase us—­a real­ity we know cannot actually happen (Spade, 2018) and yet has “crushingly real consequences” for the livability of our lives (Patel, 2015, para. 9). And through this all, she knows the score. She cares not to be in the room where our demise is planned. Instead, she delights in the destruction of ­these spaces, crunching glass, steel, and limiting ideologies u­ nder her monstrous claws. She is a monster. And maybe so am I. And maybe so are we all. The meta­phor of trans-­as-­monster is not a new one for scholars writing in transgender studies, especially as it relates to reclaiming our monstrosity as a form of gender agency (Jaekel and Nicolazzo, 2017; Malatino, 2019; Stryker, 1994). Deemed monstrous by o­ thers, our bodies and ways of being in the world are an affront not only to other p­ eople, as countless trans personal narratives and memoirs expose, but also to the very socie­ties in which we live. Said another way, we create institutional havoc through our being deemed impossible ­people and composing an impossible population (Marine, 2017b; Nicolazzo, 2020; Spade, 2015). Moreover, the bodies of trans ­people of color have been deemed weapons, bringing to the fore notions of gender transgression as a form of terrorism (Puar, 2005, 2007) in need of hypersurveillance and containment (Beauchamp, 2013, 2019). The institutional response to our gendered and raced monstrosity, then, is one of violent erasure and containment. Our monstrosity is reflected back to us and the broader public as a detriment, as something about which to fear and blot out. ­These cultural discourses seep into our skin and frame our existence. Again, we hear the (sometimes not so quiet) maxim: d­ on’t exist (Hayward, 2017). But what is the counternarrative to our monstrosity? What happens when we claim our positions as monsters set to destroy that which is trying so very hard to destroy us? How can we think about our transgression as a form of destroying the modernist trappings of racialized capitalism and playing in the rubble? What would it mean to delight in the destruction of t­ hese metonyms of violent sociocultural ideologies congealed over time? How can we pause and resist the urge to build back up (again) and just desire the latent possibility that comes with dissolution? For if ­there is nothing ­there, then anything could grow

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in its place . . . ​or not. In other words, perhaps higher education could use a ­little more destruction. Perhaps our monstrosity could help batter, bash, and annihilate the ways gender is baked into our buildings, systems, and ways of operating, laying the scene for new possibilities . . . ​or just allowing for ­there to be no mention of gender where it need not be. Educational institutions are prominent beacons of modernity. Despite the ongoing creation of queer and transgender theory occurring in ­these spaces, ­these theories have yet to radically alter the institutions from which they emanate (Renn, 2010). Moreover, the programs, initiatives, offices, funding and staffing models, and how faculty and educational administrators go about their work largely used throughout education are replications of this modernity. Hearkening back to Tuchman’s (2009) discussion of audit culture and Magolda’s (2016) articulation of corporate managerialism, the boundary lines are clear, and the stakes are high; cultural reproduction as an outgrowth of neoliberal ideologies continues to serve as a form of containment where marooned populations, modes of being, and ways of thinking are routinely kept out of the frame of higher education. In response to the trap of neoliberalism, D-­L Stewart (2017) advocated resisting the urge to pull up a seat to the proverbial t­ able. In response to the desire to “be in the room where it happens” (Manuel, 2015), he suggested educators ask, “Who is trying to get in the room but ­can’t? Whose presence in the room is ­under constant threat of erasure” (D-­L Stewart, 2017, para. 18)? I extend this thinking by suggesting that as gender monsters, perhaps we destroy the rooms and delight in the rubble. I won­der out loud what it may mean to start over, to tear down that which we have built, b­ ecause it continues to enact forms of erasure, threat, and vio­lence that are nothing but a clear and vis­i­ble threat to multiple marginalized populations, including trans ­people. I am not advocating literally destroying buildings; instead, I am advocating a strong rebuke of t­ hose ways of being, programming, researching, and organ­izing our institutional lives that reify gender binary discourses (Nicolazzo, 2017b). In the rubble, then, is where we can dream and imagine differently; where we can create that which has yet to be, that which I have even yet to imagine as an educator, theorist, and trans girl. It is in this rubble where best practices are cast aside in ­favor of localized and historically rooted responses to the catastrophe of socially imposed, colonial constructions of gender. What can we do together to envision ­these possibilities together rather than wait for someone to tell us what to do? This is what I am learning from her. This is what she is teaching me. This is how she and I are inextricably linked across the material and virtual worlds we inhabit—­both monsters and both set on embracing our destructive appetites as best we can.

Searching for Ourselves Online • 35

Journal Entry #3: Feeling through My Transness Searching for her means digging through my past. Before I met her, I kept looking other places for . . . ​someone. I ­didn’t have the language then of capaciousness and capacity, of the multitudes gender could hold. I remember times a­ fter I would get out of the bath or shower as a youth when I would pull my hair back away from my forehead—­I had that ubiquitous bowl cut, and my hair was stick straight—­ lean in over the vanity, and stare at my blue eyes in the mirror. I remember staying like that for minutes that seemed like hours and wondering, “Was I meant to be a girl?” I was searching for her even before I knew she could be a possibility for me/us. Thinking back to ­these private bathroom moments makes me think about Laura Jane Grace’s (2016) memoir, in which she wrote, “When I grew bored, I would lock myself in the bathroom and try on my m ­ other’s dresses that w ­ ere in the hamper. I’ d stand t­ here as long as I could, looking at myself in the mirror, wishing I was someone ­else, wishing I was her” (p. 11). My eyes scanned ­every inch of my face, wondering where, how, or when this label of “ boy” got placed onto me. I ­didn’t feel like I was in the “wrong body,” but I felt like ­there was more to my story, to my life, to my gendered narrative. I desired to find her, wished at times to be her, thought how my life would be dif­fer­ent w ­ ere I to meet her. And all the while, I did my seeking privately, sneaking moments in the bathroom mirror, making sure not to make ­these moments too long, lest someone ask what I was d­ oing. I never r­ eally was a good fibber. I never expressed my childhood wonderings to my ­mother and definitely did not say anything to my ­brother or ­father. Looking back on t­ hese experiences, I realize the reason I ­didn’t say anything was likely associated with patriarchy-­induced shame. If I embraced, moved t­ oward, recognized, or uttered my femininity, then I was somehow abject, wrong, deviant, bad. Shame is a power­ful affect. It stigmatizes and, as a result, moved me further away from her for years. Although I always considered myself a feminist as a young adult and came out as queer in high school (­after years of sublimating my queer desires), I made sure to find ways to distance myself from femininity. Patriarchy-­induced shame led to the ingestion of sexist attitudes. I cared for ­women, as long as I was not. I never engaged in active and vocal sexist rhe­toric, but how many times did I sit idly by while other boys did, gritting my teeth and biting my tongue so as to show I, too, was down with the patriarchy? Sitting ­here typing this makes me queasy. The shame produces a nausea that builds and rises in me again, like bile in my throat. I want to throw it all up, but I know it w ­ on’t change my past, and I am not seeking absolution anyway. Instead, I am tracing the ways that shame, femmephobia, and sexism snuck into my very being, when at the very same time I began to see glimpses of her in the mirror. And in many ways, it h­ asn’t gotten all the easier for me now. I still strug­gle with the years of internalized shame I was surrounded by as a youth. My mind wanders to Tourmaline, who talked about the implications of being a ­woman in

36  •  Logging On

an age of virulent racism, sexism, and transmisogynoir. She, too, talked about her experience with mirrors. Quoted at length—­because she said it so much better than I ever could—­she recalled: Mirrors have held so much power for me, and not in ways that have always helped me feel good about myself. ­There was a time in Boston maybe 20 years ago when I looked in a mirror and I started crying. I was so consistently navigating a racist and transphobic gaze that I ­couldn’t help but reflect that back at myself. I was overwhelmed by the me that existed through that lens. What I connected to at the club with the mirrors was a dif­fer­ent gaze that reminded me of the power­ful moments of becoming I’ve had in front of mirrors, seeing and imagining myself for who I want to be, or who I already might be. The becoming gaze happening that night helped me feel confident enough that I wanted to risk feeling humiliated, risk feeling beautiful and power­ful. So often, it’s the same risk. Something I’ve learned is that it’s harder to accept that I might be beautiful, power­ful, maybe even hot, than it is to or­ga­nize against the institutions I hate. So the next day, the Sunday we went to Jewel’s Catch One, I put on a dress. And I was hit with an incredible wave of embarrassment. I was overwhelmed by embarrassment. I ­wasn’t surprised—­this feeling is why I h­ adn’t worn a dress in years. The history of laws and punishment and shame washed over me and through me. A ­ fter so long, and so much work, it’s still so fucking hard to be a public ­woman. Even in social movements, capitalism gets reproduced and tells me that I’m not supposed to be in a place of becoming, that I’m supposed to have arrived on the scene already with a sense of my own internal power and a brilliant po­liti­cal analy­sis to articulate it. ­We’re told that if we have emotions that say other­wise, ­they’re our own fault. I felt embarrassed of my embarrassment. I am deeply embarrassed by my own embarrassment. What I needed in that moment was for my friend to tell me I looked okay, or even that I looked hot as hell. So many of us depend on other p­ eople to reflect back who we are, how we want to be seen. I’m trying to understand ­those moments not just through a framework of trans liberation, but also through de­pen­dency. I believe de­pen­dency is one of our greatest sources of power. (Grace, 2015, para. 23–27)

Maybe my experiences searching for her as a youth a­ ren’t so dif­fer­ent from my experiences now. Both are riddled by the ways that sexism, transmisogyny, and femmephobia continue to influence the gatekeeping of femininity. In both moments, I am still trying to navigate t­ hese discourses, trying to resist them, however unsuccessful I maybe was/am. In both moments, the real­ity that it is still so fucking hard to be a public ­woman was/is staring back at me from the mirror.

Searching for Ourselves Online • 37

Ahmed (2004) stated, “Feelings are not about the inside getting out or the outside getting in, but that they ‘affect’ the very distinction of inside and outside in the first place” (p. 29). Thinking about the camera lens effect of autoethnography, then, it would make sense that affect would be an impor­tant feature of thinking through how self and culture are mutually coconstitutive. Furthermore, Gilbert (2016) stated, “Affectively, public knowledge is as much a ­matter of expression as it is a collection of facts. Truth is not facticity. It is feeling” (p. 98). In this sense, affect and knowability are sutured together in the creation of public knowledge. Similar to medical suturing, the two are fused such that they become one: a body of knowledge. As my journaling elucidated, the shame I experienced and responded to was as much mine as it was given to me by the culture in which I was socialized as a youth. Patriarchy structured my shame, and I then swallowed and fed it, furthering how my affective encounters with shame created internal and external traces that continue to follow me to this day. Even in the brief moments where I courted her as a youth, t­ hose private bathroom moments, shame was pre­sent in that I could not even think to name my gendered desires with/to ­others, including my ­mother, with whom I always had a deeply loving and affirming relationship. While some readers—­perhaps you?—­will tell me to be more generous to my younger self, that I cannot blame my younger self for not naming my desires publicly, I am not convinced that is the point. It is less about chastising my younger self and more about understanding how cultural discourses of patriarchy lead to individual experiences of shame that then, over time, congeal to reinforce patriarchy and sexism, however tacit it may seem. E ­ very time I did not speak up when ­people joked about ­women or when I laughed along or when, a year before coming out as trans—­which I did in my late twenties—­I went to the gym to change my body to be more masculine, I was motivated by patriarchy-­induced shame. ­There are patterns I am tracing, and they started in a back-­and-­forth, mutually reinforcing dialectic between me and the culture in which I grew up when I was young. I am not castigating my younger self, but I cannot let that iteration of myself off the hook, ­either. We all have varying degrees of agency, even in our youth, and although it is painful to expose, it feels—­there is that word again—­impor­tant to excavate.

Wanting to Want: Trans Life Online The above autoethnographic explorations ask significant questions: What does gender want from us? How does trans necessarily include and extend beyond corporeal realities? What is the import of exploring trans interiority, and how does trans life online allow a door through which to do so? Moreover, ­these questions explore a significant shift in the study of trans life, particularly in such fields as higher education studies dedicated to only thinking transness

38  •  Logging On

on the body. First, they expose the ­limited ways gender binary discourse misunderstands—­and, therefore, always has an attenuated vision of—­trans/ realities. ­These limitations are more than misrecognition, however; they are the ideological grounds upon which death is posed as a quotidian rubric by which trans life becomes public and vis­i­ble. ­Here, life is death and, specifically, the death of Black trans ­women. Trans ­people, then, get an audience through the suturing of intense anti-­Black and transmisogynistic vio­lence. If this is the entirety of trans life through such illogics, then we always exist in a mode of foreclosure, are always a negation, and are always crossed out even as— or perhaps especially as—we come out. We always are. Second, trans want and desire are essential affectations through which we must trace trans life. Corporeality acts as a trap door, a meta­phor Gossett, ­Stanley, and Burton (2017) forwarded, to hold the potential laden in trans futurities while at the same time imposing limits on how we understand ourselves as trans ­people. That is, the notion of corporeality—­and its constant counterpart of visibility—as a construct of racialized capitalism has been a limiting trap by which many of the most vulnerable trans p­ eople are continually erased from view; indeed, they come into view through such erasure. However, t­ here are also ways that one can think of trap doors as thresholds through which we can arrive at new understandings of self, as well as possibilities for who we can become as individuals and socie­ties. One way of coming to understand trans life and trans selves could well be through a theory of trans want. Put another way, if corporeal life is attenuated through the grammar of trans death, then we desire an elucidation of trans interiority to think along a parallel register. As the first epigraph for this chapter suggests, trans ­people want so much more from gender. To overlook such want, and to castigate trans interiority, acts as a containment strategy when what gender wants of us is quite the opposite. A theory of trans want, then, would be a theory of excess, of spillage and seepage, of more.4 And h ­ ere, we find ourselves moving to trans life online as a notable form of excess. Far from constructing an “alternative” vision, we suggest trans life online is a parallel/additional grammar of life and one that becomes necessary given how “trans death” has become ontologically redundant through the social imaginary. Simply put, we think through trans life online, itself a mode of trans excess, as a form of wanting, desiring, and seeking more. The subjects of our wants are, as they should be, multiple and enmeshed. We want—­and have and ­will for some time further—­more from gender. Also, our wanting more from gender means we have desired more from our lives as they are misunderstood through the restriction and vio­lence of gender binary discourse. However, given such impossibilities for corporeal life, we assert that desiring trans life online is not only an ongoing investment in trans world making, but it is an investment in such a pro­cess in and through an active disavowal of ­those visions of the “real” re/constructed through heteropatriarchy, Western epistemes, and

Searching for Ourselves Online • 39

whiteness. H ­ ere, theorizing trans life online is a pro­cess through which to cultivate trans life across realities, to amplify the plurality and polyvocality that has rooted our trans becomings. In this manner, a pos­si­ble theory of trans want, as understood through our exploration of trans interiority vis-­à-­vis trans life online, demands that transreality is—as it always was and as it always w ­ ill be, regardless of the form(s) it takes—­real­ity.

Part 2

Trans(form)ing Online

2

The Internet as Spatial The Internet is a place where trans ­people go to learn about who they are and who they can become. It also mirrors the ways space is segmented, balkanized, and foreclosed offline (e.g., trans participants of color talked about vari­ous Internet spaces being white, which mirrors how race operates to cordon space “in real life”). In this sense, then, the Internet is not the completely free/liberatory space one may romanticize it to be, just as it is not the wholly despicable place some may claim, e­ ither. Of further interest is how our ethnographic data opened space for us to think about not just the whiteness of par­tic­u ­lar online spaces but the whiteness of the algorithms that drive ­people to t­ hose spaces (e.g., YouTube algorithms that attempt to increase watch time). What is most impor­tant to note for this refraction is how trans participants viewed the Internet as a space in which they cultivated lives. For example, Sativa reported that their primary use of Internet space was for creating and maintaining community, explaining they used social media space as a way of “maintaining connections with friends that are ­either geo­graph­i­cally in dif­fer­ent locations right now or t­ hey’re not immediately in day-­to-­day access.” Thus, even when ­there ­were possibilities for IRL community building, the Internet still operated as a spatial landscape across which connections and relationships could be made, grow, and deepen. What does space mean to the Internet, however, which lacks a sense of physical space? Yes, the Internet takes up space in the sense of servers and devices as storage sites for information; however, the way we articulate the notion of the Internet as spatial in this proj­ect is unrelated to hardware and data storage. Instead, we think of virtual landscapes, or ­those places that are the planes 43

44  •  Trans(form)ing Online

on, through, and across which participants ­were able to access ­future pos­si­ble gendered selves and develop and deepen community. In other words, for the participants who lived their lives on the Internet, it was a place, somewhere to be, to go, to have been, and to leave. In fact, participants and research team members alike referred to the Internet in spatial terms so frequently in the interviews that it became difficult to parse when we w ­ ere simply referring to the digital places or when the participants ­were saying something about ­those places. To bring some clarity to the examination of space on the Internet and in digital life, it is impor­tant to have a brief but thorough understanding of what specialists in digital communication and technology define as space in this par­ tic­u­lar context. Thus, we spend time in this chapter elucidating something close to a typology of digital spaces, including what they are and what they do. Then, we describe the current or historical contours of t­ hose Internet spaces that ­were salient for the participants. ­These spaces ­were frequently (but not solely) social media space and applications. Fi­nally, we provide a reading of the meanings participants made of their uses of digital space, including what it may offer in thinking about proliferating senses of gendered selves and community. As Kellerman (2016) argued, “The geography (or geographies) of the widely extending virtual spaces in recent years has emerged as a vague concept, thus lacking clear and systematic methodologies for its analy­sis and interpretation” (p. 503). Kellerman went on to suggest that to understand digital spaces, it is impor­tant to clearly delineate the component parts of t­ hose vague and amorphous places that lack the more familiar terrestrial bound­aries. For example, in relation to our study, participants talked first about what was closest to them, what Kellerman described as image spaces, or screen space, as the smallest and most localized spatial unit of Internet space. Participants then discussed the space of the Internet by gradually moving out from their own image spaces, talking through their connections to what Kellerman noted as Internet space, cyberspace, and fi­nally virtual space. Each successive space identified holds the previous, more specific space within it, similar to a nested system. In Kellerman’s typology, he went on to note image spaces represented the “real world” via images and, in so d­ oing, si­mul­ta­neously created spaces while crucially depending on image users for engagement to make ­those created spaces exist by the experience of them. Thus, image space is, by its very definition and use, a relationally created spatial location in that it required user interaction while also shaping and re/de/creating the user’s experience of space. Van Dijck (2013) also offered a useful meta­phor for the spatiality of the Internet and the subspaces therein, suggesting virtual space is made up of microsystems (platforms) that fit within a broader ecosystem of the Internet itself. This is particularly useful in considering social media (van Dijck’s main focus), as several microsystems that fit within a larger communication ecosystem. Both meta­phors rely on notions of nested ecosystems, signaling a layering of spatiality.

The Internet as Spatial • 45

That is, ­there is a way that nested meta­phorical notions of Internet space themselves set the foundation of iteration, multiplicity, and readings on (and in) readings for how one can navigate, understand, create, and read themselves in, out, and around the Internet. Th ­ ese meta­phors, then, provide a robust space for thinking through how the manifold possibilities of the Internet as spatial may re/de/shape participants’ experiences with genders, selves, and communities. The terms ­people have used for virtual spaces created by the connectivity of data transported at ­g reat speed has changed and w ­ ill continue to change. However, the names cyberspace, the World Wide Web, and the Internet all have very specific meanings to t­ hose who study computers, digital communication technologies, and virtual platforms. Regardless of the finer nuances of ­these names (which is not ­really in our purview or significant for our current proj­ect), the space we have come to know and call the Internet carries a g­ reat deal of power; it is a space through which t­ hings happen and where what happens ­ripples out in profound ways IRL (Castells, 2012). For example, we think of the power of the Internet to spur and consolidate activism during the Arab Spring, or the ability of Palestinian activists to communicate through Twitter with Black Lives ­Matter activists in Ferguson, Missouri, regarding how to deal with tear gas canisters police w ­ ere firing at them once the Palestinian activists recognized them as the same brand the Israeli Defense Forces used. In trying to discuss this always expanding space, some have suggested that the idea of maps, globes, or an atlas may be insufficient given how the average user of the Internet often navigates the wealth of information via search engines. In other words, it is not a globe one traverses but fragments of information that one accesses through vari­ous communications tools, developed and or­ga­nized on virtual platforms that users “give sense” to through their use and, in so ­doing, can then make sense of their own selves and multiplying worlds (Aurigi, 2005). This sort of platform development was ultimately paralleled in the same conceptual way when it came to creating the “digital campus,” with course management software becoming essentially another platform. ­There are similar signposts of sense giving that are similar to IRL schooling experiences: the syllabus, the roster, email, and chat functions. However, ­these ­were unlike a classroom environment in that ­there ­were discussion boards that made the asynchronous exchange of ideas pos­si­ble. In addition to the way the digital campus was built, faculty have begun to incorporate social media in their course content. Findings from some prior studies suggest that ­there may be more engagement—­both in terms of community and communication—­when instructors use social media instead of, or in tandem with, course management systems (Tess, 2013). Conversely, ­there are studies suggesting that social media is a hindrance to learning outcomes as mea­sured by GPA or other metrics (e.g., Kirshner and Kapinski, 2010; Paul, Baker, and Cochran, 2012). What­ever the case may be, it is clear that social media as a location continues to “play an

46  •  Trans(form)ing Online

increasingly central role in p­ eople’s everyday lives, and therefore in their everyday pre­sen­ta­tion of self ” (DeVito, 2018, p. 1, emphasis added). This “increasingly central role in . . . ​[the] everyday pre­sen­ta­tion of self ” becomes a doorway through which our current proj­ect takes on a par­tic­u­lar dimension of importance. That is, although it may be unclear what role the space of the Internet ­will play in the f­ uture, all indications are that it w ­ ill only grow in importance, including how one comes to re/understand their senses of selves. Thus, the participants in this proj­ect may be prescient harbingers of ways of being, thinking, and re/un/doing selves and community yet to come.

Internet Spaces and (a Lack of) Safety Feeling some manner of discomfort, threat, or limitation from the material conditions in which they find themselves, trans p­ eople have the option to seek and find similar or at least safer spaces in which to explore identities over time via the Internet (Pickering, 2018). To this end, participants often shared how the Internet was a “safe place” or “refuge” from the material world around them. Though the Internet was not only or always an entirely safe place, the expression was common among the participants. For example, Estelle talked about using the Internet as a safer space for her than offline space, couching her comments in narrating her coming out as trans. Specifically, she stated, “I came out in rural Arkansas. Th ­ ere was maybe five other trans ­people that I knew [in person]. A ­ fter I came out even. So it kind of created that requirement of if I wanted to interact with other p­ eople in the trans community I had to do that online.” Estelle even went so far as to suggest that a lack of safety led to her moving to a dif­fer­ent state and city, sharing, “I moved to St. Louis b­ ecause ­after I had been in Arkansas for a while, ­after I had come out, it ­wasn’t necessarily the most safe place for me to be any more (ner­vous laughter).” H ­ ere, Estelle narrated the lack of safety a­ fter having come out as trans, to the point where she felt the necessity of changing physical locations. Also, while she noted not knowing many trans ­people IRL and how this mediated her living online, her comment about safety also signals something else—­namely, the increased safety she felt living a trans life online. In other words, it was not just that she did not know many trans ­people IRL, but her lack of ability to live safely offline then motivated her move t­ oward online spaces. Of significant import in relation to Estelle’s narrative, too, is her being an autistic trans ­woman. Estelle’s gender and disability fused to create some confounding realities for her life online. For example, she discussed being a gamer and, in multiplayer games, experiencing transmisogyny due to the timbre of her voice. She mentioned Gamergate as a significant moment for her and shared that, similar to many other ­women gamers, she had to decide if, how, and when to modulate how she showed up in online spaces. What’s more, though, for Estelle

The Internet as Spatial • 47

as a trans w ­ oman, she experienced an additional layer of vio­lence in that her needing to think about how she was in/visible online—­something we refer to ­later in the book as selective visibility (see chapter 7)—­was in relation to her being trans + ­woman. Her transness—­and in par­tic­u­lar, her being a trans w ­ oman—­was what drove the vitriol that made her have to re/think through how she navigated online space. Rather than facing sexism, then, itself a diminishment of the feminine, she faced transmisogyny, which is a violent repudiation of the transfeminine such that it renders trans ­women killable subjects. Thus, the spatial calculus Estelle had to do in navigating online spaces was far more complex and had some deeply vexing complications in relation to her nontrans ­women peers. In relation to her disability, however, Estelle found online spaces to be far more comforting and easeful. In her interview, Estelle shared living online being easier for her, as she often had difficulty reading p­ eople’s facial expressions and physical cues. Thus, being online in ways that decentered or made the body irrelevant in multiple ways allowed a dif­fer­ent level of flexibility and comfort for Estelle (see chapters 5 and 7 for extended conversation on living online without bodies). As she shared, “For what­ever reason I get kind of ner­vous about ­doing that [meeting ­people] in person b­ ecause I tend to, b­ ecause I’m autistic, I ­don’t ­really tell like emotions or reactions very well.” Thus, living online was easier in some re­spects for Estelle as autistic, even as it was more difficult in some ways as a trans w ­ oman. This extended analy­sis regarding Estelle’s navigation of online space is vital in showing not only the overlapping nature of vari­ous refractions we detail throughout the book. More significantly, though, Estelle’s commentary shows how the spatial terrain of the Internet can be both vexing and extraordinary, comforting and repulsing, inviting and disinviting. One o­ ught not—­indeed, as Estelle’s comments detail, one cannot—­read the space of the Internet as any one t­ hing alone. And, despite this confusion of how Internet space occurs, participants continually engaged in ways that leveraged the malleability of the space for their own benefits, regardless of how their needs changed across time. In other words, the ethnographic lens of our work helps one understand how the space of the Internet is not only familiar, as in a space to which one gravitates to find semblances of selves and community, but also strange, as in it’s being multiple (often competing) ­things for participants, all at the same time. How we came to understand the spatial dimension of the Internet through the participants’ experiences, then, was one of unfolding profusions, be they entangled as they w ­ ere with vari­ous im/possibilities for trans life online.

Finding (Social Media) Space Historically, trans ­people have also built dif­f er­ent kinds of connections to each other through vari­ous trans-­specific online platforms. Websites like Hudson’s

48  •  Trans(form)ing Online

FTM transition guide (2004) and Susan’s Closet (1995) have given trans ­people some structure in using the Internet as a trans resource space. Over time, t­ hose sites also began to function differently: one as a very ­simple information compendium and the other growing to have message boards and moderators in addition to the gathered information about transness. Trans online space was molded by the needs of ­those using the space with both responding to community interaction. As with YouTube, t­ hese Internet spaces w ­ ere not just for information, but they w ­ ere responsible for, and responsive to, community development. They w ­ ere, in some ways, early iterations of trans social media platforms, albeit highly dif­fer­ent from what one may now consider social media. The participants all mentioned one of the following as their primary modes of connection: YouTube, Tumblr, Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, and Instagram. For participants who utilized more than one of ­these platforms, they articulated very specific ways of using each platform for distinct purposes. For example, several participants noted they began their exploration and engagement with Internet space through Facebook due to its popularity and use when they first joined the Internet; however, participants only used specific Facebook functions. They gravitated t­ oward Facebook groups—­both private and public groups—as the primary way to connect through the platform. ­These spaces became robust locations of underworlding in that participants ­were able to create zones that, fleeting as they may be, provided an other­wise to dream, think, and live beyond the ideologies of capture, extraction, and killability that circumscribe much of trans life offline. It is not that all users of Facebook do not have access to groups; it is that participants used ­these spaces in a par­tic­u­ lar way that allowed more than what the material world might other­wise offer. Thus, the way participants used online space could speak to how every­one could do the same to expand possibilities and potentialities for desiring dif­fer­ ent, new, and more livable lives, both on-­and offline. Social media sites, however, often administer gender in vari­ous ways, some of which reinforce the deleterious notion that to be “real”—as in, a “real” trans person—­requires a par­tic­u­lar investment in online visibility. For example, when the new gender options w ­ ere rolled out on Facebook to the public in 2014, Brielle Harris, the trans software engineer who was a leader in providing greater gender options beyond man/woman, said, “All too often transgender p­ eople like myself and other gender nonconforming p­ eople are given this binary option, do you want to be male or female? What is your gender? And it’s kind of disheartening ­because none of ­those let us tell ­others who we r­ eally are. This ­really changes that, and for the first time I get to go to the site and specify to all the p­ eople I know what my gender is” (Henn, 2014, para. 6, emphasis added). This quote exemplifies two concepts impor­tant for thinking through participants’ experiences navigating online spaces. First, to be “real,” one must be perceived as such, which requires a marking of oneself as visibly trans in some

The Internet as Spatial • 49

way. ­Here, the relational nature of gender shows how, despite changes like additional pronouns to denote one’s gender on Facebook, ­these online platforms are (still) not trans centered. While (some) trans persons are included by certain companies, it takes a lot of effort—­oftentimes with significant risk or at ­g reat personal cost, such as the need to be out as trans—to seek and create administrative changes. And, given how superstructures of vio­lence mediate who can be out and how one’s being out is received, t­ here is an even further narrowing of the trans experience online. Secondly, and somewhat more interestingly to our pre­sent analy­sis, was that to be digitally real on virtual platforms required a par­tic­u ­lar type of visibility, specifically one that required nontrans ­people—as well as the administrative systems that center nontrans ideologies of gender—to approve, agree, or positively adjudge one to be “trans enough” or trans in the “right way.” While we discuss the incommensurable nature of in/visibility with further depth in chapter 7, t­ hese readings of how gender is administered online through social media are predicated on identifying oneself in a set of socially acceptable ways in a par­tic­u­lar location. In this case, it is the necessity, manner, location, pro­cess, and nontrans (non)ac­cep­tance of one’s coming out that can greatly mediate trans users’ experiences online. It is also the case that, even at moments when applications seem to suggest a proliferation of ways to express gender online, t­ here may remain an overarching unknowability of how one can live t­ hose genders. This unknowability can be unintentional certainly; however, it can—­and often is—­quite intentional and can perhaps be violently so, as was the case with Estelle’s experiences gaming as a trans w ­ oman. As is the case with the administration of gender at the level of the state (e.g., Beauchamp, 2019; Spade, 2015), participants often found ways to work around the system of administrative identification imposed by social media sites. They used avatars instead of photos for profile pictures, names intentionally misspelled or rearranged, and multiple accounts—­strategies of selective visibility we revisit in chapter 7—­that took the framework of social media sites and bent it such that the space was more comfortable or accurate. ­These re/de/workings of Internet spaces allowed for concurrent adaptations and hindrances to community building on social media sites in the ways participants could not cultivate IRL. For example, Xena shared that ­because they ­were not out to their ­family, they kept two separate Facebook accounts. While Xena crafted Internet space in ways to proliferate life chances online, Xena noted managing the multiple accounts also became cumbersome. Jordan said they switched their initials to avoid having to use their birth/legal name (often referred to as a deadname by trans p­ eople) to navigate not being completely out to vari­ous p­ eople or in certain areas of their life. LP went even farther, expressing they actively cultivated a par­tic­u­lar perception of their gender in ways that ­were incongruous with how they lived in other spaces, be they on-­or offline. Specifically, they

50  •  Trans(form)ing Online

stated: “I kind of ­don’t r­ eally post much about being trans, or my gender, with the exception of when I’m sharing an opinion on a po­liti­cal topic of some sort. I mostly try and just post about myself living my life in prob­ably a more normative way than I actually live my life. Just ­because I know I have so many of my less informed aunts and u­ ncles on ­there [Facebook]. So [I] just kind of [proj­ ect a] more traditionally masculine image on my Facebook than I do in my real life.” LP’s comment gestures to how pos­si­ble gendered selves are not always, nor are they only, closer to one’s desired gendered ­future. That is, ­these expressions of selves may indeed be more expansive (in terms of proliferating pos­si­ ble gendered existences), but they may, as was the case with LP, be used in ways to occlude one’s desired gendered ­future from certain ­people in certain online spaces. Sometimes, as LP illustrated in their above comment, a pos­si­ble gendered self was for the observer, not the individual projecting the image. And, in this manner, the pos­si­ble gendered self actually did work for the person projecting the image, though in a differential way than one might at first imagine. In other words, LP’s projection of a “more traditionally masculine image” worked not ­because they desired such traditional masculinity but ­because it occluded their gendered desires from the view of their “less informed aunts and ­uncles on ­there [Facebook].” Participants also named Instagram as impor­tant to how they built online community. However, it was not just the space of Instagram that was impor­ tant but how features in Instagram allowed for trans sociality. The curation of photos and the additional text allow for a snapshot of an ordinary or extraordinary life that mirrors experiences. Not only this, the photos themselves are styled and come from the gaze of the images’ subject, a trans gaze (Halberstam, 2005). That said, more than one participant reported scrolling through Instagram as a time filler. Not only that, but Instagram’s incorporation of hashtags as a primary search function also contributed to how the site was useful for creating community space. While many social media platforms use some version of tagging to collate data in some way so that it is searchable, Tumblr, Twitter, Instagram, and now TikTok use tags as part of the cultural milieu of the platform itself. Instagram itself is essentially a highly curated/curatable ­album of photos and short videos. As J. R. mentioned, “I spend a lot of time on Insta,” gesturing to the entanglement of space and time. Social media space in this sense becomes a—or perhaps better put, the—­place to “spend a lot of time.” Instagram, then, becomes the latest iteration of the coffee shop, mall, arcade, or soda shop of the past, all in one’s back pocket. Offline lives are still lived, but they exist in parallel, tandem, opposition, or multiple to ­those lives participants explained cultivating online. Returning to Instagram as a site for trans life online, Mark talked about discovering community that he happened onto. As he noted, Instagram was a

The Internet as Spatial • 51

space Mark had intended to use to document his own transition for himself, but it turned into something e­ lse: Originally, I wanted to use it to track my transition. I d­ idn’t use it ­really to have followers, or connect with ­people. . . . ​I was just trying to see all the changes I was ­going through. . . . ​But then, throughout documenting and stuff, ­there was one specific post I remember, I had seen what my chest looked like, for the first time, a­ fter having top surgery, and I cried, and I posted a video of it, and a bunch of p­ eople started reaching out to me, and talking to me, and that’s kinda where it just . . . ​a community started coming in.

This sort of happenstance community, that which was not sought out, was echoed by Estelle, who said, “Once I started r­ eally evaluating my gender identity, I searched online for t­ hings related to that and a lot of the results came up from Reddit, so I kind of got involved in two main subreddits, [which] ­were asktransgender and MtF.” As Mark intended to use Instagram to document his own transition only, Estelle originally sought out Reddit to amass information. However, as both Mark and Estelle engaged in t­ hese two spaces, they ended up developing communities in the space that was meaningful for them both. Fi­nally, several participants noted that they moved from one platform to another as a strategy to protect their emotional well-­being. That is, they would leave online spaces when they no longer served them. This is impor­tant b­ ecause digital space can be easier to leave than offline space (­there are, ­after all, no moving costs associated with leaving an online space) but also ­because ­those same digital spaces remained accessible if, for some reason, one desired to return. Sometimes, departure from a space could also be a po­liti­cal or user-­interface decision. In Karen’s case, it was more than one ­factor that caused her to leave Tumblr. As she detailed, “I’m actually just disconnecting from Tumblr, ’cuz it’s become not a good space for me to be in. Also, the site is g­ oing weird and sideways.” H ­ ere, Karen was explaining that b­ ecause of par­tic­u­lar communal interactions, her own needs, and in response to new policies enacted by Tumblr (see chapter 6 for more on the “death of Tumblr”), she left the platform. Notably, she phrased her leaving as “disconnecting,” pointing to a sense of connectivity she had felt up to the point of her departure. This same language of disconnecting showed up again when Karen discussed Facebook: “I had to disconnect from Facebook, h ­ ere and t­ here, . . . ​especially during ­really ugly news cycles. For self-­care reasons. If something triggering happens in the news and every­body is talking about it for an entire week, I need to not be on Facebook for that week.” H ­ ere, Karen articulated a move into and out of specific Internet spaces such as Facebook and, by extension, into and out of community, simply by avoiding a par­tic­u­lar platform for a short interval. Whereas t­ here was a

52  •  Trans(form)ing Online

sense that she needed to sustain an absence from Tumblr, she talked about sporadic absence and presence from Facebook in an effort to manage her well-­ being. Given the real­ity of online othering (Colliver, 2019) in the same spaces that have served as key locations for self-­making, Karen’s attention to the affective residue of living online was of significance. In another example, Estelle reported moving ­toward Facebook groups and away from a subreddit she had previously found helpful and supportive. Her movement ­toward Facebook groups was spurred by the subreddit space being “too trans-­medicalist.” In this phrasing, Estelle was referring to the concept that to be “­really trans,” one o­ ught to have or desire biomedical body modifications. By rejecting the subreddit space she had previously found supportive due to this discourse, Estelle was able to recognize and find new spaces that supported her in ways she needed rather than stick with spaces ­because they ­were the only ones available, as sometimes happens offline/IRL. In ­these ways, participants negotiated the space of the Internet, often finding dif­fer­ent spaces that resonated and allowed them to explore and express vari­ous profusions of gendered life in ways that would have other­wise been foreclosed to them offline.

Algorithms and the Shape of the Internet If the Internet is a space, then algorithms act as a key to gain admittance to that space. The vastness of the Internet requires certain technologies for navigation, and algorithms are one such tool, albeit an imperfect one. That is, while algorithms may be able to be manipulated by the user in some ways (e.g., past search histories shape current/future search histories), ­there are also ways algorithms are built to (not) function in certain ways. For example, Noble (2018) has detailed how racism is written into algorithmic code. The Internet as spatial is constructed as relational between users, software engineers, and the algorithms that connect the two through virtual engagements. Whole platforms are now teeming with methods and cultures of moving/manipulating an algorithmic function in one way or another (see Twitter Trends, FYP, and #shadowbanned). Some of t­ hese are built into the virtual environment, while ­others are based on individual use and engagement. That said, one would be well advised to approach understandings of algorithmic functions with caution and clarity. As DeVito, Gergle, and Birnholtz (2017) wrote, ­there are as many myths and folk theories about what algorithms do as ­there are a­ ctual capabilities of any number of algorithmic functions. When coupled with how superstructures of oppression and harm are coded into algorithms, one can appreciate how they may both enhance and inhibit one’s traversing of the Internet, including how they experience the space. Karen discussed her need to trust the algorithmic functions of certain online spaces, stating,

The Internet as Spatial • 53

­ ere’s two wildly dif­fer­ent ways [of meeting ­people], and the one is, I’ve met Th ­people in person, I know I get along with them in person, I suspect that I w ­ ill get along with them and their online friends online, and so we become friends [online]. And the other is, purely trusting to the algorithms, and waiting for them to give me something good. . . . ​Facebook just recommended this group to me, and I was like “Let me try this.” Or somebody posted in one group saying, “Hey, come join this other group,” and the algorithm said, you should see this post. And so I went and joined that other group. So yeah, sort of t­ hose two options, and not a lot in the ­middle, unfortunately.

Karen’s comments are instructive in several ways. First, Karen suggests t­ here are only “two wildly dif­f er­ent ways” of meeting ­people online. The first requires an offline connection, and the second requires a certain trust and faith in algorithms to suggest p­ eople, groups, and spaces that one may like. One cannot inhabit spaces one cannot find, ­after all. This, however, seems like something about which Karen conveyed a hint of sadness. In the word “unfortunately,” ­there is a recognition (perhaps at the level of the subconscious but a recognition nonetheless) that algorithms do not or may not always work for them. By extension, then, Karen gestured to how algorithms may not work for other ­people, too. Put another way, in Karen’s use of the word “unfortunately,” ­there is a sliver of awareness that leaving one’s ability to navigate Internet spaces to software functionality (and the ­people who make said software) leaves a lot to be desired.

Racial Balkanization Online What goes unnamed in Karen’s aforementioned comment but is impor­tant to explore in relation to their sense making about algorithms is that Karen is white. Given how racism is embedded in the design and functionality of algorithms (Noble, 2018), Karen’s ability to navigate successfully to and through dif­f er­ent spaces on the Internet may be no accident at all. As we discuss next—as well as throughout several other chapters in the book—­the Internet mirrors offline environments in its being racially balkanized and segregated. For example, participants of color discussed being hard-­pressed to find trans of color spaces online and, therefore, had a hard(er) time developing racially salient trans communities (see chapter 6 for further discussion of the Internet as communal). One of the clearest findings from this proj­ect was that digital space is not a racial utopia in any way, shape, or form. In fact, not only does online space replicate similar problematic racial realities as occur in offline spaces, but the Internet has become a space on which t­ hese realities have become further pronounced and, in so d­ oing, can become quite toxic for p­ eople of color. For example, several participants noted racialized divisions in and among vari­ous

54  •  Trans(form)ing Online

digital trans communities. For example, several nonbinary participants of color named how being nonbinary was often described and displayed as being white, thin, and androgynous across digital spaces. In their describing nonbinariness as white, they w ­ ere not suggesting they w ­ ere somehow not nonbinary; instead, they w ­ ere suggesting that the idea of being nonbinary was foreclosed to ­people of color. Put another way, the way of coming to know nonbinariness was always through whiteness, therefore constricting epistemological—­and, as a result, ontological—­possibilities for who they could be(come) as nonbinary p­ eople of color. The production of nonbinariness as/through a white subjectivity also had the effect of producing online spaces as inherently white, therefore making it harder for participants of color to not only envision ­future pos­si­ble raced/gendered selves but to find trans communities of color alongside whom they could do this envisioning. ­Because of the vari­ous refractions across which race and racialization appeared in our proj­ect, we extend this conversation across the chapters of this book. That said, we use this section as an early indicator of that which is to come—­namely, an ongoing racial analy­sis of trans life online. Of further importance is that we understand racialization and race as not being something only participants of color experience. As with Karen’s comments above, we spend time thinking about how white participants’ experiences of race moderate trans life online and, thus, how whiteness exposes the limits of the premise of online space as a public commons. That is, while we mentioned that our participant pool had a lower repre­sen­ta­tion of trans p­ eople of color than we would have wanted, our ethnographic data—­both interview and digital observation—as well as how white participants did (not) talk about race and racialization, gave us vari­ous understandings of how race operated online in profuse ways. Namely, ­there are ways that race, specifically racism, foreclosed possibilities for trans life online for participants of color in ways with which white participants did not have to contend. Simply put, the machinations of whiteness that operate(d) offline also accrue(d) in online spaces, mediating trans life online in multiple ways. Th ­ ese accruals happened in epistemic ways, as described above when participants of color discussed how nonbinariness was always already coded as white online, and also then in ontological ways, as we discuss in chapter 5 in our articulation of racial melancholia online.

Conclusion ­ ere is a par­tic­u ­lar irony of trans p­ eople turning binary code into profuse Th online possibilities. In other words, all of what participants described building in terms of community, space, and f­ uture pos­si­ble selves online has been built out of what amounts to the simplest binary: ones and zeros. In some ways, observing and listening to the participants from this proj­ect describe what they

The Internet as Spatial • 55

can make out of combinations of binary code made a g­ reat deal of intuitive sense for us as researchers: this, not that; t­ hose instead of t­ hese; yes or no; on or off. However, in a turn that made the binary code space of the Internet strange, what many participants in this study articulated was the “both/and” nature of ­these spaces. That is, despite the binary root of the spatial dimensions of the Internet, participants w ­ ere able to create online lives that resonated to a “betweenness” vibration that has always been at the core of the concept of transness itself. Somehow, in a digital world constructed from an either/or, on/off worldview, participants ­were able to stamp their transness on the space, finding multiple overlapping (and sometimes conflicting) ways to explore and express life online. Moreover, participants described how they engaged with the spatial dimension of the Internet shifting over time, gesturing t­ oward a temporal aspect of trans life online. It is ­toward the temporal that we now turn our attention.

3

The Internet as Temporal The Internet has an enduring youth to it; the Internet is where young p­ eople often come to figure t­ hings out and to learn (about self and community). Additionally, t­ here is a way that time warps and bends online; time both speeds up and slows down, as ­people access and pro­cess massive amounts of information quickly. All the while, what is produced online has a staying power that can outlast ways that ­people make sense of their own corporeal selves/lives. Related to this proj­ect, the archival nature of the Internet created a temporal playground that allowed participants to speed up and slow down how they ­imagined ­future pos­si­ble selves as trans. As we discuss throughout this chapter, some participants discussed “coming out late” in their early teens through their interactions online, as well as coming into their transness a­ fter seeking and searching for genders for a few weeks online. Additionally, time stretched for participants both in how the Internet became an archive of their multiple (and multiplying) selves, as well as how the Internet was a way to have time stop IRL. In other words, participants’ engagements online allowed for them to pause what was happening offline by sinking into a notion of communality, connection, and senses of selves that felt altogether dif­fer­ent than the worlds they ­were thrown into and made to contend with offline. ­Here, too, one can see how the Internet as temporal overlaps with understandings of the Internet as spatial (chapter 2), communal (chapter 6), and visual (chapter 7). ­Going back to the meta­phor of the prism that undergirds how we have or­ga­nized the findings from this proj­ ect, although each refraction is distinct in its own right, ­there are portions of each that blur together, and through their blending, they create new articulations of transness. 56

The Internet as Temporal • 57

Through both interviews and ethnographic data collection, our data show participants w ­ ere g­ oing online quite early and, as a result, coming to senses of selves quite young. This is perhaps unsurprising, as the archival nature of the Internet provides faster, quicker, and wider access to information for t­ hose who can connect. However, what our data also indicated is ­there ­were some age-­ related patterns in terms of online platforms. For example, not as many trans participants are using Facebook, and if they are, they are spending time in groups. Conversely, almost all participants talked about Tumblr or YouTube as early entry points for exploring gender online. ­There is also a way that the archival nature of the Internet was both exciting and troubling for participants. For example, participants had multiple reactions to their expanding notions of archived selves online and how ­earlier senses of selves may (not) resonate across time but w ­ ere still publicly available. Even if participants chose to take down / delete content that was previously publicly available but did not resonate with how they understood their current senses of selves, they still had to contend with the effects and affects of such choices. That is, how participants made meaning of their archived selves through ­things like transition videos on YouTube, post histories on Tumblr, and Instagram and Facebook feeds created effects as well as affective resonances that reverberated through their lives regardless of the choices they made about the content they had previously posted online. For example, ­there w ­ ere times when participants discussed having multiple accounts on a given platform ­because some p­ eople (e.g., ­family) kept posting/commenting/seeing them in their “old selves,” whereas ­things like transition video archives on YouTube channels could give a sense of change/ growth into one’s trans selves over time. Thus, the Internet as temporal left its imprint on participants even if the images, videos, or content they posted faded into oblivion. Fi­nally, as our analy­sis demonstrates, t­ here was a certain speed of the Internet that demanded a par­tic­u­lar level of engagement to stay current, especially with platforms like Twitter. Despite one’s ability to follow along with conversations and partake in communities in asynchronous ways (e.g., accessing Twitter hashtag back channels), participants often felt compelled to be pre­ sent in the moment, which created a sense that they could not be late and ­were always rushing to catch up or stay current. Similar to gender, time as a Westernized notion is a decidedly colonial construct. Time exists both as a natu­ral phenomenon and an imposition; time passes as a ­matter of fact and has also been contorted in a par­tic­u ­lar way to mark—­oftentimes quite violently—­conquest and mea­sures of extractive logics. In other words, that time moves is axiomatic, but how time has been mined as a means of extraction, production, and l­abor is nothing short of a colonial tool of furthering empire and the nation-­state. For example, the standardization of time across geographic spaces was an impor­tant component of advancements in transportation and communication (e.g., train and

58  •  Trans(form)ing Online

telephone), which are/­were used as modes by which to (re)assert the ongoing primacy of white/Western/globalized notions of thinking and being. While movements ­toward living online do not erase the reach of colonialism, ­there are ways participants demonstrate how they leveraged the plasticity of time, calling into stark attention the falsity of time as permanent, stable, or real. Put another way, how participants experienced the Internet as temporal exposed ruptures in Westernized conceptions of how time can or should move and, as a result, how one can or should move through/with time.

Introducing Internet Time Much has already been said about the development of the Internet. From its inception as a defense and research mechanism to its current form, the Internet and its technological advances are subject to much interest and debate. One of ­those debates is about the speed at which the Internet moves, or rather, the speed at which data moves between two places across/through the Internet. The first message by someone through the Internet was “LOGIN,” and—in a turn that is quite apropos given the nature of this proj­ect—­the message was sent by a student. That was in 1969. Over fifty years ­later, an entire generation of college students have grown up in an era of digital proliferation. Most of them have, ­whether they knew it or not, lived in an era with a new way of mea­ sur­ing time. For example, though still not yet widespread as a way of “telling time,” Swatch, the Swiss watchmaking com­pany, in­ven­ted the notion of “Internet time” in 1998, declaring that ­because of the speed that information travels in the age of the Internet a new way of mea­sur­ing time was necessary (Lee and Liebenau, 2001). Over time, the amount of data on the Internet has grown exponentially as more p­ eople have access (and add) to it (Warf, 2018). As the Internet’s reach has expanded, scholars have continued to examine the meaning and use of online temporal realities in g­ reat detail; however, they have nearly always related back to the theorizing of analog time (Leong et al., 2009). What is less theorized is the experience of trans p­ eople with time on the Internet. In this sense, then, we hope this chapter (and the broader book itself) can add to the nascent work happening around trans temporalities online.

Trans Temporalities Online According to Eckstein (2018), in an article on the temporal component of transition videos on YouTube, “Transition is temporal. In a broad sense, a transition is a period in between, a time in flux” (p. 24). The betweenness of time online and in the material world is certainly analogous to the betweenness that can be experienced by trans p­ eople, between binary conceptions of gender and

The Internet as Temporal • 59

the desiring of something e­ lse, something other than, and something beyond. It makes sense then that almost since its inception—­the beginning of Internet time, as it ­were—­trans ­people have been using the Internet to share information and build community. In fact, it is entirely likely that ­there are unknown or unnamed trans p­ eople who contributed to building the Internet as it exists now. And, even as it is likely the case that the Internet continues to be constructed without trans ­people in mind or in positions of authority to influence its design and operation, trans ­people are still making the Internet their own in how they inhabit it across time. Two examples of the trans community’s early engagements with the Internet are helpful in establishing how trans p­ eoples’ use of the internet occurred over time. According to Whittle (1998), a single local trans Internet user, along with Riki Anne Wilchins, spread news via both public and private online listserv and newsgroups of the murders of Brandon Teena, Phillip DeVine, and Lisa Lambert within a day of their being killed.1 This near instantaneous information sharing culminated in trans p­ eople from across the country converging IRL for a vigil outside the court­house where Brandon’s murderer was tried. Space, in this instance, was commuted by the speed at which information could be shared, demonstrating an overlap between the temporal and spatial refractions of the Internet. Additionally, this example highlights how the operation of online listservs and newsgroups was made trans, even if it was not made by trans ­people. In an entirely dif­fer­ent example, in the “trans tipping point” issue of Time magazine (Steinmetz, 2014), readers ­were introduced to Lynne Conway, who worked as a computer engineer in the 1970s and developed the chips and pro­ cessors vari­ous devices use to access the Internet. Her professional time in her ­career essentially had to restart at her transition, certainly an indication that ­there are vari­ous conceptions of timelines in analog living that have jumped to and then proliferated on the Internet. Her website (LynnConway​.­com) was an early location for Internet-­based research for many trans ­people. She reported that the pages focused on “successful” trans ­women and men—­what she spoke of as examples of trans p­ eople who had transitioned and w ­ ere living their lives—­ were the most popu­lar on her site. ­Here, one can start to sense how trans folks have often turned online as a space and time through which to look for visions of their ­f uture pos­si­ble selves, finding vari­ous iterations of who they could become along the way. Message boards and resource compilation sites like Susan’s Place Transgender Resources (1995) and Hudson’s FTM Guide (2004) w ­ ere early instantiations of underworlding (Gossett and Huxtable, 2017). Th ­ ese online spaces cut down to the length of an Internet search the amount of time it took trans ­people to connect with resources and support. The longevity of ­these sites, both of which are still up and r­ unning and w ­ ere updated by their creators in

60  •  Trans(form)ing Online

2016 and 2017 respectively, is a testament to their utility when it comes to trans sociality and community building online (see chapter 6 for a more in-­ depth discussion about the Internet as communal). A variety of trans websites reference ­these two sites, which are arguably foundational (or, if not, they are at least formative) when it comes to trans underworlding and sociality. The websites are also linked to other trans-­related sites, creating a web with branches that extend ­here, t­ here, and virtually everywhere (pun very much intended). This web is spatial-­temporal, too, as it compresses and stretches time across the space of the Internet. In other words, as websites and online resources are linked (creating a spatial dynamic to the information), they reduce time to p­ eople accessing information (compressing time) and create an ongoing archive of trans knowledge production (a stretching of time). In this way, then, one can recognize the spatial-­temporal proliferation the Internet makes pos­si­ble, all leading back to painstakingly gathered and maintained resources that did not always exist online; nor did they exist all in one place or connected through space. ­These websites and their connections to each other have offered time itself to trans p­ eople as much as they have offered information and community. The Internet and its attendant technologies have been a site of trans temporality long before we undertook this research proj­ect. Whittle asserted in 1998 that trans ­people w ­ ere uniquely suited to creating lives online precisely ­because of the betweenness they experience IRL. As he stated, “The real world has medically, socially and legally failed to afford a place in which one can authenticate oneself as trans” (Whittle, 1998, p. 392). He went on to argue that cyberspace was a useful tool for trans p­ eople, who have always already been living virtual lives to congregate, communicate, and create ­whole bodies of knowledge about how best to support one another. ­There are some par­tic­u ­lar nuances to trans temporalities online that are worth exploring in relation to extant lit­er­a­ture. For example, Horak (2014) noted the concept of hormone time in relationship to trans ­people’s use of YouTube, stating: Time begins with the first shot of testosterone or HRT pills (hormone replacement therapy) and is mea­sured against that date, even years afterward. For example, many trans men start their video diary with their first shot of testosterone and title subsequent vlogs “1 week on T” or “testosterone week 23.” Though many trans w ­ omen start their vlogs ­earlier, when they begin wanting to live as w ­ omen full time, they still date their videos by the amount of time elapsed since beginning HRT. Diaries, slideshows, and time-­lapse videos all state the amount of time on hormones in their titles and descriptions. Other markers of time, such as the calendar date or the vlogger’s age, are indicated far less often. (pp. 579–580)

The Internet as Temporal • 61

Similar to Horak’s description of trans temporalities as a bending of time, Halberstam (2005) and Muñoz (2009) both noted the decidedly queer way time functions, albeit in offline contexts. But it was Car­ter (2013) who pointed out the omnidirectional way transitional time can flow, and this is the most useful conception of time given the ways participants for this proj­ect reported they w ­ ere pre­sent on or engaging with the Internet. According to Car­ter (2013), transitional time is a rejection of a linear-­only timeline of transition, from a “wrongness” to a “rightness.” Both Car­ter and Horak argued trans time moves in vari­ous directions; however, Horak’s assertion suggested a movement of time ­toward a more positive linear f­uture. This is true enough for the creators of YouTube transition video content and for the par­ameters of Horak’s study. And yet, if one zooms out to thinking about how time operates just beyond vlog creators—­which is to say, when one includes the trans ­people watching the trans vlogs—­the assertion that YouTube transition videos function in any sort of linear way for anyone other than the creator is not quite as accurate. Car­ter’s (2013) notion of transitional time also allows for an understanding of how time morphs across virtual platforms, especially for ­those who use algorithms and hashtags to find and navigate the aforementioned trans web of online information. That morph­ing, Car­ter argued, is a folding of time that accompanies transition (and thus transition narratives on social media in this case) where past, pre­sent, and ­f uture selves can all return to one another or brush up against another part of self-­in-­time. Ultimately, Car­ter (2013) asked, “What would happen . . . ​if we i­ magined transitions between genders, like choreographic transitions, as places in time in which numerous movements—­ forward, backward, sideways, tangential—­are equally pos­si­ble and can coexist” (p. 2)? Such a folding of time, a plasticity between past/present/future temporalities, was what we found through the data, including the ethnographic observations we undertook. If one w ­ ere to search YouTube right now for transition videos, the first few results would be relatively current. For example, the first five videos presented to Alden when they began their digital observation in such a search as they wrote this chapter draft (search terms: transition video trans) ­were uploaded from as recently as a week ago to as far back as three years ago. With just a bit of scrolling, however, any viewer can jump around in a single creator’s timeline, especially ­those who use YouTube as a vlog with consecutive weeks of content. Furthermore, viewers can sort vlogs in vari­ous ways, some of which may differ from what is most recent based on linear/analog notions of time. H ­ ere again, one can recognize how time as a linear construct is not particularly relevant to accessing trans content, and as such, trans temporality online functions altogether differently. In fact, a trans person seeking support and community online may not come across the account that is most useful to them. ­There are many an abandoned account on vari­ous platforms that, while not the

62  •  Trans(form)ing Online

most likely to turn up in a search result, may be linked from some other resource, or may turn up in user searches due to tags, search terms, and the operation of algorithms. ­These are all examples of folds in transitional time. The accounts may be a de­cade old but may show up in a current context, suggesting not only the uniqueness of trans temporalities online, but the vari­ous nuanced components (e.g., search terms, algorithmic functions, an individual’s search history, video tags) shift such temporalities in highly situated and deeply personal/ individualistic ways.

Age on the Internet While the Internet was created for military and then industrial use, it quickly took on broader social relevance. Further, while we do not seek to overlook the ways that class, rurality, and coloniality act as disconnections separating p­ eople from online f­ utures, t­ here continues to be an increase in p­ eople connecting and engaging with the Internet. That said, what is clear—­and came into technicolor through our proj­ect—­was how the Internet has a par­tic­u ­lar appeal to and engagement with youth culture. Specifically, the ways of connecting and creating on the Internet are largely inhabited (first, if not always) by youth. For example, Facebook, the now megasite full of vari­ous iterations of itself, was once a site for just Harvard students. Then, as the popularity of the site grew, students at any college could join—­one used to need a .edu email address to sign up. Facebook then opened its digital doors to t­ hose without a school email address in 2006, barely two years ­after its launch as an internal social network for Harvard. For our proj­ect, participants ranged in age from eigh­teen to thirty-­three. What is in­ter­est­ing about the age of participants was the clear absence of participants between the ages of twenty-­four and twenty-­nine. While the dominant image of college students is of a banded group of eighteen-­to twenty-­two-­year-­olds, the age range of the college-­going population is more heterogeneous. In this sense, then, the lack of participants aged twenty-­four to twenty-­nine struck us as all the more curious. Of course, the simplest rationale was that trans students (both former and current) in their late twenties just chose not to participate in the study. Their nonparticipation may signal that they did not volunteer ­because they may not have felt they had much to say or offer due to perhaps not spending much time online (a marker of their potential feelings of aging out of the Internet when it comes to explorations of f­ uture pos­si­ble selves and community making). They also may not have been pre­sent in the same online spaces we advertised for participation or may not use the Internet as much or in the same ways as some of their younger trans peers. While we do not want to overdetermine a meaning to why an age block did not appear in our participant pool, we raise the point h ­ ere as one of curiosity.

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Of course, trans p­ eople aged twenty-­four to twenty-­nine exist online, and yet ­there may be several readings of how their online lives are markedly dif­fer­ent in relation to the ways gender, time, and life online unfold in intertwined ways. What­ever the case may be, it was noticeable when we ­were analyzing the data that ­there was about half a de­cade of trans p­ eople who did not show up, causing us to think not just about how youthfulness showed up online but how it may have also mediated who saw themselves through the call and, therefore, answered it. In other words, trans p­ eople not only existed temporally online, but temporality may have even mediated how (and when and why) trans ­people move(d) offline. While this par­tic­u­lar contour of thinking was beyond the scope of our proj­ect, it does suggest an in­ter­est­ing node for further reflection and study and perhaps offers a possibility of thinking through how on-­and offline trans temporalities and lived realities may be connected in impor­tant ways. When participants ­were asked about how old they ­were when they first encountered (or recalled encountering) the Internet, the average age was about eight. This marked a significant age gap for us as researchers, given that two of us (Alden and Z) ­were thirty-­five at the time of data collection, which is often discussed as a significant age for trans ­people. While some nontrans p­ eople may remark that thirty-­five is not old, reaching thirty-­five for many trans ­people—­especially trans w ­ omen and especially trans w ­ omen of color—is a milestone given the ideologies of killability through which trans p­ eople must wade. Thus, thirty-­five becomes an age whereby, if a trans person reaches this milestone, they may likely be considered an elder. Although the research team could have been deemed rather young by nontrans logics, trans temporalities suggested other­wise. Moreover, in relation to when we as authors moved online, eight was still decidedly young. Taken together, then, the age differences between us as researchers and the participants we w ­ ere talking with, as well as when we all moved online, signaled some distinct temporal shifts in how participants ­were experiencing trans life online in the pre­sent tense. Not only did we as researchers often feel Internet-­old, but we began to realize that the Internet as temporal was creating an online landscape that was younger, moved faster, and archived life in unique ways. In fact, in one conversation at the end of this proj­ect, Z mentioned, “­There are ­things I still do not understand about online life, and I think ­these are t­ hings I may not ever get nor do I need to get.” It was not that Z was or is unable to understand what is happening online but that her age and positioning within broader trans communities (online) created a way in which she realized what she needed was dif­fer­ent than the participants, with an understanding of the Internet as temporal likely playing a role in what ­shaped ­these dif­fer­ent needs. Participants noted how certain concepts ­were not part of the awareness of a par­tic­u­lar age group both within trans communities as well as in noting

64  •  Trans(form)ing Online

dif­fer­ent awarenesses across trans and nontrans populations online. In the case of Erin, when asked about gender expression in online video game chats, she said, “It w ­ asn’t r­ eally in the perception of p­ eople who w ­ ere fifteen, which is the demographic of the game.” ­Here, Erin was noting that gender was not a part of the broader lexicon of nontrans online spaces. Her comment denotes how trans temporality and spatiality online overlap with that of nontrans temporality and spatiality, creating multiple parallel worlds that overlay and mix with each other. In other words, in online spaces where ­people across genders interacted, ­there ­were multiple, overlapping ways in which space/time was experienced. Whereas Erin was thinking of gender online at a par­tic­u­lar age, not every­one using that online space was. Thus, while gender was “in the perception” of some trans ­people at fifteen, it was not for many nontrans ­people. As many video games are made without gender in mind—­which is to say, they are made with the gender binary in mind due to the machinations of gender binary discourse (Nicolazzo, 2016b, 2017b)—­there ­were then multiple perceptions of gender and time happening within the same game, creating multiple overlapping understandings of time and space across gendered online realities. Spence also noted ­there was some difference in how identity language was used in vari­ous trans community spaces, saying, “You r­ eally saw the age divide in the trans community. Th ­ ere’s a very big sectioning of dif­fer­ent ages that [delimit how] the trans community acts in dif­fer­ent ways. Like, I think t­ hose ­people are like a c­ ouple years younger than me—­not hugely younger—­but it definitely makes a difference with the way ­people interact with identity. By that point, p­ eople ­were ­really very strongly against queer, whereas now queer is a lot more of a common label.” Spence’s comment toggles back and forth between notions of chronological age offline and trans temporalities online. Specifically, they remarked how even when other trans ­people w ­ ere “a c­ ouple years younger,” which they suggested was “not hugely younger” (a chronological suggestion of temporality), ­there w ­ ere large differences in how trans p­ eople took up par­tic­ u­lar lexicons (a suggestion of trans temporality). Furthermore, the mode across which this toggling of temporalities occurred was the Internet, meaning that on, in, and through online engagement, Spence noted how age and time acted distinctly for trans ­people, operating quite differently than offline (and nontrans and offline nontrans) time. AB put it even more plainly when they said, “I remember having this thought of like, ‘But I’m too old to be trans,’ ” when they recounted when they began exploring their gender in digital spaces. For many of us who came out in our twenties and beyond, AB’s comment is striking given their youthfulness. However, ­because trans temporalities online create a differentiated understanding of how time functions in relation to transness and coming into one’s trans becoming, one can begin to see how a deeper understanding of the Internet as temporal was mediating their comment. That is, AB had difficulty imagining

The Internet as Temporal • 65

moving ­toward trans ­future pos­si­ble selves b­ ecause they thought they ­were “too old,” with too old being a stand-in ­here for being too old online. Kate commented on age and youth as well, saying, “I start thinking about possibility models, and I start thinking about other trans ­women that I know, and I find myself mostly surrounded with trans w ­ omen who are younger than I am, or newer to transition than I am. So, I’m like, ‘Well, I do look up to you, but I feel like ­you’re an alternative history possibility model’ ” (emphasis added). What is impor­tant in what Kate stated is her toggling back and forth in how she understands time. Similar to Horak’s (2014) notion of transition time—­a term that, notably, Horak developed through a study of the Internet—­Kate marked how trans ­women she was surrounded by ­were “younger than I am” (chronological) “or newer to transition than I am” (trans temporal). Furthermore, Kate’s comments ­were embedded in her understandings of her trans becomings and community development through online spaces, giving a decidedly online edge to her remark. In t­ hese examples, it is clear how chronological age, youth(fulness), transition time, and trans time all swirl together to create the notion of trans temporality online, which then gives rise to profusions of pos­si­ble gendered selves in relation to trans life online. In some cases, chronological age mattered to how participants perceived vari­ous digital community spaces; and in ­others, it was still a noted feature but was less impor­tant to the participant’s connection to other trans p­ eople on the Internet. Indeed, AB felt age was such a strong component of transness as exemplified on the Internet they thought that they ­were “too old” to be trans. While AB’s comment is noteworthy in multiple ways, and despite its foreclosing the possibilities of trans elders living online—we trans elders are, a­ fter all, still pre­sent virtually—it does signal the ways trans life online is structured in part through the notion of perceived youth.

The Folding Pasts/Presents/Futures of Trans Temporality Online Time functions differently in/on the Internet than it does offline. In the U.S./ Western episteme, coloniality suggests time is linear, and collegiate environments have created social worlds that fall in line with this colonial imposition (think term lengths, academic calendars, and the like). Linearity exists online and in social media, particularly ­after the advent of social media naming feeds “timelines”; however, time online does not function only linearly. If one chooses to do so, one can jump through, across, and around time (and space) with relative ease, even occupying multiple moments and timelines si­mul­ta­neously. Simply switching tabs or flipping between vari­ous apps might put the user in two very dif­fer­ent timelines depending on how they have curated their content (e.g., how frequently other p­ eople post) or how a par­tic­u­lar app controls its

66  •  Trans(form)ing Online

algorithms and, thus, which posts get moved up in priority. Facebook even has a function called “memories,” through which it encourages this time jumping. Facebook and Twitter also have two settings for their timelines: the first being an algorithmic timeline with popu­lar posts moving up regardless of their post time and the second labeled “newest posts first.” Even inside e­ ither platform, the user can control what timeline they engage with and ultimately can split time into popu­lar time and linear time. Moreover, Instagram’s algorithm shows content on the “explore” page nonlinearly, which is to say, the posts are not or­ga­ nized by when they are posted but by interest and what a user has previously searched for and liked. Again, ­there is a pliability to online temporalities. Part of a clear understanding of trans temporality online is recognizing the speed with which information moves. The pace of the Internet led to the imperative participants felt to be regularly connected lest they feel left ­behind—­yet another way in which transness and trans life is projected through present/ future tenses. Participants in the study and our digital ethnographic observations pointed ­toward this concept of speed and frequency. Specifically, responses to a prompted question where participants ­were asked how frequently they ­were online pointed again to frequency as a mea­sure of time online. Several gave estimates in hours, with a few saying, “I’m on all the time,” or, “Um, ­every day, multiple times a day” or some variation of that sentiment. Erin said, “Like, ­every minute. A lot. I’m a programmer and I work on games on the side and most of the time is spent on the Internet, so . . .” ­Here Erin was gesturing to her always being online not merely as a function of her work but as a way of being pre­sent with and projecting her trans becoming into the ­future. That is, her senses of trans selves—­professionally and personally, on-­and offline—­were structured in and through the speed with which information moves online, and a sense of needing to be connected to this speed so as to not be left ­behind. Participants attributed this time function to access to their smartphones and to a desire to be connected. For example, when asked how often she was spending time in online spaces, Estelle said, “A large portion of the day, I would say. During times that I ­don’t have other t­ hings, that’s what I do [laughs].” Estelle ­here is noting the way that the Internet and its availability function as a filler between IRL activities. Sam said nearly the same ­thing, stating, “I never actually quantified it [how much time they w ­ ere spending in digital spaces], and it’s kind of difficult ­because it’s always in the in-­between times of my day.” Connecting this with our previous analy­sis of chronological and online age, one can see how access, speed, time, and youthfulness fold in on one another, creating multiple concurrent temporal sensibilities that then have vari­ous affective resonances for participants (e.g., not wanting to be left out, b­ ehind, or cast aside, desiring to be pre­sent for both the trans moment and the trans ­future online). We discuss the affective refraction of the Internet in further depth in the following chapter.

The Internet as Temporal • 67

Rabbit Holes, or Where Does the Time Go? The reference to rabbit holes is widely credited to Lewis Carrol’s Alice in Wonderland in which the main character Alice follows a rabbit into a hole and experiences an entirely bizarre, new—­and we would argue altogether queer—­sort of time and place. The allusion to this sort of rabbit hole has also become common parlance in the age of the Internet. A rabbit hole is not a design flaw or even a byproduct of the Internet; it is a basic part of the digital scaffolding that makes the Internet what it is. B ­ ecause of hyperlinks and how they function, always linking to another place or piece of information, the Internet can be a ­giant rabbit hole down which one can lose all sense of place and time. One part of the digital ethnographic data collection for this proj­ect centered on participants’ tumbling down Internet rabbit holes, especially in terms of losing one’s sense of time in tracing routes down t­ hese spaces. Almost anyone who has searched for something online can name a time where one search led to another, and then one link led to a dif­fer­ent page with some other information, and before one knows it, hours have passed and one may have learned a lot about Marie Antoinette or the politics of New Zealand but not necessarily the very ­thing for which one had gone to the Internet. This same ­thing happened as we hung out with our participants’ digital selves online. As we began digital participant observation, we started by looking at a participants’ social media presence, which inevitably led us to looking through the archives participants had created or of which they had become a part. In this sense, participants themselves became the entrances to the rabbit holes that then spun out into their many pos­si­ble selves. Although we had no sense of looking for anything specifically, too, we lost all sense of (linear) time when we followed ­these trails, often through hashtags, keyword searches, and other nuggets of information participants offered through how they curated and archived their own trans lives online. Our experiences as researchers d­ oing digital ethnographic work down the rabbit hole ­were even reflected in how some of the participants discussed their own engagements online. For instance, Xena mentioned, “Like on Instagram, a lot of it [trans knowledge] was found through Instagram where I just, like, went down this rabbit hole of finding ­people where I was like, ‘Oh yes, yes, yes, yes, yes’ ” (emphasis added). Sam also talked about rabbit holes when asked about how they used Tumblr for trans/gender exploration. As Sam told us, I just kind of started following ­people and noticed some ­people had they/them pronouns in their bio, and I had ­really never heard about non-­binary p­ eople before that. And so, I kind of started to do some research and look into some of ­these p­ eople [who] had an FAQ and talked about what their gender meant to them. And I was like, “Oh, huh. That’s in­ter­est­ing.” And so, I kind of went into

68  •  Trans(form)ing Online

a rabbit hole of specific Tumblr blogs that talked about gender. And then I started following more non-­binary p­ eople, and the more I followed them, the more I was like, “Huh, this kind of fits.” (emphasis added)

Both Xena and Sam gestured t­ oward how trans rabbit holes not only helped them find other trans p­ eople—­a form of trans sociality online—­but also envision ­future pos­si­ble selves. For example, Xena’s exclamatory comment that they “went down this rabbit hole of finding ­people where I was like, ‘Oh, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes’ ” underscores not only a connection to ­others but also a connection to ­f uture pos­si­ble selves who may be reflected through their connections to ­others. Sam’s comments push this idea even further, with Sam reflecting on their connections to ­others by saying, “Huh, this kind of fits.” In ­going down rabbit holes and losing all senses of time—or perhaps better worded, in stretching time out through the joy, excitement, and euphoria participants ­were finding in their online searchings—­participants ­were able to not only explore trans sociality in new ways (a notion we discuss further in chapter 6) but to envision ­future pos­si­ble trans selves. Another participant, Jonesy, reported “stumbling” into a “trans timeline” subreddit on a bit of an intentional rabbit hole (achieved by using a random search function on the site). H ­ ere, rabbit holes and timelines meet and can become one and the same or at least more obviously entangled. When tracing the participants’ steps ethnographically, we w ­ ere overwhelmed by the number, frequency, and variety of posts in one par­tic­u­lar subreddit (r/ TransTimelines), getting lost ourselves as we tracked through the information, encouragements, support, and questions. The trans timelines subreddit was its own rabbit hole. For example, Alden spent at least five hours on this subreddit alone, perhaps more even that they did not track. However, it was not just Alden who spent time on this subreddit rabbit hole; ­there ­were 114,000 members, with 474 online at the time Alden first viewed the subreddit as part of the virtual ethnographic data collection for this proj­ ect. ­These numbers are meaningful in that they show not only how many trans ­people are invested in exploring ­these sorts of temporalities online but that their searches happen concurrently, both alone and in community with each other. In other words, 474 ­people may likely have been ­going down their own trans rabbit holes together, even as they may have been together online while being alone IRL. This, then, becomes another nuance in relation to how notions of the Internet as temporal, spatial, and communal create excesses through which participants can come to know pos­si­ble gendered selves, as well as inhabit trans life online. Perhaps trans ­people create such relationships to temporality online ­because ­there is a wealth of information and that then means that it must be sifted and sorted into what is (not) useful. Investments in trans rabbit holes may also be

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a way to look for more support as time goes on, which may be a response to living u­ nder regimes of trans killability that may show up quite acutely offline. It may also be that some trans ­people are looking for confirmation that they are in fact trans or perhaps even permission to envision themselves as trans once they learn such grammars exist. For example, one participant noted that even though they had seen similar memes multiple times while down a trans rabbit hole, one version of a meme hit at just the right moment and led to a trans self-­ realization. H ­ ere, the Internet as temporal led some participants to finding f­ uture pos­si­ble trans selves. From the participant interviews, ethnographic observations, and e­ arlier scholarly work that discusses coming into one’s transness, it is salient that participants spent significant time following trans rabbit holes—­which is to say, participants spent significant time losing time as they sought and found ­future pos­si­ble trans selves online. Thus, losing time may have been a key function to finding senses of selves for many participants. In an exciting extension of Nicolazzo’s (2016b, 2017b) previous work, the way participants for this proj­ect understood time could operate in a way that demonstrates a temporal aspect of gender binary discourse. In other words, participants’ losing time to find senses of selves signals how linear and chronological time—­time IRL—­operates to foreclose possibilities that ­were crucial for imagining transness, trans selves, and trans socialities online. And, b­ ecause the on-­/offline binary is, in and of itself, a false construct, such a temporal extension of gender binary discourse very likely influences trans life offline in vari­ous ways that would be well worth looking into through ­future research.

Profusions of Selves across Time Many participants noted the vari­ous ways they expressed themselves over time. The years and markers varied across participants, but the comments all signaled how online usage influenced participants’ senses of trans selves and how they expressed ­those (or did not) in on-­and offline spaces. For example, Jordan said of their gendered Instagram presence over time: “As I have gotten older and become more settled [with my transness], it’s about half and half. Not half and half. It’s mixed. Sometimes my posts ­will be more feminine and sometimes ­they’ll be more masculine. It just depends on, I ­don’t know, my day.” For Jordan, time saw a multiplication of trans selves, as they suggested their transness was “mixed” across time, and how they expressed themselves online “just depends on, I d­ on’t know, my day.” While this sort of shifting pre­sen­ta­tion is pos­si­ble offline, Jordan’s comments highlight the possibilities of trans life online that would make such an offline life all the more pos­si­ble. Put another way, Jordan was able to leverage trans temporality online to proliferate senses of selves, which then may have potential effects for their—­and o­ thers—­trans life offline.

70  •  Trans(form)ing Online

Gabe expressed a similar sentiment when he said the change in how he engaged on the Internet moved ­toward building a community that he wanted to see. He explained: “I know when I first used it [the Internet] for my identity, it was more or less just trying to get more information as to what my identity was, or just what I was, if t­ here was anything that labeled what I was feeling. And now, based on the experience I’ve had, it’s now been more of, like, a . . . ​community builder is the word I’m looking for.” Gabe went on to explain that the number of other p­ eople’s experiences he read while seeking out information about his feelings about gender and coming into his transness created a sense of community. Gabe mentioned message boards specifically, which are by their nature asynchronous, as compared to a chat room, where folks talk to one another in real time. Over and through vari­ous time modalities, Gabe developed grammars through which he could explore ­future pos­si­ble trans selves. He then invested in t­ hese communities by seeking ways to return the f­ avor by being a trans possibility model for ­others who may have been seeking information and community or identities ­after him.

Conclusion While time on the Internet can be construed in several ways (e.g., How long have you been ­here? How long do you visit ­here ­every day? How much of your ­limited analog time do you spend in digital spaces? What does time mean to post a video that can never be deleted?), what it meant to this study was an exploration of the limits of the imaginable. What was imaginable no longer had to correspond with analog time (or space), and what was, is, and could be pos­ si­ble stretched beyond what was or is immediate, including stretching beyond even that which is conscious. This sort of extension of time also included an implosion of time, where time ceased to m ­ atter, or at least m ­ atter in a way that cordoned off possibilities for trans sociality and senses of selves. As we have discussed in this chapter, the multiple profuse ways of coming to un/know trans temporalities online are also corrosive to forms of temporal understanding as they are structured by gender binary discourse. Put another way, trans life online signaled a way transness was out of time with offline realities, which is to say participants lived temporally online in ways that defied, resisted, or other­ wise pushed back against gender binary discourse and logics of killability. While we never want to suggest that trans life online can be a panacea to such structures of vio­lence, it does gesture t­ oward a possibility of elsewheres and other­wises and to underworlding as a strategy for moving ­toward pos­si­ble trans selves in ways that participants w ­ ere not as able to do offline. Simply put, our data show how being out of time, losing time, or compressing and overlapping senses of time proliferated possibilities for participants’ trans lives online.

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­These many uses and nuances of trans time on the Internet cannot be overstated. From the young age at which most of the participants began using the Internet to long-­abandoned YouTube channels and their indelible rec­ord of vari­ous trans and transition-­related experiences, time on the Internet is simply dif­f er­ent—­now. Th ­ ere is also ­little doubt that how time functions through the Internet ­will continue to change, morph, and proliferate, much like how trans ­people ­will make sense of such temporal changes. The uses of Internet time have changed at the speed of the changes to the Internet itself. As we have endeavored to show in this chapter, participants named the many ways their senses of pos­si­ble selves w ­ ere related to time, something our ethnographic observations not only bore out but literally mimicked, as was the case in our discussion of trans rabbit holes. Certainly, the nonlinearity of much of trans Internet time is attributable in part to the functions of the Internet, but ­these functions manifested in par­tic­u­lar ways that are unique to how the participants used, made sense of, and made t­ hese functions their own through their online engagements. In other words, trans temporality online is not just something that is built into the system, but profuse understandings of trans temporality online are themselves (co)created as a result of how, when, where, with whom, and why trans ­people choose to live online.

4

The Internet as Affective As researchers, we expected that the Internet had par­tic­u­lar spatial and temporal relationalities that participants would find salient. Just how the participants made sense of ­these refractions ­were multitextured, as we discussed in previous chapters, and yet t­ hese dimensions themselves struck us as perhaps more quotidian in their being named by participants. What felt qualitatively unexpected, however, was the felt nature of the Internet. That is, participants understood the Internet as comprising an affective sensorium through which they made ongoing sense of gender and trans sociality. The Internet was not just a space or a time but a structure of feeling by which participants began to make meaning of transness in extracorporeal ways. In sensing/thinking the neologism of extracorporeality, what we are attempting to signal is how the Internet, and specifically how participants using the Internet, created a threshold through which trans as an embodied phenomenon, a corporeal becoming, could be un/re/done. Not that the embodied nature of trans becoming was, is, or ­will be a “prob­lem,” per se, but recognizing the Internet as affective unlocks a potentiality through which trans unbecoming—­a way of embracing the disembodied futurities of transness—­could serve to un/re/articulate provocative elsewheres for gender. Similar to Gossett and Huxtable’s (2017) elucidation of the underworlding practices as “temporary fabulous zones” (p. 52), participants made meaning of the Internet to sense trans(ness) in new, exciting, and fabulous ways. Of course, some of ­these affectations mapped onto their bodies. For instance, the sense of confidence online engagements produced for some participants led them to feel better in their

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trans bodies, which then led to a sharing of their trans embodiments with o­ thers in ways they had previously thought to be unsustainable. Our recognition of the extracorporeality of the Internet, especially as we elucidate such through the refraction of affect, o­ ught not be understood by readers as an anticorporeal sentiment or a move whereby we suggest embodiment is not an enduring site onto which transness maps for participants. It is also not to say that the affective dimensionality of the Internet does not influence or interact with vari­ous other refractions. Much to the contrary, the Internet as affective provides a rich locus from which to understand how the structures of feeling proliferated through and across h ­ uman ← → digital interactions is, in and of itself, an essential “temporary fabulous zone” through which to sense trans in and also beyond embodiments. Moreover, what we describe in this chapter as the affective transrealities of life online need not be permanent to leave a profound impression on participants, ­those they engage with on-­/offline, and, as a result, renderings of gender/sex. For example, the notion of gender euphoria several participants described highlights the fleeting-­yet-­permanent nature of how affect can alter relationships to and with gender. That is, while the sense of euphoria participants gained through their online engagements may have been temporary, it could also provide a mode through which transness—­and, as a result, gender—­could be reworked, as well as revisited and resensed. In other words, the fabulous zone of the Internet as affective operated in such a manner that participants used the caprice of sensation(s) to mold new possibilities for trans life on-­and offline.

Affect Theory as Genderfull In recognizing this par­tic­u­lar refraction of the Internet, it becomes impor­tant to describe what we as researchers mean when invoking affect. As is often the case with fields of theory, affect has no singular mode or prescribed set of tenets by which one can understand it as a unified body of thought. That said, we leverage two aspects of affect theory that provide a lens through which to understand this chapter. First, we mirror Gould’s (2007) articulation of affect as a way “to indicate nonconscious and unnamed, but nevertheless registered, experiences of bodily energy and intensity that arise in response to stimuli impinging on the body” (p. 19). Impor­tant in Gould’s definition is a recognition that affect is both nonconscious and an expression of one’s interiority. Whereas emotions are outward/exterior reactions and be­hav­iors, affect signals the interior, unconscious happenings that arise, ­those “experiences of bodily energy and intensity that arise” when p­ eople interact, as well as when p­ eople engage with institutions (e.g., schools, the Internet). Affect, then, signals the occurrences between ­people and/in their social worlds, the sensorial residue ­these

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interactions, bumps, and engagements leave, and how t­ hese residues re/orient ­people as they move through life (Seigworth and Gregg, 2010). Furthermore, the nonconscious nature of affect is impor­tant, as it suggests that affective traces are not always desired, thought, or in the foreground of our experiences but are nonetheless pre­sent in how they motivate ­people and their interactions through the social sphere. Desire, shame, guilt, disgust—­these affective experiences stimulate how we come to know ourselves, how we move through our vari­ous worlds (virtual and other­wise), and largely operate below the surface of conscious thought. Second, we recognize affect as an extramaterial happening and one that marks t­ hose micromoments that occur and accrue between p­ eople, as well as between p­ eople and institutions. In elucidating our argument, we agree with other scholars who suggest the Internet is itself a social institution, a modality through which ­people bump into each other, as well as move around their and ­others’ virtual world(s). That is, the Internet is a social institution through which affect happens; it provides a way to sense through the accrual of affective happenstance. Indeed, the hap of such genderfull affective happenstances in this proj­ect was quite fortuitous and unexpected for us as researchers. As the trans participants describe in the data we pre­sent throughout this chapter, they did not intend for their online lives to yield the par­tic­u­lar senses that w ­ ere produced through such virtual engagements. Put another way, participants did not go online with the express purpose of cultivating gender euphoria or to experience the melancholic feeling produced by how gender and race rub against each other online, leaving the same acrid taste of racism they often experience in real life. And yet, the Internet became exactly that kind of affective happening, one that we as researchers stumbled on with a level of happenstance ourselves. Similar to Gould’s (2007) definition, then, we recognize the ways affect both influences material lives and extends beyond materiality. Understood in this way, affect allows for a way of sensing how the Internet invokes a level of plasticity, a moldability of one’s trans interiority that proliferates new ways of thinking transness, trans selves, and trans sociality on-­and offline.

Desiring (and) Gender Euphoria The word euphoria originates from the Greek euphoros, which was used to signify the sense of well-­being produced by a sick person’s use of drugs. The term’s current use, which signals an intense happiness or excitement, makes sense when put in the context of drug use. Namely, the use of drugs to achieve a euphoric state invokes a temporal fleetingness or an impermanent desiring of a beyond-­the-­present real­ity. Th ­ ere is also a marking of one’s pre­sent condition as being unwell, undesirable, or what one hopes to alter. The pre­sent, then, is unideal, to say the least. ­There is a wanting and a yearning for something beyond

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the pre­sent condition, which itself may have become what it is through the sedimentation of an ongoing history of neglect, harm, or disregard. In other words, one’s being unwell in the pre­sent does not just happen; it occurs through a historic accrual of unwell moments and times. That one seeks the drug-­ induced state of euphoria makes further sense in light of this past/present condition of life; t­ here can be no alternative, it may seem, to an altering of ways of being, even if it is temporary. Participants in this proj­ect used the term gender euphoria multiple times to describe a temporary feeling of elation and excitement regarding being trans. This term, which is common parlance in trans online spaces, allows for a way of thinking/feeling the affective notion of euphoria through transness and in par­tic­u­lar trans life online. One might begin to understand how the Internet acts as the proverbial drug through which trans p­ eople can desire, reach for, and seek a semipermanent state of euphoria they have been denied by nontrans material realities. If the material world has been one marked by impossibility for, and the killability of, trans p­ eople, then the Internet provides an affective gateway through which one can move to continually seek the excitement and plea­sure derived from otherworldly gendered possibilities. As Nicolazzo (2019a) wrote, If our current condition as trans is one framed by loss, by the always already inaccessible existential possibility of existing, then why ­wouldn’t we set up camp in t­ hose places where we can hide in the shadows and chase, seek, and experience gender euphoria? Why w ­ ouldn’t we use online platforms and virtual landscapes in ways that let us envision beyond our bodies, or allow us to think our bodies in completely new ways? Why w ­ ouldn’t we go to the place where euphoria feels a bit more pos­si­ble, and lingers a ­little bit longer, and allows us to be with o­ thers who are a ­little bit more like us? (para. 18)

Understood in this light, the Internet is not only a place where gender euphoria occurs but operates as an affective in-­between, a sensorial connection that encourages, promotes, and invites trans ­people to desire beyond their past/present material conditions of lives offline. Speaking about their beginning to take and post selfies online as a nonbinary person, Sam stated, “When I started presenting [as nonbinary]—­and this had a lot to do with seeing other ­people pre­sent and identify in a way that resonated with me—­but once I started ­doing that, ­there was just a sense of gender euphoria with being able to pre­sent that way [as nonbinary] and with seeing that reflected back.” Sam’s comment speaks to the enmeshed workings of the Internet’s spatial and affective refractions. Not only was the Internet the place where they began “seeing other ­people pre­sent and identify in a way that resonated,” but it also then created an affective desiring for a euphoric state that

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was impossible (or, at the least, not yet pos­si­ble) in IRL spaces. Furthermore, Sam speaks to the rippling effect of gender euphoria online. Sam saw nonbinary ­f utures that excited them, which induced in them a wanting of gender beyond what their social conditions allowed IRL. They then began posting selfies through virtual platforms, which moved out into online spaces, inducing ­others to reflect back their own nonbinary f­utures to Sam again. Desiring gender beyond what was (im)pos­si­ble IRL was a group effort Sam took part in and was supported through a refractive understanding of the Internet as affective. In other words, it was not just a space Sam went to view, post, and then view again nonbinary selfies, but in the group pro­cess of sending out and receiving in this visual media, Sam was able to sense the temporary excitement and happiness of gender euphoria. Hearkening back to the connection between euphoria and drug-­like states, Sam began to desire this state of gender euphoria more, thereby bringing them closer and further into their viewing, producing, and posting selfies online. H ­ ere, a cyclical affective loop was produced through Sam’s online engagement: gender euphoria created desire, which then induced further euphoria. This sort of intensified and intensifying sensorium was an affective real­ity made pos­si­ble through Sam’s experience of the Internet. And yet, as is the case with the felt sense of drugs, the effects may dull with time. For example, Sam discussed their affective experience of gender euphoria as temporally bound. Specifically, they mentioned, “When I first came out it [seeing and posting nonbinary selfies] was definitely a source of gender euphoria.” Again, thinking back to the coupling of the Internet as a drug through which one experienced and could chase gender euphoria, ­there ­were points by which the drug wore off. The same experiences (e.g., seeing, creating, and posting selfies) may not always induce the same sensations. This dulling effect over time, however, does not take away the affective plea­sure or importance of the Internet to induce in them for the time during which p­ eople experience them. Instead, it suggests the affective dimensionality of the Internet is, in and of itself, quite robust in cultivating a sensorium that animates previously unknown possibilities for trans life online. Jonesy discussed gender euphoria as an experience whereby ­others gave them gender-­appropriate compliments online. At first, Jonesy tried to play this off as fictitious, stating, “They [other p­ eople] tell me that I’m handsome b­ ecause they want me to feel handsome, not ­because I actually look handsome. It’s fine. I’ll take it. I look like an egg and that’s fine with me [ner­vous laughter].” Jonesy’s laughter was ner­vous laughter, as if talking about the possibility of their attractiveness could not possibly be anything other than a lie. However, ­whether or not Jonesy was handsome was unimportant. Instead, the sensorium created through the exchange of p­ eople telling Jonesy they w ­ ere handsome is the significant moment itself. That is, Jonesy’s experience of handsomeness was not just as a quality or character trait but as an affective connection of online

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experience. That other p­ eople told Jonesy they w ­ ere handsome produced an affective (re)occurrence through which Jonesy was drawn further into the Internet and closer to/with experiences of trans sociality (see chapter 6 for further discussion on trans sociality). When asked what the feeling of gender euphoria meant for him, Jonesy replied, “Ignoring the internalized shit. That this was in e­ very female-­bodied person [sic] the moment we are socialized into society. The ­thing that helped me to kind of take ­those steps t­ oward my ­future in the way [of] wearing boxers, buying a packer, and dressing more masculine was just how happy it made me. . . . ​I had to put the pieces together and start creating this masculine identity before he became trans. It’s just reaffirming of how I see myself, and that other ­people are starting to see it, too.” The affective dimension of the Internet for Jonesy stretched into its sartorial refraction (see chapter 5) and was a way to resist feminine socialization he experienced growing up. It did not necessarily change the nature of such socialization; recognizing affect does not necessarily equate to a changing of the overarching superstructures that evoke sensations. However, the affect-­inducing state of the Internet allowed Jonesy to ignore the socialized/internalized “shit” of gender while also helping him move ­toward new sartorial ­f utures through following the euphoric state he experienced from other p­ eople calling him handsome. Jamie’s experiences with gender euphoria online underscore the collective orientation of such a genderfull sensory experience, as well as one that fully defies the corporeal impossibilities of trans life offline. During her interview, Jamie spoke of the pain she experienced as never being able to embody her transness as she wanted. A particularly violent form of transmisogynistic undoing for trans girls and w ­ omen, Jamie reflected on the impossibility of being a girl offline by saying ­things like, “I was having thoughts of, ‘Oh, I’ll never pass, I’ll be too tall, my hands are too big.” This sort of picking apart of oneself by focusing on where gender shows up “incorrectly” on the body was not Jamie’s fault; it was a reassertion of the fault of societal expectations of gender, how ­these expectations are invariably heightened for ­women via systemic sexism, and then how t­ hese are violently enforced through transmisogyny for trans girls and ­women. That is, it was not Jamie’s fault for focusing on her passability but a function of the catastrophe that is gender binary discourse, which is especially pernicious for trans girls and w ­ omen. Describing her nascent trans becoming, Jamie recounted, I did fantasize about how I’d look if I transitioned that night. So I told [friends] I was questioning [if I was trans the] next day, specifically trans friends, ’cuz you know, [I] wanted to hear their opinion. But I w ­ asn’t officially out to myself ­until [a few days l­ ater], but I was 99% sure I was trans [the day before] a­ fter I shaved my armpits and felt the euphoria. So I told my trans friends and I

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actually made a post on [the Reddit forum] r/trans and, yeah, quite a few ­people told me, “Hey, that’s gender euphoria right t­ here.”

Jamie’s fantasies about being trans (an interior happening) rippled out ­toward her friends, just as her posting on a Reddit forum about her experience shaving her armpits and the feeling of euphoria she enjoyed (again, an interior happening) rippled out t­ oward ­others online. Both her friends’ and other Reddit followers’ responses not only created an external dimensionality to the affective happening of euphoria but also heightened her investment in the online sensorium produced through the collective experience of identifying and naming such an affective state. She was so elated, in fact, that as she told her interviewer, “I accidentally outed myself to my mom [that night].” In other words, Jamie was so overcome with the excitement and happiness of gender euphoria created through her collective engagements online that she could not help but move such feeling offline. In other words, she had not intended to come out to her ­mother—­she noted her coming out as “accidental” ­after all—­but the affective charge of collective gender euphoria was so ­great that it could not be contained online. ­Here, one can understand how the bound­a ries of online/offline are quite flimsy, with what happens across each plane of life leaking into and influencing each other in vari­ous ways. Fi­nally, as we and other scholars have argued (Hayward, 2017; Snorton and Haritaworn, 2013; Stanley, 2011), trans killability is brought into full clarity through the always annihilation of Black trans w ­ omen, through Black trans w ­ omen’s being. Trans killability, then, is a manifestation of the violent technology of whiteness and one that marks and furthers anti-­Blackness, transmisogyny, and transmisogynoir. When situated alongside the notion of gender euphoria, then, we suggest this affective field may well be animated by/through whiteness. To be clear, it is not just white trans p­ eople who feel or experience gender euphoria. Rather, we argue that gender euphoria as an affect is one that is cultivated through whiteness. Gender euphoria marks a freedom, a movement ­toward life on-­and offline that is inherently imbued with possibility. This possibility juxtaposes with the impos­si­ble un/reality of the ways trans killability forecloses endarkened trans life. To this end, we are left wondering several questions that may be provocative places for fellow and ­future scholars to think through:

• What are the relationships between gender euphoria, whiteness, and racial melancholia? • Is gender euphoria for white trans participants structured by or an affect of whiteness? • Is t­ here such a t­ hing as “just” gender euphoria for ­people of color? Or gender-­race euphoria?

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• What would a space that made race-­gender euphoria pos­si­ble for trans folks of color “feel” like for white trans folks? • How might gender/race mediate experiences of euphoria particularly in relation to transfemininities?1

The Racialization of Trans Melancholia As we identified through the second chapter of this text, moving online does not wholly dissolve racial stratification and racism. While the Internet exists as a par­tic­u­lar form of public commons that may be more open in the sense that ­people have broader access to vari­ous types of information and connections, its cartography—as with all spaces—­bears the markings of racism. As  J.  N. Chen (2019) wrote, “Gender as a perception—or sensuous cultural interpretation—of bodily material at the threshold between the self and social world, is the target for policing, regulation, and rehabilitation in the negative and negating attempt to incorporate communities of color into the national body through cis-­heterosexual social contract” (p. 16). Furthermore, as Noble (2018) eruditely discussed, how ­people traverse the space of the Internet is framed through algorithmic manifestations of systemic racism. Th ­ ese realities, then, lead to ­those who use the Internet being brought into ongoing proximity to par­tic­u­lar nodes of oppression (i.e., racism), which then animate vari­ous oppression-­steeped affective happenings. In other words, the spatial dimension of the Internet being structured by systemic racism means that participants had to contend with the sensorium such racism provoked. This was made all the more intense for trans participants of color who w ­ ere logging onto the Internet looking for spaces that ­were ­free from—or, at the least, less overdetermined by—­the effects of racism they experienced on their college campuses. Take, for example, the following image, fig. 1. ­There is certainly a temporal aspect of the meme, signaling that the gender binary is a t­ hing of the past (as a set of authors in our thirties, we have several questions about what we see as an admittedly flimsy reading of “the past” being associated with the 1990s). Further, the meme suggests that the ushering in of the new millennium also saw a refreshing of gender such that “­these genders” have been ware­housed, not to be used again. Fi­nally, the meme also does not overtly comment on racialization, a point one may use to suggest the meme is “not about race.” This, however, would be an overly sanguine interpretation of what is more insidious about what the tacit (non)racialization of this meme highlights: that gender is regularly discussed as decidedly nonracial, which is to say, gender is positioned as/through being the property of whiteness (Ellison et al., 2017; Jones, 2020; Jourian and McCloud, 2020; Nicolazzo, 2016a, 2017b; Ozias and Nicolazzo, 2021; Simms, Nicolazzo, and Jones, 2021). In other words, to talk about gender is to always talk about race, even—­and perhaps especially—­when

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FIGURE 1  ​“Only 90’s kids ­will remember” meme.

race is not named. So, while the meme represented in the figure may not “name” race, it is still—­and always ­will be—­a commentary about gender and race, namely, the white(ning) of gender to the point where transness of color is further solidified as an epistemic (and, thus, ontological) impossibility. This analy­ sis also dovetails with our finding about how offline racial discourses are replicated online. In this instance, on-­/offline ideologies of whiteness suppose race as only being related to p­ eople of color; therefore, anything that is not expressly about populations of color is devoid of a racial analy­sis and, thus, coded as white. Gender, then, is coded as the property of whiteness. By extension, transness is coded as white, which then mediates how trans p­ eople of color experience trans life online. A main affective resonance of Internet-­based racism for participants of color in the proj­ect was that of melancholia. Described by Muñoz (1999), racial melancholia for queer ­people of color operates not solely as a form of grieving or mourning a loss (e.g., the loss of a present/future f­ ree from harm). Instead, he wrote that “the lost object returns with a vengeance. It is floated as an ideal, a call to collectivize, an identity-­affirming example” (p. 52). For Muñoz, t­ here was a way queer ­people of color could recognize and grieve the loss of a life not circumscribed by racism while also disidentifying with the world’s ongoing

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investments in racism to create new ­f utures and socialities. In other words, racial melancholia signals both a grieving and an animated desire for more, for an excessive life despite—­and perhaps ­because of—­that for which they grieve. Writing about how racial melancholia ­shaped the life and work of Jean-­Michel Basquiat, Muñoz (1999) wrote, “I see the pain and anguish in his productions. To this I would add that t­ here is also a power­ful impulse in the artist’s work to rec­ord a black life-­world that is complex and multilayered.” He went on, stating that “Basquiat’s images do more than connote the destruction of the black body. They also strategize survival and imagine assertions of self in a cultural sphere that is structured to deny visibility to such bodies” (p. 55, emphasis added). The work of racial melancholia, then, is a doubled pro­cess. It is at once both a signal of deep sorrow of the real­ity of always being in the wake of racism (Sharpe, 2016) while also a gesture to the yet-­to-­be-­determined utopic possibilities of queer-­of-­color life regardless. AB’s narrative is particularly helpful for elucidating how trans participants of color felt racial melancholia through the Internet. At first, AB pointed out the racism they experienced in offline/IRL spaces, noting, “In person when I’ve entered a lot of Chicanx spaces [­there is a] very machismo culture, very just talks of masculinity [sic], and I kinda felt pushed out from t­ hose spaces in person. So I felt like the only way for me to interact with ­those [Chicanx] spaces now is online.” AB then moved online, seeking an alternative to their experience of racism in queer/trans Chicanx communities. What they felt, though, was more of the same. They recounted: I felt like when I first was using trans social media it was very like white centered. And over time, I just feel I was being ­really assimilated into white culture. I felt like I c­ ouldn’t be trans and Latinx. I felt like I had to choose one or the other and I feel like over time, especially once I started entering spaces in person, I started to realize that’s not the case. Like, I d­ on’t have to do this. And I started noticing that other [trans] p­ eople [of color] felt the same as me, where they ­were like, “Yeah this ­really white, trans centered media is kinda taking over and that ­doesn’t give us a lot of room.” (emphasis added)

AB’s comments signal clearly the doubling pro­cess of racial melancholia. First, AB notes the prevalence of the nonracialization/whitening of transness on-­and offline. That the campus is structured through racism and that LGBT centers as focal points for queer and trans life on the campuses that have them are not immune from such structuring led AB to desire trans of color life in virtual realms. However, when AB began living online, they noticed similar features whereby existence was curtailed for trans p­ eople of color. The message AB and other trans participants of color began to receive online was, to use their word, one of assimilation into trans culture as an artifact of whiteness.

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And yet AB began to connect with other trans p­ eople of color to scheme and envision online elsewheres. As the emphasized text above demonstrates, AB learned “I ­don’t have to do this,” meaning they did not need to assimilate into projections of transness as already the property of whiteness. Moreover, they did not just realize this (for) themselves but reached out and “started noticing that other [trans] ­people [of color] felt the same.” This reaching out and stretching beyond oneself is itself the work of envisioning online elsewheres for trans ­people of color and of imagining assertions of self in the cultural sphere. That is, despite its vari­ous structural deficiencies in relation to the ongoing presence of racism, racial melancholia provided a structure of feeling through which trans participants of color could begin to cobble new worlds together. As Ororo stated, “If it w ­ eren’t for online spaces, I w ­ ouldn’t be the person that I am right now.” It was not that the Internet was ­free from racism but that ­there ­were ways to work the affective register of racial melancholia to imagine cultural spheres full of trans-­of-­color f­ utures.

The Confidence to Transgress (into) the Material Plane Of further curiosity when analyzing the data was how the sensorium of the Internet created connections between on-­and offline worlds for participants. In this sense, the affective dimensionality of the Internet served as a bridge between virtual and material planes of life. Th ­ ere w ­ ere impor­tant ways participants noted t­ hese worlds differing, such as Estelle commenting on the editability of life online. The ability to sit with comments, write and rewrite them, and edit the self in multiple ways was of further comfort for Estelle as an autistic trans w ­ oman. For her, being online allowed for an altogether more comforting form of sociality, thus opening up possibilities for connection to activist communities regarding c­ auses about which she cared deeply. Paralleling Estelle’s growing confidence, multiple participants noted how living online allowed for forms of self-­assurance that spilled offline. This sense of conviction was not something participants developed alone but was a direct result of being with and alongside ­others online, an extension of the trans sociality they created together across virtual landscapes. ­Going back to Jamie’s above comment about how she “accidentally outed” herself to her m ­ other, one can see how this accident may have been one of temporality rather than affectation. That is, while Jamie may not have wanted or anticipated coming out to her ­mother at the time she did (or perhaps ever), the affective charges of trans life online formed a sense of confidence with a directionality and force that promoted her familial disclosure. The “accident” was one made in response to the sedimentation of positive affect between Jamie and her trans peers and was made pos­si­ble as a result of their online engagements. The confidence Jamie experienced, which resulted in an (over)eagerness to express her transness

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offline, was a result of the affective happenings between her, her peers, and their virtual lives. Thus, her accidentally outing herself can be understood as an amalgam of interior/exterior desires, an excessive profusion of wanting more from gender that poured over on-­and offline domains of life. Affectively speaking, then, Jamie’s utterance was no accident. Jordan also noted that when it came to intangibles, their online life had produced “a lot more of that confidence and ­actual ability to talk about some of ­these hard to talk about t­ hings.” The heightened, collective production of confidence online seeped into offline areas of Jordan’s life, especially in relation to talking about “hard to talk about t­ hings,” by which Jordan meant their transness. Beyond discussions of disclosure, Jordan’s sense of confidence also allowed them the ability to talk about vari­ous contours of gender, as well as t­ hings that may be correlated to gender but did not necessarily have to be (e.g., politics). Jordan was able to gain their confidence through the anonymity of online life, which then led to practicing with friends offline and then led to an altered affective orientation that extended across material and virtual planes. Mirroring Z’s use of Bitmoji to imagine f­ uture pos­si­ble selves discussed in chapter 1, Jonesy created a Bitmoji representing how they saw themselves rather than how they ­were seen by ­others in real life. In creating this ­future pos­si­ble self, Jonesy moved t­ oward their own gendered fantasies, seeking refuge in the virtual possibilities made pos­si­ble through the plasticity of such avatar creation platforms. They also took a risk by representing themselves in direct contrast to how ­others saw them, which is to say, they used the pliability of online environments to cultivate confidence through risk-­taking. H ­ ere, one can understand trans confidence not as merely an accrual of “good” feelings but as a sensorium created through fantasy, risk-­taking, and the reactions and responses to such fantasizing on interior and exterior levels. Jonesy’s confidence was not just a result of other ­people giving it to them, or a form of ongoing external validation. At its nascence, Jonesy’s confidence was constructed through their own desire and joy in falling into the fantasy of who they could be(come)—by way of their use of Bitmoji—­which then rippled out to o­ thers. Jonesy and other participants’ development of confidence did indeed have a collective patina, and yet it was not something that o­ thers gave or gifted the participants. Much to the contrary, the confidence participants discussed as leaking across on-­and offline realms of life was something that accrued online as they engaged with other ­people and events, as well as in how they harnessed the plasticity of apps to highlight and enhance their own desires regarding trans futurity. Of import when discussing confidence is its marked frailty. Indeed, all sensory fields carry an ethereal, fleeting, and delicate quality, as if they may collapse in on themselves at any moment. G ­ oing back to Gould (2007), if affect is about the nonconscious and unnamed, and signals responses to the energies and intensities that move through and across bodies and planes of existence,

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then it might come as no surprise that such traces have a certain loose ungraspability to them and that they then need to be continually (re)worked to draw out their presence and potential usability. Participants’ relationship to confidence, then, was one that needed continual care and maintenance. Th ­ ere was no moment by which one “gets” confidence, as if it was a trait one acquired and then had in perpetuity. Instead, participants’ discussions of confidence reflect Nicolazzo’s (2017b) notion of practices of resilience in their need to cultivate the affectation in an ongoing, practiced way that responded to its fleeting nature. In other words, participants demonstrated how their engagements with the affective refraction of the Internet allowed them to practice ways to gain, hold, and let go of traces of confidence that proliferated life chances on-­ and offline.

Transfeminine Body Management A final affective nuance from the data related to the ongoing body management of trans w ­ omen and femmes throughout the participant pool. In thinking through where and how to unspool this thread of data, we as authors made the intentional choice to discuss it as an affective rather than sartorial refraction. To be clear, the types of management trans ­women and femmes discussed is a way of re/fashioning the body, meaning ­there is a sartorial aspect. However, the catalyst for such transfeminine body management was affective, specifically in relation to the haunting absent presence of transmisogyny (Nicolazzo, 2022). Take, for example, Jamie’s aforementioned comment discussing her body in relation to passability. She stated, “I was having thoughts of, ‘Oh, I’ll never pass, I’ll be too tall, my hands are too big.” Jamie is not saying that she is too tall or that her hands are too big but that, b­ ecause of the epistemic ← → ontological vio­lence that underscores how transmisogyny works on trans ­women’s bodies, she is made to feel as if her body is out of shape. In other words, Jamie is not too tall but is made to feel too tall as a result of transmisogyny, which stimulates a need to determine how, when, in what ways, or if she ­will respond as a form of transfeminine body management. ­W hether she responds is of ­little consequence, as even a nonresponse (in the sense of not modifying her bodily comportment, morphology, or presence) is a decision she must arrive at by moving through the affective haunting of transmisogyny. Moreover, the nature of passability as a manifestation of transmisogyny was a further real­ity the trans w ­ omen and feminine participants contended with, even if they did not name it directly. As Plemons (2017) argued, the “place” of feminization may well be moving across the body, motivating a growing facet of the medical industrial complex dedicated to trans surgical interventions. However, what he did not discuss with adequate depth was the disfiguring

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rhe­torics of transmisogyny and passing and how the nontrans desire for a very par­tic­u­lar bodily form of feminine beauty is the bedrock on which many decisions regarding body management are made. To be clear, trans girls, ­women, and femmes do make impor­tant and life-­saving decisions regarding their own body morphology. And yet t­ here can be l­ ittle denial that even in the shadowy recesses of such impor­tant and life-­saving decisions, t­ here existed the haunting absent presence of transmisogyny and what it means to pass—­itself determined through a nontrans episteme (Glover, 2016). Even in transcentric spaces like drag and ball culture, where trans ­women and femininity are celebrated in incredibly liberatory ways, the notions of realness and passability carry with them a nontrans affective residue. Th ­ ere is always a way, then, that trans w ­ omen need to disidentify (Muñoz, 1999) with passability, re/working the notion into one that works for them, all while recognizing that the superstructure from which it emanates may be working against them. Quoted at length below, Estelle’s conversation with her interviewer exposed the way transmisogyny and passability haunted her through her one way of decompressing from the vio­lence of material life: her involvement in multiplayer video games: ES T EL L E:  ​The real­ity of the situation is that b ­ ecause of my past experiences, if

I portray myself as anything other than a man in game, ­there is a lot of like sexism [laughs ner­vously]. Which is the downside of [gaming], so actually, in order for my own ability to play without being harassed by p­ eople, I have to kind of pipe down. IN T ERVIE WER:  ​How do you feel about that? ES T EL L E:  ​I wish it ­wasn’t that way [laughs]. I mean, I’m just one person. I ­can’t change the dynamic of that overnight. IN T ERVIE WER:  ​Well, I guess I’m wondering how you feel being a trans w ­ oman who ­doesn’t feel able to play a ­woman video game character. ES T EL L E:  ​I mean, it’s another way of nonaffirmation. It’s one of t­ hose ­things that’s unfortunate b­ ecause ­these games are kind of like my recreational ­thing to kind of diffuse from my day. It’s almost like the one ­thing that ­really helps me with that, I c­ an’t be myself in [laughs]. And that’s kind of upsetting, but I never ­really found any replacement for that. You know, being 90 ­percent OK with it is better than not having anything at all that ­really helps me decompress. IN T ERVIE WER:  ​Are t­ here moments where it feels harder than not? ES T EL L E:  ​It depends on the day, but we do a lot of voice chat, and most of the time during the day, when I’m out in public, I tend to modulate my voice [in a] higher pitch. I wish that I could talk to p­ eople in that sort of voice [when gaming], but again that codes me as e­ ither a trans w ­ oman or a cis w ­ oman depending on how they interpret that voice.

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IN T ERVIE WER:  ​Right. ES T EL L E:  ​And that [how ­others code my voice] has caused prob­lems in the

past, too.

­ ere are multiple aspects of transfeminine body management that Estelle poiTh gnantly described through her experience with multiplayer online games. First, it was telling she used the phrase “pipe down” when describing the need to not address the sexism (her word) / transmisogyny (our word) she has experienced. ­Women are often taught to be quiet, and if they speak up, they risk facing threat and vio­lence. While her use of the phrase “pipe down” may have been unconscious, it speaks to Gould’s (2007) articulation of the unnamed and yet charged nature of affect. That is, Estelle did not need to name directly how or why she was using the phrase “pipe down” for it to signal the especially acute form of sexism/transmisogyny she had experienced in the past and was trying to avoid experiencing in the present/future. Estelle also named her experience of isolation, itself a trace of transmisogyny. Put another way, to be determined as not-­woman through how ­others w ­ ere “coding” her voice—­what trans w ­ omen often refer to as clocking / being clocked—­was overwhelming to the point where she felt as if she had no one ­else with whom she could be who she was without needing to manage her voice. And, even if/when she did speak in a higher register, she was still at the whim of nontrans gamers to determine if she was “appropriately” w ­ oman or, at the least, “­woman enough.” This sense of having her trans femininity on display for judgement is alienating in multiple ways. Not only does it create a relationality through which one’s femininity and womanhood is up for debate, but it cleaves one’s sense of self from oneself. In other words, the wonderability of if Estelle would pass as “­woman enough” based on the combination of her playing a w ­ oman character and her voice over the chat feature created a rupture whereby she was made to question her own womanhood. Clearly, Estelle knew she was a ­woman; and yet the absent presence of transmisogyny and passability created a haunting question that lingered in the background: But are you, ­really? This question lurked in Estelle’s ner­vous laughter throughout her exchange with the interviewer, as well as in her comment that she is “just one person” and that she “­can’t change the dynamic of that overnight,” with the “that” indicating transmisogyny. Moreover, when she has attempted to “change the dynamic,” she mentioned that it has “caused prob­lems.” While she did not articulate what the prob­lems ­were specifically, one can read a reassertion of transmisogyny as the likely response. As a response, then, she made an uncomfortable peace with holding onto “being 90 ­percent OK” with her gaming experience. It is impor­tant not to read Estelle’s docility ­here as a fault or some inability to be herself in any way. Instead, what we as authors are attempting to show in this extended

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passage, as well as this specific language around Estelle “being 90 ­percent OK” with her gaming, is the depth and extent to which transfeminine body management is mediated by the affective rubble of transmisogyny and passability. For Estelle, even though she chose not to modify her voice while gaming, she still had to work through what that meant for her being a trans w ­ omen, including what characters she could (not) play, how she compartmentalized her gaming practice, the way she used gaming to decompress from her material existence as a trans w ­ oman, and the vari­ous feelings that came with her voice modulation decisions. For Estelle, a character was not just a character but an extension of her own trans becoming, one of many ­future pos­si­ble selves. Thus, to have that possibility violently foreclosed as a result of the absent presence of transmisogyny and passability was an experience that was exceedingly affective.

Conclusion Throughout this chapter, participants provide multiple ways to think about not just the shape and time of the Internet but the sensations that circulate throughout. Additionally, participants gestured to how ­these affective structures ­were circumscribed by racialization and transmisogyny. The choices they made online, even ­those that provided a proliferated sense of livability, ­were not ­free from compromise and critique, even from themselves. For example, the way AB contended with racism online or the way Estelle and Jamie dealt with the always shifting im/possibilities of their transfemininity confounded as much as it expanded possibilities for trans life online. ­Because of the unconscious workings of affect, many participants did not “name” t­ hese structures of feeling; however, that does not make them any less “real” or profoundly life-­altering. Indeed, the inability to name is rarely a good judge for the level to which something may animate the course of one’s life. And, as many participants noted, to name certain affective occurrences would be to face an acute threat, one they had ­either experienced in the past or they knew ­others with similar subjectivities had. Thus, t­ here was a motivation to not name or, at best, to name other­wise through elision, silence, indirection, or substitution. For example, Estelle’s ner­vous laughter was an indirect way of signaling past harm. Participants also often used silence in a manner that signaled regret or want, as if the act of speaking such senses into being may overwhelm. Similarly, participants’ naming of gender euphoria, while joyous, elided the unpindownable and fleeting nature of the affective happening. The intensity of gender euphoria and of participants’ experiences of it spoke to a desire to reside in an unresideable feeling. As discussed through this chapter, the very nature of gender euphoria is one of being in a drug-­like state mediated through the Internet and, as such, is a sensorium marked by instability. Rather than

88  •  Trans(form)ing Online

signaling a loss or negation of joy, however, the fleeting nature of gender euphoria as experienced and mediated through an understanding of the Internet as affective opens ­toward ­future possibilities for what trans life online has, does, and can mean. Of par­tic­u­lar importance from our affective analy­sis is the concept of extracorporeality. Specifically, the Internet is a threshold across which one can envision other­wise worlds that do not rely solely on unified, coherent understandings of the self; nor is embodiment the only venue through which to reckon with trans life chances. Our elucidation of extracorporeality provides a lens through which to recognize and harness the multidimensionality of trans. That is, trans is not just a noun or adjective but an affective happening that can shift perspectives for how to imagine liberation and ­f uture elsewheres. Such extracorporeal thinking/feeling stretches what trans can do, investing in a par­ tic­u­lar plasticity that encourages what may be(come), and not just for trans ­people. As we explore through our final chapter, extracorporeality not only helps us explode static notions of identity / identity development but also signals vari­ous futurities across gender/sex/race/disability subjectivities. The neologism is not just a critique on the corporeal/embodied nature of identity and identity development (though it is certainly that); it invites an excessiveness whereby trans life online signals modes through which dispossessed populations may sense the livability of life across dif­fer­ent registers.

5

The Internet as Sartorial To say gender is a relational experience of/with/in the world is axiomatic. Similarly, to suggest the Internet has become a mode through which ­people envision sartorial choices seems a bit pedestrian in its naming. Multiple scholars have done impressive work to explore the ways communities have used Internet technologies to transmit sartorial expressions. For example, in her beautiful text Asians Wear Clothes on the Internet, Pham (2015) elucidated the interworkings of how racialization, gender, sexuality, and class mediated the world of Asian style bloggers. Her analy­sis also showed the power of mimicry and repetition as a mode through which style extended beyond personal choice, including how systemic racism, sexism, and homo-­/queerphobia operated in global fashion brands appropriating signature poses of personal style bloggers (e.g., Fendi’s appropriation of the “Bryanboy gesture” in their 2006 handbag ad campaign). While Pham discussed the three p­ eople she profiled in her text as being part of an elite set of Asian personal style bloggers, the “taste work” the three produced, and how it was further reproduced across the Internet, signals something deeper than the use of a par­tic­u­lar platform to fashion the body. Namely, Pham’s articulation of taste work gestures ­toward how Internet-­mediated sartorial choices may become a mode of coming into senses of selves and communities. That is, taste work is not merely about envisioning or transmitting fashion choices and images but about desiring re/ fashionings of the self through the Internet and using virtual platforms to create communities rooted in t­ hese re/fashionings. For example, when Fendi released their 2006 handbag ad campaign, it was Bryanboy’s fanbase (developed through his regular blogging) who banded together to expose the com­pany’s 89

90  •  Trans(form)ing Online

appropriation. Bryanboy has also used TikTok and Instagram to maintain and grow his fanbase. In a contour of Bryanboy’s online presence that is particularly curious in relation to this current proj­ect, he has even used ­these two platforms to cultivate a character he poses as: the gay divorcé. The character has an entire backstory, and he films himself d­ oing a variety of everyday ­things to develop the character, which is, in some senses, an exaggerated and fantastical extension of his IRL life. Bryanboy’s extension of self—or, as we may talk about it through our work, his proliferating of multiple selves across virtual and material worlds—is itself a form of queer camp, an excess(ive) rearticulation of self that is steeped in Bryanboy’s racialized gender/sex/uality as a Filipino queer man living in Sweden with his husband. Although he does not claim to be trans, his use of virtual platforms not only to re/fashion his multiple, profuse selves but to also build and maintain a vibrant fanbase speaks to the sort of taste work in which student participants engaged. In this chapter, we argue that the Internet is a sartorial playground for trans ­people. Moreover, we show how the Internet as sartorial unravels the multiple forms of virtual engagement that is trans (un)becoming online. That is, we explore how some participants used the Internet to dream present/future selves, including how they did not feel a need to create one image or likeness in which they felt a need to stay rooted. Much of t­ hese de/re/fashionings of self w ­ ere guided by participants’ finding or playing with styles they wanted to replicate. Some of ­these styles even rippled out into material worlds (e.g., haircuts and more gender-­ambiguous style investments). And yet some participants discussed their sartorial choices as a form of disinvestment. Namely, participants shared how they moved through a pro­cess of unbecoming through the Internet. They used nonhuman avatars and images to represent themselves, as well as using platforms that ­were text based rather than voice based. Th ­ ese choices, which we argue are a form of re/fashioning present/future pos­si­ble selves, w ­ ere always made in relation to participants’ transness, both as an interior understanding and an exterior structure of feeling mediated by notions of realness and passing, as well as the weaponization of such notions by nontrans ­people. In essence, we argue that while the Internet as a sartorial playground allowed some participants to create and construct new/different/plural selves/somebodies, other participants used the very same playground to defashion and unbecome themselves into nobodies. ­Here, we draw again from Hayward’s (2017) work on trans negativity, as well as from Tourmaline’s visual artistry to explore what productive potential may exist for desiring states of unbecoming/embracing a practice of nobodying.

#ThisIsWhatTransLooksLike: Possibilities and Punctures In the 1995 film Clueless, ­there is an early scene where Cher—­played by Alicia Silverstone—is trying to select an outfit for her first day ­going back to school.

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Rather than ­going to her closet, Cher goes to a desktop computer and pulls up a program that has e­ very article of her clothing cata­loged. Through the computer program’s matching algorithm, Cher chooses what would become an iconic look from the film: a yellow and black plaid blazer and skirt, a yellow knit cardigan over a white crop top tee, and white thigh-­high tights. While Clueless is not considered a trans film (though a very good argument could be—­ and prob­ably has been—­made that it is a rather queer film), the way Cher uses her computer to curate her own sartorial choice speaks directly to the work participants made the Internet do. That is, the participants in our proj­ect talked about turning to the Internet to seek, curate, and extend their own sartorial choices as trans ­people, even as some of ­these choices included the occlusion of self, which we describe l­ ater in this chapter as a pro­cess of defashioning the self. Put another way, in a moment when trans life offline is increasingly precarious, the Internet provided a way for participants to find, try out, and think about how, if, and when to move sartorial choices offline. Furthermore, even when participants did not move their stylings offline, their decisions ­were not a signal of the unreality of their transness. Much to the contrary, one of our main arguments through this text is of the real­ity of the Internet itself, that the Internet does not require a movement from on-­ to offline for something, someone, or a decision to gain a semblance of clarity or veracity. Moreover, our proj­ect highlights the multiplicity of selves the Internet aided in catalyzing for trans participants, signaling t­here has never been one singular look trans p­ eople ever need(ed) to maintain across spaces/ times to be “­really trans.” Indeed, to require or demand this of trans ­people is a ciscentric desire rooted in an antiquated need for coherency eschewed by the very idea of trans. In other words, if trans is marked by an ever-­expanding capacious desire for more, an affective excessiveness from and for gendered ­futures, it would be antithetical to suggest that to be trans was, is, or ­ought to be about finding one unified look that one carries throughout their worlds. This does not foreclose the possibility that some trans p­ eople do this—­indeed, some of the participants we talked with did and likely still do. And also, the opening up provided through recognizing plurality through the Internet does not negate or resist ­these two possibilities from coexisting. Several participants spoke about their Bitmoji avatars being a significant way they ­were able to explore their style through the Internet. For example, LP said, I have a Bitmoji. That was one of the funnest [sic], b­ ecause I got my Bitmoji in high school, and one of the funnest [sic] small ­little aspects of my transition was being able to change my Bitmoji. . . . ​Even though it was pretty much the same hairstyle and stuff, just the fact that t­ hose features on the Bitmoji looked less feminine, was r­ eally me, when I was still kind of stuck in like bureaucratic waiting hell. . . . ​So having that and being able to [think], “OK yeah, so

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eventually I’ll look dif­fer­ent,” and be able to represent that through an avatar was ­really fun.

Similar to LP, CO found possibility through creating a Bitmoji avatar. Speaking about their avatar, CO stated, “One day when I was feeling super shitty about myself, but thinking about trans stuff a lot, I downloaded Bitmoji and created a male [sic] Bitmoji for myself and ­didn’t even share it with friends, but I just had it, ’cuz I wanted to see what it would look like.” Both LP and CO found possibility through Bitmoji. Far from a perfect avatar creation app (as CO named and we discuss below), it allowed several participants to envision new trans fashionings. In some senses, they w ­ ere able to create their own possibility models through the app, projecting themselves into the f­ uture in dif­fer­ent, exciting, and desirable constellations of selves. Furthermore, as CO stated and LP intimated, they did not even need to share their newly fashioned selves with anyone for them to be affirming. LP’s avatar provided a sense of comfort while navigating state-­sponsored ­legal and medical apparatuses that administer gender, while CO’s provided comfort at low emotional points. Both Bitmoji avatars ­were ­doing similar sorts of future-­oriented taste work; LP mentioned looking at his Bitmoji and thinking, “OK yeah, so eventually I’ll look dif­fer­ ent,” and CO made theirs “ ’cuz I wanted to see what it would look like.” Moreover, in d­ oing this similar sort of taste work, LP’s and CO’s Bitmoji avatars provided a level of comfort in the pre­sent tense of ongoing erasure, hurt, and harm they experienced in their IRL lives. Specifically, LP’s Bitmoji was helpful when he was ­going through the “hell” of the pro­cess of legally and medically administered gender, while CO used theirs to help stop them from “feeling super shitty about” themself. H ­ ere, then, the sartorial choices LP and CO w ­ ere exploring through the Internet had a temporal pliability to them that not only aided in traversing their pre­sent tenses but also allowed them to envision wholly new ­future tenses. Participants also accessed multiple online platforms that ­were structured around easily searchable archives. ­These archives, often formed around image tags or hashtags, allowed participants to find quickly images of specific nodes of taste work they desired (e.g., genderqueer). In other words, the way certain online platforms used self-­generated tags or hashtags to provide an ever-­ expanding, easily searchable public archive allowed trans participants to learn what sartorial choices they gravitated ­toward and then to use ­these newly acquired understandings to envision ­future pos­si­ble selves. For example, some participants discussed the importance of Tumblr as a site for accessing vari­ous trans sartorial archives. As Andie stated: “I used to use Tumblr b­ ecause Tumblr was the only way that I could find out physically what happens to your body on testosterone without ­going to a porn site. But since they switched their policies that kind of stuff is no longer on t­ here, so I r­ eally s­ topped using Tumblr.”

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Andie’s comment is significant in multiple ways. First, Andie noted how Tumblr was one of the few places they could see visions of a ­future pos­si­ble self ­after having started taking testosterone. Using Tumblr as a searchable database of images or­ga­nized by vari­ous tags, Andie and other trans participants w ­ ere able to envision how they could refashion their body morphology through hormone replacement treatment (HRT). A distinctly dif­fer­ent version of taste work, participants’ desiring forward of dif­fer­ent constructions of embodiments could—­and we argue should—be understood as a form of sartorial choice. That is, participants ­were using Tumblr to refashion their bodies as well as the wardrobes with which they adorned their bodies. Second, Andie noted Tumblr as “the only way” to find this sort of embodied refashioning via HRT “without ­going to a porn site.” Th ­ ere is a body of scholarship about chasers, or nontrans ­people who desire, seek, or fetishize trans ­people b­ ecause of their transness (e.g., Tompkins, 2014). While it is slightly ancillary to the arc of this text to delve deeply into this lit­er­a­ture, it bears noting given Andie’s comment. Specifically, they note Tumblr and porn sites as the two most readily accessible and known spaces to see how trans p­ eople who engage HRT as a technique of embodied refashioning may look through the pro­cess. In thinking of where images of transness are archived online in easily searchable ways, Tumblr and pornography are not only main areas, but Andie makes a value judgment in discerning between the two. Without naming it specifically, Andie suggests Tumblr is where they can go to indulge their “real” interest in refashioning their body, or a way of thinking alongside other trans p­ eople to do the community-­based taste work of desiring an embodied refashioning of the self through HRT. Conversely, Andie marks pornographic sites as spaces where nontrans ­people—­some, but perhaps not all, of whom may be chasers—go to look at or fetishize trans bodies. While the differentiation Andie poses is not nearly as clear-­cut as they suggest, the adjudication of a normative value judgment signals an impor­tant mode through which Andie thinks about what Halberstam (2005) discussed as the transgender gaze. In his text, Halberstam used trans characters in film to tease apart how audiences ­were encouraged to e­ ither look at or look with trans p­ eople. Without knowing it, Andie used this same type of analy­sis to suppose Tumblr was a sartorial space through which trans ­people could look with each other to envision embodied refashionings, whereas porn sites w ­ ere places nontrans ­people went to look at trans bodies in vari­ous embodied states. Fi­nally, Andie’s comment illuminates the change in Tumblr’s adult content policy, as well as the influence of this policy change on trans user engagement. During the course of data collection for this proj­ect, Tumblr modified their policy about which posts would be marked as pornographic in nature. Many recognized this policy change as deleterious for queer and trans world making, especially as many of the ways queer and trans ­people envision who they can

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become involve embodied taste work. Andie’s comment about the “kind of stuff that is no longer on” Tumblr ­after the policy change was a recognition of the platform’s inability to meet their demand of thinking forward about how they could refashion their body through HRT. Specifically, ­because Tumblr moved to marking more queer and trans content as pornographic, and therefore censoring the content, queer and trans users used the platform less frequently (we discuss this “death of Tumblr” more in the following chapter). W ­ hether as a form of protest or b­ ecause they no longer found the site useful to find the sorts of images they desired, the significance of participants no longer using Tumblr (or, at the least, using it less) ­after the com­pany’s policy change should not be overlooked. Thinking back to Andie’s comment about the most readily accessible places to look with/at trans embodiments, if Tumblr was no longer an option—or, at the least, a significantly less good option for the sorts of community-­curated image collections trans p­ eople needed and sought—­and if it was no longer an option b­ ecause trans content was increasingly being flagged as pornographic, then the message conveyed to trans ­people was that who they ­were or desired to be(come) was equally pornographic. While ­there certainly is a beauty in the sex/uality of trans p­ eople, t­ here is a danger in asserting that trans embodiment is largely or solely a pornographic or sexual endeavor. Thinking back to Halberstam’s notion of the transgender gaze, to pose trans embodiment as the main/sole property of porn sites may lead trans youth to think they are only good for creating and providing plea­sure for nontrans ­people who seek to consume and fetishize their bodies. In other words, they may lose a sense that they can look with other trans p­ eople to envision f­ uture pos­si­ble embodied refashionings, substituting such a possibility with a resignation to being looked at as fetishized bodies for the purpose of providing plea­sure to nontrans ­others. Tumblr, then, was deeply impor­tant in relation to trans life online, and its policy change marked a moment of foreclosure and communal loss for trans participants. As with most t­ hings, e­ very possibility often has a shadow side that punctures its endurance. In terms of the fashioning possibilities of the Internet, participants described several ways that raced and gendered subjectivities mediated taste work online. That is, while participants discussed a par­tic­u­lar comfort moving online to find ways to fashion themselves, they ­were also aware of how ­these fashionings ­were themselves fashioned by structural forms of oppression that permeated the spatial and temporal dimensions of the Internet. As previously discussed, the Internet is certainly a public commons, and as such, it is imbued with all that such a naming entails, including being continually warped through systemic vio­lence. AB spoke about the racial stratification of the Internet as a barrier to the sorts of taste work he wanted to do. He stated, “For me right now, I noticed I’ll spend time like on Instagram looking like, ‘OK, where are all my Latinx

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folks at?’ And I strug­gle and I c­ an’t find them.” It is impor­tant ­here to note that it is not that Latinx spaces do not exist on the Internet, but that AB did not have easy access to them. In other words, it was not the recognition of the Internet as framed through racism that is significant ­here—to be sure, it is significant, but just not in working through this par­tic­u­lar analytical moment—­ but in how the unfolding of racism through online platforms made the Latinx taste work and styling AB wanted to do less pos­si­ble. In her book On Being Included, Ahmed (2012) wrote about institutions of higher education being akin to seas of whiteness through which faculty, staff, and students of color had to wade. AB’s comment—­“OK, where are all my Latinx folks at?”—­gestures to the difficulty of wading through the sea of whiteness that is the Internet and the way such a slogging through creates an exhaustion for trans p­ eople of color seeking to style themselves in ways that resonate with their senses of racialized selves. In a similar manner, CO discussed their frustration with the Bitmoji avatar creation platform. While they used the platform to envision f­ uture pos­si­ ble embodied refashionings, they mentioned the impossibilities of the platform to think beyond the gender binary. Specifically, they stated, “My friends kept trying to get me to get Bitmoji and at first I ­didn’t want to do it. I ­didn’t want to create one for a while b­ ecause it would make me pick a gender.” As CO noted, the Bitmoji app requires the user to pick e­ ither a “man” or “­woman” body. Once the user makes this forced choice, ­there are several embodied options that are foreclosed to the user. For example, when a “­woman” body is chosen, the user cannot add facial hair to their avatar, and when a “man” body is chosen, the user cannot create a body that has breasts. Th ­ ere are also ways the forced choice of binary gender in relation to bodies maps onto sets of clothing in Bitmoji, further suggesting the app’s investments in gender binary discourse that tracks and traps many trans ­people into online lives that may be dissonant with their desired modes of virtual taste work. Furthermore, as AB’s and CO’s comments name, while they use vari­ous online platforms to explore embodied refashionings, they do so through racialized and gendered discourses that continually negate the sorts of trans multiplicities they seek. This, then, means they—­and, by extension, other trans p­ eople—­need to understand the always conditional nature of online platforms to explore, move ­toward, and desire beyond embodied refashionings of selves.

Re/Conceptualizing Mimetic Fashionings Years ago, while conducting research for what would become her first book proj­ect, one of Z’s participants, Adem, described his coming into his transness as a practice of “stealing parts of other p­ eople’s identity” (Nicolazzo, 2017b, p. 56). Although the word was perhaps imprecise—it was not that who Adem

96  •  Trans(form)ing Online

“stole” from no longer had that component of their self, ­after all—­Adem was expressing how he began moving into his trans becoming through other trans ­people’s fashionings. Put another way, Adem was able to re/conceptualize gendered possibilities by exploring, finding, and then replicating ­those gendered fashionings of self that felt good. As we went through the interview data from this current proj­ect, we noticed a similar sensibility of participants partaking in mimicry as an envisioning of ­future pos­si­ble selves. In some senses, participants’ ability to see other ­people who ­were fashioning their bodies in ways that resonated with whom they wanted to become was vital for unlocking the grammar of trans. Put another way, where they previously may not have had the language of trans, they saw images of transness that created an affective trace they could then follow to come into their own personal re/conceptualizations of trans fashionings. Mimicry, especially as it related to the ability for participants to unlock trans grammars to which they previously did not have access, was often enhanced through the repetition of images they saw online. For example, while t­ here w ­ ere moments when participants discussed being moved by seeing one specific image of a desired trans ­future, the motivation to re/conceptualize their own trans fashionings often came about through seeing a repetition of images pointing ­toward an overall style. Such a repetition offered participants a glimpse into a vision of trans community through a re/fashioning of the self, in addition to whom they could become as a part of that trans community. Through their experience of repetition, participants ­were able to develop a comfort with the transgressive re/fashioning of selves they desired but from which they had been socialized away. In some ways, then, the multiplicity of images participants discussed seeing through Tumblr, or the way hashtags make sets/categories of images readily accessible on Twitter and Instagram (e.g., #TransIsBeautiful, which we discuss further below), created a sense of neocommunity, which then may have aided in participants developing the confidence to move ­toward the latent affinity the images helped expose. If two is com­pany and three is a crowd, then the repetition of looks, styles, and images, all of which algorithms can collate into specific categories that include hundreds and thousands of examples, created a comforting cacophony of transness from which participants could mimic their own present/future pos­si­ble selves. They could then add to the expanding online archive by posting their own re/fashioned gendered selves, which might then provide similar sensations for other p­ eople searching the Internet for whom they could become. In speaking about their ability to refashion themselves through the Internet, Sam discussed the importance of seeing trans repre­sen­ta­tion. Specifically, they named trans-­only Slack and Twitter spaces, nonbinary-­specific Facebook groups, and Instagram as being places that ­were “I guess impor­tant for me in terms of I can sort of see the issues and the feelings that I have reflected back.”

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The notion of reflection is central to that of mimicry, as it provides a sense of validation for the form one has taken / is taking / desires to take. Sam’s joining online spaces was a way to both search for their own likeness and, upon finding it, be able to take comfort in that likeness. This comfort in reflection is not a narcissistic endeavor but a necessary affirmation of the sartorial work trans ­people seek to do online. ­Here, the screen acts as a meta­phorical mirror, with Internet communities and subcommunities providing the stuff of desiring f­ uture pos­si­ble sartorial selves. Stylings and refashionings of both the trans body and clothing become wholly more pos­si­ble through t­ hese online engagements, as participants’ gazing at who they are and can become, and having their (pos­si­ble) selves reflected back, becomes a cyclical pro­cess in the ongoing re/ crafting of trans taste work. ­Later in their interview, Sam came back to the notion of stylistic mimicry: I’ve seen some discourse about this too, but just sort of, like how it resonates for me is just that, when I started presenting in a way, and this has a lot to do with seeing other p­ eople pre­sent and identify in a way that resonated with me, but once I started d­ oing that, ­there was just a sense of . . . ​like gender euphoria with being able to pre­sent that way and with seeing that reflected back. So, I guess that’s why trans ­people like taking selfies. . . . ​A nd I also have been exposed to conversations about t­ here [being] a po­liti­cal aspect to it also; repre­sen­ta­tion is impor­tant. (emphasis added)

Not only had Sam “seen some discourse” about the notion of finding oneself through mimicry—­itself a form of replication, a d­ oing through hearing about ­doing—­but this was something that resonated with them, as the italicized portion of the quote indicates. To style and fashion the trans body is not solely an individual proj­ect, but as Sam indicated, one that takes place in community, and specifically, one that has a decidedly online dimensionality to it. Moreover, as Sam went on to name, trans p­ eople taking and posting selfies online was not just an indulgent or narcissistic act. It was a part of a larger po­liti­cal proj­ect of repre­sen­ta­tion, which Sam noted as being “impor­tant.” While they did not explain exactly what they meant by using the word impor­tant ­here, ­there are two pos­si­ble readings. The first is the sort of repre­sen­ta­tional politic that is outward/nontrans focused, which acts as a quasi demand that hearkens back to early gay-­liberation protest chants (i.e., “­We’re h ­ ere; w ­ e’re queer; get used to it!”). The second reading, however, is a more intimate, internal/trans-­focused reading. This understanding of the word impor­tant suggests that to see and be seen is itself a way to cultivate and recognize the desire that drives trans online sartorial choice. Put another way, the importance Sam noted about seeing current and pos­si­ble repre­sen­ta­tions of transness via selfies made their wanting transness in the now as well as the beyond all the more pos­si­ble. It was in and

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through t­ hese repeated images, in and through the mirrorlike quality of the Internet, that Sam and other trans participants ­were able to develop their own unfolding sartorial choice. Even forms of defashioning the body, which we talk about in further depth in the next section of this chapter, developed through mimicry. That is, the ways trans participants sought to deemphasize their own corporeal forms through sartorial choices that embraced disembodied repre­sen­ta­tions of self w ­ ere also ones they picked up from ­others. For example, in discussing their Tumblr icon, Lab shared, “My icon, I got it from somebody e­ lse. [It] is a ­little cartoon sheep over the nonbinary flag.” In what might have at first seemed like a throwaway comment, Lab articulated a mimicked sensibility of defashioning their body and, therefore, of reproducing a form of trans taste work that allowed for a pos­si­ble self that embraced a moving away from material/corporeal re-­ presentations of what trans ­ought to, could, or might look like. In what follows, we delve deeper into this form of mimicry, thinking through what it means to become somebody through a defashioning of the self that we describe through what Tourmaline describes as becoming nobodies.

Becoming Nobodies During her 2016 commencement speech at Hampshire College, Tourmaline, a Black trans w ­ oman artist, archivist, and activist, discussed the nobodying pro­cess of structural vio­lence within institutions of higher education. Specifically, Tourmaline spoke about the unmooring effects of t­ hese vio­lences on dispossessed student populations, some of whom are involved in attempts to change their institutions through activism. She spoke of nobodying as a double-­ looped event in which institutions first un/make dispossessed populations by “treat[ing] them like they are nobodies and that their life [sic] does not m ­ atter” (Reina, 2016, para. 6).1 ­Here, the institution—­which is to say, institutional agents whose actions cohere into a discourse that charts a path for the overarching proj­ect of university life in local and global modes—is the agent provocateur as well as the site for the ongoing structural vio­lence that delimits life for dispossessed populations. ­There is a nefarious edge to this aspect of institutional nobodying, as it stems from a social institution (i.e., higher education) many discuss as demo­cratizing, well-­intentioned, and, at its most hyperbolic, a mode through which to address social inequities. Thus, the espoused values and discourse of the proj­ect of the university occludes its investments in the ongoing logics of vio­lence and killability directed t­ oward already vulnerable, marginalized, and dispossessed ­peoples. Understood from this vantage point, the university becomes a deadening zone, a space in/from which dispossessed populations are deemed nobody upon arrival, if they can even gain admittance in the first place (e.g., Marine, 2017a; Salazar, In review).

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And yet Tourmaline draws from her legacy of Black queer and trans activism to reformulate nobodying as a pro­cess through which life can and does persist despite de jure structural vio­lence. Mirroring the aforementioned discussion of disidentification as an episto-­ontological twisting of material conditions of life for queer ­people of color, Tourmaline suggests a way that dispossessed populations can revel in nobodyness. Through sheer agentic force, she gestured ­toward a vision of subaltern life that is not invested in what “normative” or “majoritarian” perspectives think but is instead squarely focused on the past/present/future tenses of ­those who are dispossessed by the (proj­ect of the) institution. Quoted at length below, Tourmaline stated, We run roots under­ground like rhizomes, like crabgrass, only to pop up above­ground to do our ­thing, to bring our ­thing to the world or to bring our ­thing back home—­because sometimes as a nobody y­ ou’ve still got to be somebody for a moment, sometimes ­you’ve gotta go get that job or that degree, sometimes you are sent to do a ­thing, sent in the way Sylvia Rivera fought her way to speak on stage at the gay pride rally in 1973, a time when assimilation meant that the p­ eople whose life and ­labor was the constitutional ground on which the modern queer movement was built w ­ ere made to feel exiled from that very movement. But she was sent and got on stage and roared that she’s been trying to get up ­there all day for your gay ­brothers and your gay ­sisters in jail. It’s ok to be a somebody in your nobodiness! (Reina, 2016, para. 46)

To be nobody is not a failed subject position in Tourmaline’s disidentification-­ steeped retelling. Instead, to be nobody (from the vantage point of heteropatriarchal, settler-­colonial, anti-­Black un/making) is to be somebody in the Black, queer/trans, Indigenous imaginary. It is not that nontrans ­people are re/ cast as nobodies but that they are just framed out of view to recognize the full potentiality that is queer-­and trans-­of-­color life, a making of it to be “ok to be a somebody in [one’s] nobodiness” b­ ecause t­ hose with whom one desires to be in community are t­ hose who have never invested in the institutional logics of vio­lence and killability that mark the university—­both as a site and a proj­ect—­ that as itself failed and ruinous. Thinking through the disidentification-­laden possibilities of nobodying as a form of sartorial investment means a twisting of the absent presence of the ongoing structural vio­lence of gender binary discourse throughout institutions of higher education such that trans participants actively chose when, how, if, and with whom to shroud themselves from view online. In other words, they strategically disidentified with the absent presenceness of harm by themselves becoming pre­sent through absence, by becoming a somebody through nobodying. As we discuss below, some participants chose to engage with the Internet in ways that separated them from their own bodily forms. For example, some

100  •  Trans(form)ing Online

participants chose avatars that ­were nonhuman images to represent their online selves or purposefully chose to engage mostly on platforms that did not require or encourage vocal interaction. ­Here, participants actively chose to become pre­sent in certain dis/embodied forms that signaled a twisting of absence. It was not an absence forced through structures of vio­lence and erasure, but an agentic choice to be pre­sent through rearticulated forms of absence that envisioned lives other­wise. In other words, participants w ­ ere no longer subjected to the absent presence of structural vio­lence that curtailed their life chances but held their reenvisioned absent presences as object, becoming somebodies through an agentic form of nobodying. We argue that such a disidentification represents a sartorial refashioning of trans becoming. Perhaps more accurately put, the agentic embrace of nobodying is a defashioning that signals a turn ­toward trans unbecoming as possibility and, perhaps, although not necessarily, a turn imbued with a modicum of liberatory potential.2 In essence, trans participants moved t­ oward and through nobodying in ways that disentangled them from their bodily form. If fashioning the self is a form of adornment and embellishment of the self, then one can understand defashioning as a form of disidentifying with the self through modes of distancing or other­wise being pre­sent through absence and obscurity. Rather than becoming more embodied, trans participants who engaged in this form of defashioning invested in excessive modes of unbecoming, thus allowing them “to be a somebody in their nobodiness.” H ­ ere, even the pro­cess of fashioning is a site of disidentification, allowing participants to invest in f­ uture pos­si­ble selves by disinvesting in the ways they are un/made by broader social structures of vio­lence. LE noted her increasing comfort living online given her ability to not use her voice. In a turn that is strikingly familiar for a lot of trans girls, ­women, and feminine ­people, the voice can often be a “give away” of one’s transness. In other words, transfeminine ­people are often “clocked” for having overly masculine voices. This type of vio­lence structures transfeminine p­ eople’s lives in two ways: not only do they face forms of overt threat and harm if nontrans ­people clock them, but ­because of the trace of transmisogyny from which nontrans ­people’s clocking of voice modulation occurs, many transfeminine ­people often invest in forms of self-­hatred regarding their voices. In other words, the externalized forms of transmisogyny that curtail life chances for trans girls, ­women, and feminine ­people are also often turned inward as trans girls, w ­ omen, and feminine p­ eople learn to hate themselves through the hatred of nontrans ­others. In LE’s interview, she stated, “It’s dif­fer­ent online ’cuz it’s mostly just text. But in person, it’s all voice and stuff and I’m pretty uncomfortable with my voice, so it’s just like . . . ​[laughs ner­vously]. So it’s just more comfortable being out on the Internet.” LE’s laughter was ner­vous, with the silence of her trailing off signaling what her discomfort with her voice meant for her existence

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offline. While LE did not talk about specific moments of fear or harm through her life—we as researchers also did not ask—­what becomes clear through the ner­vous laughter and silence of trailing off is that she desired a way to defashion her transness by becoming voiceless. While it may seem antithetical—­ people often talk about amplifying or giving voice, not taking it away or becoming voiceless—­LE’s movement t­ oward the Internet as a way to strip herself of her voice was a way to become a somebody through the nobodying pro­ cess of defashioning. That is, she became more comfortable online specifically ­because how she engaged online was largely text based, and thus she was able to defashion her body of her voice, which may mark her as not-­woman in threatening, harmful, and dysphoria-­inducing ways. Lab also defashioned themselves through nobodying, specifically on Tumblr. ­Here, we recall a comment that we discussed in the previous section on mimicry, as it also speaks to how Lab was involved in the nobodying pro­cess. They stated that on “Tumblr my icon—­I got it from somebody else—is currently a l­ ittle cartoon sheep over the nonbinary flag. I’m just a nonbinary sheep [laughs]. So that’s my icon on ­there right now. It’s never been my face on Tumblr. I usually would put like a cool rock or like a—­just anything e­ lse.” For Lab, they never used their face as their Tumblr icon, but would instead use animals, rocks, cartoons, and other avatars as a form of defashioned self-­representation. In talking with Lab, they did not have much of a reason for this choice, but then again, it is not why they made this choice but that they made and kept making it that seems impor­tant ­here. In other words, Lab’s dearticulation of online presence through bodily absence is, in and of itself, a telling moment regarding the ability for the Internet to provide a sartorial space for nobodying. Furthermore, through the pro­cess and act of nobodying, Lab was able to live online in more comfortable ways that facilitated easier and, for them, more genuine connections with peers. In other words, Lab was able to be somebody through nobodying. Similarly, R spoke about not posting pictures of themselves online. In talking about this choice, they stated: I ­don’t ever ­really post pictures of myself online typically, even on my Facebook. I usually [laughs], I usually [let] other p­ eople like tag me or what­ever. But on Tumblr, it’s pretty much anonymous. Like if you ­were looking for me and you knew, you know, my outside and my inside [laughs], if that makes sense, you could prob­ably figure it out. But it’s mostly anonymous. I ­don’t post pictures of myself on Tumblr. I thought about it. I find a lot of comfort in seeing other ­people though that are out and wanna take pictures of themselves like, “Hey, feeling ­really dapper ­today.” That gives me a bit of pride like even if I’m not out I can kind of like feel a part of the community and safe through other ­people [laughs].

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In this statement, R talked about being more open online, despite not posting pictures. That is, R did not feel that their engagement with the nobodying pro­ cess meant they w ­ ere somehow not trans enough. This is significant, as the overarching proj­ect of visibility and repre­sen­ta­tional politics within the mainstream gay and lesbian movement often places enormous pressure on queer and trans youth to be “out and proud,” suggesting “it gets better” if they do so. The logics of white supremacy, compulsory able-­bodiedness, and upward class mobility that course through the overt focus on visibility and repre­sen­ta­tion are both shockingly clear, as well as dangerous for many queer and trans youth (see chapter 7 for a more detailed discussion of visibility). As a Chinese gender-­ nonconforming person, R was likely having to navigate discourses of fetishism of the Asian body, as well as the ways whiteness affixed to transness. Therefore, their re­sis­tance to being somebody (through the posting of selfies) was an impor­tant rebuke of the damaging effects of white supremacy, and a defashioned critique of mainstream modes of trans becoming. In other words, through maintaining a defashioned state of being nobody, R was able to think differently about being somebody online. In what is perhaps the most telling moment in R’s commentary, they further stated, “I ­don’t know; I’m just generally more open on a virtual space ’cuz ­there’s that anonymity of it. It’s not a dual life. It’s just an extension of myself that’s a l­ittle more fr ­ ee” (emphasis added). H ­ ere, R stated clearly that becoming nobody, and dis/embodying a nobodied positionality, allowed for them to be “more open.” For R, this pro­cess of defashioning, of cultivating their sartorial choice of nobodying, was “not a dual life” but was “an extension of myself that’s a l­ittle more ­free.” R’s freedom as a Chinese trans person, then, was framed through and made pos­si­ble by the nobodying pro­cess. The taste work they ­were invested in—­that of defashioning the body by living as disembodied online—­not only created a level of freedom but also resisted the overarching whiteness of “out and proud” rhe­toric and the proj­ects of visibility and repre­sen­ta­tion that such rhe­toric signals. In this choice, R did not need to be out, did not need to post selfies, and did not need to offer up their body for other’s consumption/fetishization to be trans enough; being trans was, in and of itself, the marker of enoughness. In closing this subsection of analy­sis, it is impor­tant to think about defashioning as a specific mode through which to recognize the technology of trans negativity (Hayward, 2017). That is, the act of defashioning is a disinvestment from the episto-­ontological claim that trans ­people—in par­tic­u­lar, trans ­women and trans ­women of color—do not exist. In other words, defashioning is a way of not answering the claim that we do not exist as trans ­people, and of ­doing so as a part of a po­liti­cal proj­ect that seeks an elsewhere between/underneath/ around/through the vio­lence that saturates quotidian trans life. Defashioning, then, is a part of an other­wise movement (Crawley, 2015) focused on the

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livability of trans lives across vari­ous realms, a way of dis/embodying f­ uture possibilities by which trans p­ eople can move closer together by moving further from how they are un/made by t­ hose who would desire them/us dead.

(Trans) Beauty Standards In a 2015 interview with Cosmopolitan, Laverne Cox discussed the genesis of the hashtag #TransIsBeautiful, including its connections with her being a Black trans ­woman. Quoted at length below, Cox said: I started the hashtag #TransIsBeautiful b­ ecause I was ­doing a lecture and talking about this period in my life when I was being mis-­gendered on the street a lot. I was experiencing lots of harassment—­being called a man a lot on the street—­and that still happens actually. Early in my transition, I would feel like a failure when that would happen. I would be like, “What am I ­doing wrong?” I was in this place where I fi­nally accepted my womanhood and that the world w ­ asn’t seeing that; they ­were calling me a man. . . . ​But I would feel like a failure, like, ­They’re not seeing the person that I know I am! Then I realized that trans ­people, a lot of us, just look dif­fer­ent. We d­ on’t all just look like non-­trans ­people. And that’s OK. It’s not only OK, it’s beautiful. I started looking at all t­ hese trans folks who have ­things about them that are noticeably trans and talking to dif­fer­ent trans ­women who I thought ­were absolutely stunning who ­were still being called a man on the street. If this beautiful girl’s being called a man, like, something’s off. We live in a culture that does not celebrate trans beauty, that d­ oesn’t celebrate the unique ­things that make trans ­people dif­fer­ent. Then, during a lecture, I was like, “Lets tweet and Instagram #TransIsBeautiful as a way to celebrate all t­ hose ­things about us that make us uniquely who we are.” (Manning, 2015, para. 4–7, italics in original)

Cox’s first Instagram image she tagged with the #TransIsBeautiful hashtag is one of her in a strappy black swimsuit on a beach on Fire Island. The location of the photo is iconic for queer world making, and her beauty is, as the above quote notes, an intervention against the logics of killability that ensnare trans ­women, especially Black trans w ­ omen, in the United States. As Cox went on to state in the interview, “For me always, obviously, I am a ­woman. But I am also a black ­woman and I’m also a trans ­woman” (Manning, 2015, para. 8, italics in original). Thus, Cox’s invocation that #TransIsBeautiful is also an articulation of crafting some semblance of online livability for Black trans ­women. It is likely unsurprising that Cox was one of the most named figures when participants w ­ ere asked who their possibility models w ­ ere. While none of the participants mentioned the #TransIsBeautiful hashtag, the focus on Cox as a model for pos­si­ble life, and the prominence of the hashtag in online spaces,

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creates a nexus through which Cox remained omnipresent in trans life and world-­making possibilities on-­and offline. In other words, Cox’s presence—­ both her presence through the material social sphere and her digital presence through the circulation of the #TransIsBeautiful hashtag—is an impor­tant symbol of trans livability and trans sociality. That she is a Black trans w ­ oman adds a vital texture to just who is and can envision themselves through transness, as her reasserting her Blackness and womanhood serves as a consistent reminder that trans can never be wholly metabolized by the twin proj­ects of white supremacy and settler colonialism. And yet the prominence of Cox as a signifier of transness is one full of complication. In a media analy­sis of Janet Mock, Laverne Cox, and TS Madison, Glover (2016) pointed out how discourses of respectability, heteronormativity, and white beauty standards both capture and are furthered by Mock and Cox as highly vis­i­ble Black trans ­women. Specifically, Glover noted how Mock and Cox are both made object through t­ hese discourses (e.g., Cox being used on the 2014 cover of Time magazine to denote the supposed “transgender tipping point”), as well as how they are active participants in the furthering of t­ hese discourses. As Glover (2016) wrote: “While it is impor­tant that the public encounters and understands transgender identities and the vari­ous experiences with discrimination that transgender ­women of color face on a regular basis, it is also impor­tant to understand that not all transwomen have the same experience or relationship to their transgender identity. . . . ​Mass media—­working collaboratively with Laverne Cox and Janet Mock—­creates narratives of transgender w ­ omen of color (TWOC) that employ a compulsory appeal to respectability politics in order to situate them as individuals worthy of incorporation into heteronormative society” (p. 340, emphasis added). Clearly, ­there are several contours to consider through the analy­sis of how Black trans ­women like Mock and Cox are positioned through society, as well as how they position themselves. For example, it remains imperative to think about how their Blackness and their living in an anti-­Black world may produce an affective need or draw ­toward discourses of respectability as a mode through which to make a livable life. Also, the culture industry in which both Mock and Cox are a part leaves l­ittle room for ­women to not conform strictly to white standards of beauty. To their credit, too, Mock and Cox have written and talked eloquently about how their adherence to beauty standards and heterosexuality cause tensions for trans repre­sen­ta­tion. However, that said, the place and stature they have throughout the social sphere may create or intensify pressures and anx­i­ eties for trans ­people who may just be trying to find a community in which to explore their gender and for whom the excruciatingly high standards of social beauty are always beyond our grasp (Nicolazzo, 2019c). In talking about her ­future pos­si­ble self, Jamie discussed what she may look like ­were she to transition. Her conversation was spurred by a Reddit forum

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she had looked through (r/asktransgender), which was a forum for trans p­ eople to connect. In thinking about her pos­si­ble transition, she stated: I was thinking last night as I was trying to fall asleep what I’d be like if I ­were to transition to a w ­ oman. Like, could I ever pass? I’m [six foot three]; I’ve never seen a girl that tall. I mean I’m super skinny so that might not look weird, but I also have t­ hese enormous feet, and then ­there’s the hands, my giant-­sized hands. Th ­ ere’s also my voice, but that can be trained at least, but I’m not sure if I’d pass anyways, plus I d­ on’t like the idea of having to put on makeup or wear super feminine clothes b­ ecause it’s just not fun. I also saw a poster in r/trans that’s saying it was okay to not wear makeup. I d­ on’t know, I ju—­I just need, or, I ­don’t know.

What is clear in Jamie’s comment is the intense beauty standards for her and other trans ­women. Th ­ ere are so many places where Jamie’s femininity could seemingly go wrong: her height, weight, feet, hands, voice, clothing, or her (lack of) makeup. Moreover, her way of thinking through her transness is ­whether she would pass, and given the forum she was on, she was thinking about beauty standards from nontrans p­ eople and how she and other trans ­women reproduce t­ hese beauty standards intracommunally. Jamie went on to won­der out loud if perhaps, given her supposed inability to pass, she was even trans: I need to finish reading that paper about autistic p­ eople and being trans ­because I’m at the very least not a masculine guy. Make no m ­ istake, even if I’m not full-­blown trans, I do not conform to male gender roles. I ­don’t know if what I would look like if I ­were born [a girl] or transitioned is a sign that I might be trans. I’m not sure if that counts as dysphoria honestly, I d­ on’t know. I started feeling this a lot more a­ fter I started ­going on r/trans and [r/]asktransgender and talking to trans p­ eople about their experiences. (emphasis added)

Not only does Jamie question her ability to be trans in relation to her disability status—­itself a feature of how compulsory able-­bodiedness produces an undercurrent regarding what trans can look like—­but she also suggests that through her investments in several trans Reddit forums, she was unsure if what she felt was dysphoria (which she considered a threshold across which one must cross to be able to identify as trans). This analy­sis is not to suggest that Jamie is somehow a “bad” or “inauthentic” trans person; instead, it suggests the fractious relationship trans ­people—­especially trans ­women—­have with beauty standards, how they are imposed from external (nontrans) audiences, and their potential investments and internal articulations of them within trans (­women) communities, such as par­tic­u­lar Reddit forums.

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Talking about the contours of sartorial choice, refashioning the body, and trans masculinity, AB offered: Over the years I’ve been getting ­really frustrated with trans masc[uline] spaces. I used to love ­going to trans masc spaces and, like, ­going into them. But I think ­a fter taking a step back . . . ​like, I ­don’t know. I’ve just taken a step back, and, especially being in spaces with more femme folks, I’ve kinda been able to realize, “Yeah ­these comments [in trans masculine spaces] are actually pretty bad. Like, [laughs] t­ hey’re actually horrible comments. A lot of ­these trans masc spaces are very focused on who’s “actually trans or not.” And then t­ here’s like, “You have to be this way; you have to have dysphoria; you ­can’t dress up feminine,” and it’s just ­really horrible ideas. And then like I’ve noticed how like younger trans masc folks pick up on t­ hese ideas to be validated and it’s just ­really like hard for me to watch sometimes. So, I ­don’t know. I’ve been trying to avoid ­those spaces.

­ ere, AB suggested how restrictive notions of refashioning the body as a form H of taste work can also capture trans men and trans masculine ­people. Th ­ ese discourses are strong, and as AB told, they have a generational effect, with “younger trans masc folks pick[ing] up on t­ hese ideas to be validated.” The discourse is painful to the point of being alienating for AB, motivating him to avoid trans masculine online spaces. It would seem, then, that trans beauty standards, their exacting nature on how one can/ought to refashion one’s body, and the passing down of ­these standards cause communal ruptures for some trans ­people. ­Here, taste work and sartorial choice may create chasms between trans p­ eople, working against the trans sociality the Internet helps to facilitate. Similar to Mock’s and Cox’s aforementioned complicity in further perpetuating ­these standards, too, it is impor­tant to note that the taste work being done in relation to refashioning the trans body is not just externally imposed but internally digested and mediated. Put another way, trans ­people are both harmed by ­these exacting beauty standards and complicit in enacting further harm by passing them on to other trans ­people. This sort of analy­ sis—­ the back-­ and-­ forth nature of how trans beauty standards are demanded by both nontrans and trans p­ eople—is fraught, at best. We recognize this may also feel like intracommunal “dirty laundry” not fit for public consumption, especially as it could be weaponized by some nontrans ­people for nefarious purposes. And yet we feel it impor­tant to be clear about how beauty standards create fissures in the sartorial de/re/fashioning of the body many trans p­ eople do through the Internet. Simply put, trans taste work is never s­imple or linear; nor can one understand its effects and affects in a monolithic manner. Despite the risk of our airing this laundry, we do so in the hopes of providing necessary texture and volume to our discussion of the

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Internet as sartorial, complete with its attendant ruptures and a fuller sense of its undulating terrain.

Conclusion The taste work we started this chapter discussing—­Pham’s (2015) exploration of elite Asian style bloggers—­created a starting point for thinking about the possibilities of trans de/re/fashionings. That is, while trans participants certainly talked about their taste work in terms of clothing, the aesthetic and sartorial choices they made extended beyond clothing to include ways of re-­ and defashioning the body. More than cata­loging clothing choices and where participants found t­ hese choices online, this chapter provides a glimpse into an expanded understanding of what sartorial choice can encompass. In other words, to think about the body, one’s de/re/fashioning the body as an extension of sartorial choice, how mimicry and mirroring play impor­tant roles in how trans ­people find and come to embrace their f­uture pos­si­ble selves online, and the vari­ous contestations regarding (trans) beauty standards all go ­toward making up a broader archive of the Internet as sartorial. Building off Pham’s (2015) work also provided an essential mode through which to think about the racialized, classed, gendered, and disabled dimensions of sartorial choices online. Taste work is never neutral, and in this chapter, we have endeavored to provide a snapshot of how trans ­people’s vari­ous subjectivities create an excess of readings through which to make sense sartorial choice. At times, this excess was conflicting for participants (e.g., the possibilities and ruptures of beauty standards), while at other times, the expanding archive of the Internet as sartorial provided a literal playground, a widening closet from which trans ­people could try out what may fit on/for them. As Adem’s comment at the outset of the chapter stated, the excess of readings regarding trans taste work online provided a threshold across which participants could seek, find, and embrace parts of other trans p­ eople’s identities they could “steal,” with steal ­here signaling a mimetic de/re/fashioning of the self. Fi­nally, this chapter gestures t­ oward the communal aspect of how taste work unfolds for trans online life. That is, trans style and fashioning is not something that (only or often) occurs in isolation. Similar to how Bryanboy’s online followers—or community—­were quick to call out Fendi for their appropriation of his signature gesture, the participants of this proj­ect ­were quick to move online as a way to find other ­people who looked or desired to look like them. To be sure, ­there ­were pitfalls to how this “look” was ­adopted, especially in its presumed monolithic nature. However, the communal aspect of de/re/fashioning trans selves online is an enduring trace. We now turn to exploring the Internet as communal in the next chapter.

6

The Internet as Communal

Risking the mundane, it bears noting at the outset of this chapter that the Internet serves as a tool for social connection in a continually fractured social world. Rarely do p­ eople go online to be alone, and often, they move to virtual spaces to connect with other p­ eople with whom they envision similarities. It should come as no surprise, then, that the participants for this proj­ect saw the Internet as meeting communal purposes in vari­ous ways, including to foster new connections and relationships with other trans ­people, to find trans-­affirming spaces (both to explore ­future pos­si­ble selves and to find platforms where they can connect to resources), and to deepen connections with trans p­ eople, organ­ izations, and spaces they had begun—­and that continued to exist—­offline. Furthermore, as we discuss throughout this chapter, participants used vari­ous online spaces in dif­fer­ent ways, with ­these uses—­and the spaces through which they found and developed community—­often aligning with certain subjectivities and ways of being in the world. In other words, ­there are ways that participant’s racialized, gendered, classed, and disabled subjectivities mediated which platforms they used to develop community, as well as how they used t­ hese platforms. Moreover, the communal virtual connections participants made helped mitigate the senses of loneliness and isolation many discussed experiencing in their IRL lives. Even for participants in more urban areas, t­ here was a shared sense that trans life online helped cut through the loneliness they felt. This finding parallels work by fellow critical ethnographers who resist the simplistic and reductive logics that suggest urban areas are somehow inherently trans friendly (e.g., Hanhardt, 2013).

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In writing this chapter, we as a group of authors paused when thinking about the words communal and community. Specifically, we worried ­these words ­were overly vacuous and ­were continually made so through their being used ad nauseum. If every­thing is communal, we wondered, then is anything communal? What about community and the communal marks trans life online as unique or altogether dif­fer­ent than, say, bowling or weekly bar trivia leagues? And, w ­ ere we to use a dif­fer­ent term, would we be ­doing so out of a socially desirable pressure to not use community/communal, or would any other word serve as a better signifier for what participants ­were experiencing through their online lives? Fi­nally, Z has written previously about kinship networks (Nicolazzo, 2016b, 2017b), which was for her a de­cided turn away from the blanket concept of community in describing the connections trans ­people made to sustain life in vari­ous ways. Thus, did our language choices in this book need to mirror this previous choice? What might it mean if it did not? Clearly, our discussion about the way we described the participants’ coming together online unfolded into a complex negotiation that proved to be quite unruly. At pre­sent, we have chosen to stick with the terms community/communal in describing how participants managed their online lives with and alongside ­others. For us, the term kinship was far too intimate to describe some of what the data from this proj­ect showed. That is, not all participants felt—or even sought—­the sorts of intimate connections Z’s participants developed through previous proj­ects. This likely is the case for vari­ous reasons, but what seemed most striking to us in the difference was that Z’s study was focused on a par­ tic­u­lar campus and was originally trained on material spaces and offline dis/ connections. In this way, participants in Z’s previous study may have needed, craved, and, as a result, sought out partnerships that felt qualitatively more intimate as a way to push back against the press of both gender binary discourse and compulsory heterogenderism as the twin cultural realities that underscored the ongoing prevalence of trans oppression (see Nicolazzo, 2016b, 2017a, 2017b, for a more in-­depth discussion of gender binary discourse and compulsory heterogenderism). While the participants in our current proj­ect also experienced trans oppression—­and explained scenes through which gender binary discourse and compulsory heterogenderism curtailed their life chances—­the connections they sought and developed through the Internet ­were not as intimate a portrayal of coming together virtually. This does not mean the connections did not seem “real” or that they did not turn t­ oward the close and deep, but it means that participants did not go online specifically looking to develop this sort of closeness and deepness, whereas Z’s previous partnerships desired intimate forms of kinship and, as a response, created what they needed. One way of thinking about this difference, then, may be about the ubiquity of the Internet as a platform; most

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participants discussed growing up on the Internet, which speaks more to the omnipresence of the Internet than Z’s previous participants discussing how they specifically used online space to build what they did not have in  IRL spaces. If the Internet was just ­there, and participants ­were always already on/in/around it, then the connections they created could be less intimate and still provide the level of comfort and trans sociality they craved. Conversely, the intense lack of trans sociality on par­tic­u­lar campuses like City University for Z’s previous work meant that trans ­people moved online to get what was culturally curtailed IRL. In other words, through the current proj­ ect, participants ­were already online, whereas in the previous proj­ect, participants moved/used online spaces to fill a material void. For this book, then, we discuss trans life online through the refraction of community and the communal. Where t­ hese connections may develop or demonstrate a heightened level of intimacy, we may shift to using dif­f er­ent words; however, one should still understand the overall constellation of coming together with ­others through online spaces as not necessitating the same sort of desires or being in response to the same needs as previous studies related to trans sociality. Rather than signify ruptures or flaws, this differentiation from previous studies signals an ongoing proliferation of possibilities for trans sociality and for trans life online. Our use of concepts in this chapter mirrors our embracing the profusion of ways of being in and across the Internet, which is itself a main proj­ect we forward through this entire text. Before we elucidate the communal nature of the Internet through participant data, we would be remiss if we did not underscore how the quotidian nature of being online s­ haped trans life online. Specifically, participants w ­ ere spending time online before using the Internet as a tool for trans sociality and community building. As such, they w ­ ere developing a level of competence and fluency with online platforms that then aided their navigation of the Internet as communal. This fluency meant that participants could use the Internet, which was not built by or with trans ­people in mind, in trans ways. In other words, participants’ level of comfort online translated to their being able to create trans online underworlds that may have been hidden to them ­were they not already familiar with the spaces in which they built such communities. Their familiarity with the Internet also allowed them to recognize and harness the benefits of the Internet as communal at an altogether swifter pace than if they had to learn the platform while also developing community. Just as youth who are familiar with jungle gyms can move more quickly and seamlessly across the vari­ous ele­ments contained within, participants’ exposure and awareness of how to use and navigate the Internet as a space (see chapter 2) allowed trans participants to cultivate trans life online in quicker, more seamless ways due to the omnipresence of the Internet (and their ongoing use of it).

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Envisioning Selves through Finding P ­ eople Overwhelmingly, participants shared that the Internet was a place where they could find other ­people like them. Some participants initially ventured onto the Internet to find community around other hobbies and interests, like games, fan fiction, or fashion. However, some took to the Internet to find community around par­tic­u­lar questions and curiosities they had about gender and sexuality. Regardless of their original movements online, participants described how they eventually found their way to trans parts of the Internet and stayed, solidifying the connections they made along the way. For example, LP described their initial dive into online spaces as a way to find ­people who had similar interests to them; however, they found their way into spaces that focused on gender and sexuality. They stated: I originally joined [Tumblr] for fandom stuff ­because they have a lot of cool fan art. That’s why I [was t­ here]. That’s definitely the only reason why I [was t­ here]. But then, I started using it to look at what other p­ eople said about gender and sexuality, and their own stories, and their own experiences with it. . . . ​Even though I ­wasn’t ­really sharing anything personally, I was just looking at what other ­people wrote, and reblogging it to my own blog. It kind of helped me feel more secure in the sense that I w ­ asn’t alone in my own confusion.

As LP stated, finding t­ hese other stories regarding gender and sexuality provided them a sense of comfort in their own gender questioning, helping reduce feelings of loneliness. Furthermore, it was not just LP’s finding t­ hese stories but their finding them on/through Tumblr that is significant. ­Here, the Internet as communal signals a sense of togetherness that would have other­wise been inaccessible to LP. Moreover, the medium of Tumblr, its ability for LP to see images visually and then to reblog ­those images as a way of both desiring and imagining their own f­ uture pos­si­ble selves w ­ ere essential aspects of the communal refraction of the Internet. In other words, the design and usability of the online platform aided in the cultivation of the communal effect LP experienced. LE shared a similar sentiment when she stated: “On the Internet it’s a lot easier to be out ’cuz ­there’s so many more ­people that are trans. . . . ​­There’s a much higher volume. ’Cuz you can connect with ­people that are in other states that you ­wouldn’t normally be able to talk to. Yeah, so you ­don’t have the same kind of feeling of being the only one, or one of the few.” ­Here, LE toggled back and forth between the Internet as spatial (see chapter  2 for a fuller discussion of this refraction) and communal. In many ways, the toggling mirrors the ongoing entanglement of the refractions we as authors have tried to differentiate for explanatory purposes but are never fully separate from each other. Similar to light shined through a prism,

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waves of light bleed into each other. In other words, LE’s above comment gestures not t­ oward the Internet as both spatial and communal but about its qualities as spatial, communal, and spatial/communal. That is, the spatial ele­ment of the Internet is what makes the communal pos­si­ble, and the communal aspect of the Internet is what makes it a space worthy of trans ­people’s time and affective investments (themselves two other refractions we discuss in chapters 3 and 4, respectively). LE’s and LP’s comments also signal the importance of community in allowing oneself to think the self differently. In other words, it was the Internet as communal that provided them the opportunity to envision trans ­future pos­si­ ble selves and to do so in ways that ­were less isolated, lonely, and, perhaps as a result, less risky and dangerous. Not only did the Internet as communal cut through the confusion (LP’s word), but it provided a trans expanse, a way to understand the breadth and volume (LE’s words) of available transness. The communal led to LP and LE granting themselves the access to desire more from gender, the ability to sink into their want in ways that helped them overcome the confusion and isolation that may have other­wise inhibited their searching for pos­si­ble selves. If the Internet did not make LP and LE trans, then it at least allowed the space/community through which to follow their desiring more from gender and to envision profuse understandings of their pos­si­ble gendered selves. Following this trace, participants shared how the Internet as communal played a pivotal role in their coming into their own transness. For example, Jamie, LE, and Jonesy shared how Internet communities helped them actualize their own trans identities. In their own words, they described their moments of trans realization as follows: I was scrolling through one of the subreddits that said, “Hey, if you think that ­you’re cis but you ­really want to be like X, Y, Z gender, surprise, ­you’re transgender.” Then I’m just like, “Oh, I guess I’m trans.” (Jamie) Well, basically, I was just watching a YouTube video and someone mentioned dysphoria and stuff and I looked it up and I was like, “Hey [laughs]—­that sounds like something that I am dealing with.” (LE) Just hearing and reading about the experiences of other trans ­people helped me realize, “Oh yeah, y­ ou’re trans.” (Jonesy)

­ ere, one can see how the Internet as communal provided a nexus through H which Jamie, LE, and Jonesy could recognize and move ­toward their transness. Put another way, the communal nature of the Internet provided a series of visual, textual, and community-­based markers with which Jamie, Ellie, and

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Jonesy could associate. The Internet as communal also provided ­these markers in a private and passive manner, allowing participants the time and space they needed to make sense of what they ­were experiencing. To go back to LP’s words, the privacy and passivity of the Internet as communal allowed for participants to make meaning of their confusion and to feel, imagine, and dream their genders in profuse ways.

Racial Community Building / Navigating Racial Community Online Being online provided a space to build trans communities with ­others who also had similar marginalized subject positions. For the seven participants who identified as being both a person of color and trans, the Internet gave many of them a way to find other trans p­ eople of color to supplement their existing offline community spaces as well as use it to build and foster survival strategies to navigate their racist and transphobic worlds offline. Often, the sentiment of “finding p­ eople who look like me” uttered by trans p­ eople of color might be a conscious statement around trying to find ­people with similar genders as them, while at the same time operating unconsciously to their desire to seek and find ­those who have similar gender/race experiences as they do. Moreover, while participants may have had connections with other trans ­people of color in offline spaces they inhabited, online communities became another way to envision ­future pos­si­ble selves as trans, as well as get support around specific issues. For example, Sativa shared about their experiences with digital spaces to have their strug­gles heard, stating, Digital spaces are the spaces that I turn to the most when I need like support. Especially living at home and not having access to a trans community h ­ ere, I think that g­ oing to ­those digital spaces, I’m able to get support [about] what­ever living at home entails in terms of my m ­ ental health, but also like in terms of hearing my ­family members say ­really problematic t­ hings. I think digital spaces have also made me realize that I’m not alone in terms of my experiences, that t­ here are other ­people who also are struggling with bringing up ­these conversations with their families.

­ oing online meant that Sativa could find other trans p­ eople of color who G might understand the experiences of navigating their racial identity and f­ amily dynamics while negotiating trans life at home. As they had not yet come out to their parents, digital space was one of the few places Sativa felt seen and could express their experiences to ­people who understood and would empathize. Like Sativa, Ororo also took to digital spaces to find p­ eople who could understand their experiences as a trans person of color. In their interview, they shared,

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“Facebook has r­ eally just become a way to access community. When I was t­ here to check in ­because bullshit went down in class and I needed other ­women and nonbinary p­ eople of color to talk to about it, or when I was g­ oing no contact with some members of my f­ amily, that [­going online] was a ­whole piece of it . . . ​ of just having venting space.” It was noteworthy that both Sativa and Ororo used digital spaces to find the communal support they needed regarding f­ amily concerns. As such, trans life online for some of the participants of color illuminated how trans sociality online created necessary connections participants may not have had, or at least that they did not have in the same sort of substantive way, offline. Although not always the case, ­there is extant lit­er­a­ture signaling a lack of queer repre­sen­ta­tion in racial affinity spaces on college campuses (e.g., Nicolazzo, 2016a, 2017b). It should be said that such a rupture between gender and race is an outgrowth of white supremacy, and specifically what Stewart and Nicolazzo (2018) discussed as whiteness as a container, which is to say, “whiteness as an ideology of interlocking tacit assumptions that shape and support racism, patriarchy, classism, ableism, ageism, religious hegemony, trans oppression, heterogenderism, and settler colonialism” on college campuses (p. 134). In other words, the gender/race rupture is not something endemic to racialization—­ indeed, Black, brown, Indigenous, and Asian communities have long had vibrant queer and trans communities—­but the ongoing machinations of ideologies of whiteness as they show up across higher education landscapes that maintain the bedrock upon which ­these ruptures occur. For example, in talking about the Black affinity center Ororo was a gradu­ate assistant in, they mentioned, “It’s a safe space for Black p­ eople, but it’s not a safe space for Black queer ­people.” Similarly, in a chunk of data we return to from the previous chapter, AB noted, “In person when I’ve entered a lot of Chicanx spaces [­there is a] very machismo culture, very just talks of masculinity [sic], and I kinda felt pushed out from ­those spaces in person. So I felt like the only way for me to interact with t­ hose [Chicanx] spaces now is online.” Just as Ororo described the difficulty with on-­ campus spaces designed to foster racial affinity, AB noted how ­these spaces could be spaces of conflict for them. And, while we have discussed—­and ­will continue to discuss—­the ongoing presence, effects, and affects of racism online, participants of color gestured to how trans sociality online, especially with/in trans communities of color, created possibilities for gendered/raced elsewheres to which they did not have access offline. In other words, moving online was not a panacea but an opening of a doorway across the threshold of which participants could desire trans-­of-­color sociality in profuse ways. Fi­nally, as with gender euphoria, we noted that almost none of the white participants discussed themselves as having a race, let alone how their racialization mediated their dis/connections with trans ­people online. Estelle was the only white participant who mentioned how her whiteness influenced

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im/possibilities for relationship building, and even she talked about this in relation to building community with nonwhite trans ­people online. In other words, none of the white participants discussed how whiteness mediated intraracial community building with other white trans p­ eople online, and only one (Estelle) discussed how her whiteness may influence her dis/connections with trans p­ eople of color. This is perhaps not surprising in how white ­people deracialize their senses of selves but is striking in how white trans participants’ inattention to how their own racialization influences (potential) community building is a manifestation of anti-­Blackness. ­Here, whiteness as that which is unspoken (and yet deeply pre­sent through absence) marks a site and scene of further racial balkanization online. Whiteness as both an ideology and subject position also created barriers for interracial online community building. To be sure, t­ hese w ­ ere barriers white participants reinforced through their inability or willful re­sis­tance to recognize themselves as racialized ­people, as well as how their racialization mediated the online (and offline) lives of trans ­people of color.

The Life and Death of Tumblr It’s hard to write this chapter and not reflect on the ways that I spent so much time in trans Internet spaces. Specifically, I remember recording my own transition videos as I documented my parts of my medical transition for my friends on the internet. More than that, I talked about my life moving from the West to the East Coast and how dif­fer­ent t­ hings ­were as a Black person, what queer life was like in a small town, and how I navigated my relationship with my then significant other. While many of my videos ­were “flops” in terms of the number of viewers who watched them (read: not many), the fact that t­ here was a regular group of folks who watched and commented made me feel like t­ here ­were ­people out ­there who cared about me. Even more than that, I felt like I was ­doing something positive for the trans story. One of the main reasons I started recording videos and sharing them with the world was ­because most of the videos I had seen up ­until that point ­were of white trans men; none of them spoke to the experience of being genderqueer and Black. I also started hormones postundergrad, meaning that while many stories about trans life ­were about college experiences, very few talked about this par­tic­u­lar aspect of my journey. That said, I was fascinated by, when ­going through the data for this proj­ect, how my migration from YouTube to Tumblr mirrored the participants’ platform change. ­There was something about the fact that I could reblog and be reblogged by p­ eople or even chat with ­people whose content I liked that made me feel like I had a more robust community. So despite the age difference, ­there seemed to be something striking about the movement ­toward Tumblr that felt impor­tant for many of us. —­Excerpt from Sy’s reflective journaling

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As Cavalcante (2019) noted, Tumblr has been a crucial nexus through which to develop and maintain queer and trans community. In speaking with queer and trans youth, he found many youth “described Tumblr as a queer ‘­bubble,’ a ‘black hole,’ a place where you can get ‘sucked in’ and ‘fall into.’ They [the youth] talked about this dynamic in both positive and negative ways. On the one hand, they extolled Tumblr’s advantages and its queer world-­making potential, but, on the other hand, they acknowledged its significant risks and shortcomings” (pp. 1715–1716). Cavalcante wrote of this duality as generating a sense of Tumblr as a queer utopia as well as a queer vortex, and while his study focused on youth across the LGBTQ spectrum, his findings resonate with much of what the trans participants in our proj­ect described. Namely, participants discussed how Tumblr was one of the few—­and one of the first—­places they could be openly trans. Due to the way the platform operated, and what it required from users— or perhaps better put, what it did not require—­participants may have felt a certain resonance with the site. As Sy noted in their above personal reflection, the ability to both reblog content and have your own content reblogged may have provided a level of passive comfort and connection. And, for the more advanced users, the ability to make choices about how, with whom, and when to connect may have enhanced their connection to the platform itself. For example, Eddie was already using Tumblr for his artistic interests but then began exploring gender through the platform as well. As he told his interviewer: I remember I was in college and my partner at the time was trans, but I d­ idn’t ­really know what that meant. I think at the time they w ­ ere using [the term] genderqueer, and t­ here was also another trans student, and I was super uneducated on that. We would just talk about stuff we’d seen online, and they would show me, like, “Oh, this is what I found on Tumblr. Th ­ ese are some artists I follow. Th ­ ese are p­ eople I like,” and it just totally just ripped open my idea of how p­ eople can use the Internet. . . . ​That was r­ eally dif­fer­ent for me. I had a Tumblr at the time, so then I’d be like, “Yeah, let me search this stuff,” or [I found] dif­fer­ent blogging platforms or t­ hings like that, and then, that kind of just was a slowly evolving practice that also, I think, has a ­really impor­tant relationship to my work as an artist and person whose written stuff, ’cuz then it became entwined with how I like using the Internet to do artist research or just to learn about t­ hings I wanna learn about. . . . ​But it was very specifically this mix of personal and artist accounts, p­ eople who ­were queer or trans themselves or interested in gender writing, performing, et cetera. I think I ended up spending a lot of time on YouTube as well, watching informative videos or watching poets [and] dif­fer­ent ­people with like dif­fer­ent content, and it was like ­every time I kind of opened ­these sites, it was just like kind of more and more accumulated, and then I think it got much more pointed when I started kind of realizing that I was kind of . . . ​something was ­going on [for me] gender-­wise.

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What is also curious about Eddie’s comments is that he was brought into the virtual community of Tumblr through an already existing IRL community. This signals yet again the importance of not thinking of the material and virtual as wholly separate, nor as one being “better” or “worse” than the other. Indeed, the two are mutually coconstitutive in that they have the ability to reinforce and make each other better. Also, as Eddie’s narrative suggests, the Internet as communal, especially Tumblr as an essential site of trans sociality, has the ability to bring forth what may have been previously subconscious gender desires. As he shared, Eddie was led to Tumblr by a genderqueer partner who would talk to him about what they both saw online. Eddie also then used the site as a way to learn about transness, particularly as it related to friends, artists, and poets in whom he had a growing interest. Through Tumblr, he was also introduced to trans content shared on other online platforms (i.e., YouTube), at which point he began to think about his own gendered becoming. Tumblr, then, was a centralized hub through which Eddie began to learn more about the trans community, a place he returned to in order to develop his own unfolding sense of self and then a site through which he was able to cultivate and maintain the community into which he had begun to understand himself as a part. LE shared a similar story about how she first found Tumblr. She stated, “­There was a lot of p­ eople that ­were on Tumblr, so I was like, ‘I should prob­ ably make a Tumblr so I can actually do ­things.’ ” Clearly, ­there was a sense of being left b­ ehind and left out for LE if she did not join Tumblr. This is significant, as the world-­making potential of online spaces and the ability for Tumblr to maintain a steadfast place in that proj­ect of world making—­what Cavalcante (2019) referred to as a “queer utopia”—­reorganize how one thinks of possibilities for sociality. The move to online spaces for Eddie, LE, and other participants, and specifically to Tumblr as a central/starting hub, was a way not to be left b­ ehind IRL. It also became a vital source of cultivating a new, virtual life in which participants could envision and be who they desired in vari­ous ways. LE continued in her interview, stating, “And then, it sort of led from [­there]. They [­people on Tumblr] would post invites to dif­fer­ent ­things, and then you just sort of end up making a bunch of friends. And then it builds from that. Like, you meet a few ­people, and it just goes up.” In this sense, LE’s engagement with the Internet as communal began by meeting a few ­people through invites to shared Tumblr spaces, and then, as she described, “it just goes up,” meaning the communal aspect of the Internet continued to deepen and develop. Furthermore, as we described in our chapter on the Internet as sartorial, the deepening nature of trans sociality on Tumblr further allowed participants to imagine who they wanted to be(come) as gendered subjects. That is, through online community, participants could take the virtual time and space to think and feel who they wanted to become in ways that material environments could

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not offer or, at least, could not do so in as safe a manner as they may have needed or wanted. Of impor­tant note is how trans life on Tumblr made pos­si­ble a form of sociality that was other­wise foreclosed to participants with disabilities. For example, LP made a specific reference to how Tumblr made it pos­si­ble to cultivate community with other trans disabled p­ eople as well as other trans p­ eople invested in disabled communities and c­ auses. As they shared, “I have a r­ eally hard time feeling like I connect with other p­ eople b­ ecause I’m both LGBT and I’m also on the autism spectrum. So r­ eally the only place I’ve ever seen ­people actually talk about both of ­those t­ hings is Tumblr.” Similar to LP, Estelle also discussed her ability to mediate her communication with ­others online in ways she did not always feel she could do IRL. Thus, not only ­were online spaces—­ and for many participants, Tumblr specifically—­sources of community, but the platform generated par­tic­u ­lar modes of engagement through which participants could see multiple subjectivities reflected and discussed openly in a manner they strug­gled to find in material spaces. This specific dimension of trans life online also mirrors Miller’s (2017) trail-­blazing work on queer and trans college students with disabilities and their moving to online platforms as a way to embrace more comfortable modes of sociality and world making. And yet Tumblr was not—­and is not now—­a site that is beyond reproach or critique. One of the t­ hings that many participants expressed remorse over was the “the death of Tumblr.” In 2018, as we w ­ ere collecting the data for this proj­ect, the then president of the United States signed into law two bills: the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA) and the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (SESTA), both of which ­were intended to reduce online sex trafficking (Romano, 2018). Due to one of the clauses that would find website hosts partially responsible for permitting sex work—­something that is illegal in all states except Nevada—­many social online platforms changed their permissions and terms of agreement to ban specific types of content they allowed, including photo­graphs and pictures users could post. Online social networking companies did this to avoid being implicated in ­these charges, and Tumblr was one of the highly notable companies to make such changes. However, this shift in policy had—­and continues to have—­a dramatic effect on many social media sites. For example, Craigs­list banned patron-­based personals ads, citing the difficulties in regulating posts that ­were sex trafficking, and Tumblr, Facebook, and Instagram changed their guidelines as well. Specifically, Tumblr created new standards for posting photo­graphs based on gender binary discourse, which ­were rooted specifically in sexism. ­Because of ­these new standards, many photo­ graphs trans users had taken to share vari­ous physical changes over the course of transition w ­ ere flagged and taken down or required a manual submission of approval through Tumblr. For many trans masculine p­ eople and trans ­people

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assigned female at birth (AFAB), shirtless photos with or without ­binders became coded as having “female presenting nipples”—­something that was expressly prohibited by the new laws enacted by the federal administration. This was not just an anti-­trans discourse but a transmisogynistic discourse, in that it focused on the femininization of the body. That is, the regulations ­were aimed at occluding ­those bodies that ­were deemed feminine (i.e., in the language of the regulations, “female presenting nipples”), as that which is deemed feminine has always already been deemed socially abject. Thus, while trans masculine ­people may have been subjected to punishment and regulation ­under the enactment of FOSTA and SESTA, it is essential to understand that the root of the laws are themselves about the regulation of the feminine and, in relation to trans communities, the regulation of the femininization or the perceived femininity of the body by the nation-­state. H ­ ere, the labeling of t­ hese laws as purely trans oppressive or trans antagonistic is overly simplistic. Instead, we find it imperative to highlight how transmisogyny operates through an absent presence that mirrors the haunting effects of much trans vio­lence and threat. Put another way, if one can recognize the transmisogynistic roots of this thread of trans antagonism, encoded as it has been through federal policy, then the responses we can (and we would argue that we ­ought to) make can be more focused on the needs of not just trans p­ eople as a broadly dispossessed population but on the needs and vulnerabilities of trans ­women specifically. As Spade (2015) has articulated, this sort of trickle up approach to activism is itself a way of zeroing in on the needs of ­those who are most at risk to benefit populations with more access or privilege or who may experience less precarity through social and virtual spheres of life. That said, the implications for the Tumblr trans community, and for the understanding of how to use the site to develop and maintain trans sociality, ­were catastrophic. As Tumblr announced their decision, trans users announced their exit from the platform. Th ­ ese announcements created a confounding ­ripple effect, where more trans users ­either left or felt the intensity of the trans content vacuum that had been created by o­ thers’ departures.1 The decision to leave or stay was far from s­ imple, a signal to the overwhelming pull of the queer utopia/vortex dynamic that Cavalcante (2019) articulated. Furthermore, the choice felt l­ imited, as t­ hose trans users who de­cided to stay mourned the ongoing loss of members of their community with whom they had grown to share a deep affinity and care, and ­those who chose to leave felt equally pressed to rebuild the community that had been ruptured due to the aforementioned federal policies. Moreover, the havoc created by the conflation of laws aimed at curtailing sex trafficking with trans sociality again meant that all trans users—­ regardless of the choices they made to stay on or leave Tumblr—­had to confront the damaging association of trans p­ eople as criminals, especially as

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pedophiles or dealers in the sexual exploits of c­ hildren. That is, not only ­were trans p­ eople’s bodies deemed “inappropriate” through the furthering of transmisogynistic logics, but trans ­people’s supposed inappropriateness extended beyond corporeality to further dangerous tropes linking gender transgressions with child sexual predation. And, in the dissolution of Tumblr as a gathering space, t­ here was a broader effect for trans ­people, as ­those who would have other­wise been able to gather and develop forms of communal re­sis­tance online may have been less able to do so as a community. ­Here, the links between and across online and offline trans sociality and corporeality are impor­tant to recognize. Trans life online did not—­indeed, it does not—­exist as an alternate realm, one that somehow does not interact with or mediate one’s offline happenings. Instead, on-­and offline sociality and lives are deeply intertwined. In thinking through the effects of FOSTA and SESTA, their roots in transmisogynoir, what that meant for gathering on Tumblr, and the effects of ­these policies on heightening precarity particularly for trans ­women of color and for ­those trans ­people engaged in sex work, one can further realize the false binary of online/offline. Furthermore, one can recognize with intense clarity how trans life online allows for a multiplicity of selves that can promote trans livability, including—­and perhaps especially—in offline spaces. During interviews, many of the participants mentioned how Tumblr was over and done for due to ­these new policies. For example, Xena mentioned, “Tumblr should die, like it’s gonna die now.” Xena’s comment was in relation to the new federal policies and their influence on trans Tumblr users specifically. Although not using the language of death, Kaspy echoed Xena’s sentiments, suggesting the policy changes ­were leading them away from interacting over the platform as much as pos­si­ble. Specifically, Kaspy stated, “I ­don’t use Tumbler as often anymore. It’s a dark place [laughing]; Tumblr’s an evil place nowadays. So I try to avoid it. They banned the porn, but they d­ idn’t ban the Nazis. So it’s like, I ­can’t.” Jordan also spoke about the demise of Tumblr and the damaging effect it had on trans sociality online, especially in relation to trans ­people seeking pos­si­ble gendered selves. As they elucidated, Tumblr got rid of sexually explicit material, and the part that always gets me is “female presenting nipples” [part of the policy]. But along with that, ­there are a bunch of tags that [Tumblr] made not safe for work. So like the word sex, even if it’s attached to something like sex education what­ever, you ­can’t look that up anymore. And so, I think that’s r­ eally dangerous for ­people who are questioning their gender identity. B ­ ecause a lot of what goes into that is your body. Like, trying to figure out what your body does. And if you ­can’t see pictures of ­people putting b­ inders on, or something like that, it’s r­ eally hard to figure out how to be a trans person.

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It was clear that SESTA and FOSTA had a sharply negative influence on possibilities for trans sociality on Tumblr, which had previously been a vibrant space for trans communal gathering and exchange. However, SESTA and FOSTA w ­ ere not the only reasons contributing to some participants’ moves away from Tumblr as a space for trans sociality. For example, AB noted the whiteness and masculinity of Tumblr spaces, stating, “Over time I was like, ‘OK yeah, I ­don’t wanna be on Tumblr no more ­because it’s predominately just white trans masc folks. That’s not where I wanna be.’ ” In a movement that signals the sort of cislation logics we describe in further detail in the section below, Kaspy talked about why they de­cided to leave Tumblr: “It was a g­ reat space to maybe be able to find my identity and connect with other p­ eople. They [other Tumblr users] w ­ ere feeling the same kinds of ways that I was. [However,] it was also a place that was teaching me a lot of ­really toxic ideas about a lot of t­ hings in regards [to] gender and sexuality. While they [Tumblr users] w ­ ere good, they w ­ ere also harmful, gate keeping certain identities to an extent and saying, ‘No, y­ ou’re this ­thing, if this is how you feel,’ or saying, ‘You c­ an’t be this if y­ ou’re not this.’ ” What is striking about Kaspy’s comment is the both/and nature of Tumblr to provide and foreclose possibilities for trans sociality. For example, Kaspy noted the power of the online platform to be a site “to find my identity and connect with other p­ eople” who “­were feeling the same kinds of ways” they ­were feeling. H ­ ere, the intensity of trans sociality online cannot be overstated. Kaspy was able to find and be with other trans ­people, which then allowed them to envision f­ uture pos­si­ble selves or, as they put it, “to maybe be able to find my identity.” And yet, alongside the joy of trans sociality online, ­there resided the uncomfortable real­ity of how the very same space, at the very same time, could be increasingly difficult for participants. In this sense, Tumblr was both an affirming location of trans sociality and a platform across which some trans users shared divisive rhe­torics and logics that caused some participants to leave the community they had found. While Tumblr is still an active online platform, the vis­i­ble trans presence that previously used the platform feels qualitatively dif­fer­ent. And while ­there remains a group of trans former users who mourn the loss of the platform as it previously existed, ­there is a way that such collective grief and mourning shows an ethic of care in trans sociality online. In other words, through movement off Tumblr and grieving the loss of the site together, trans p­ eople came together, thereby strengthening their communal connections as they searched for new sites to be social together.

The Cislation of Trans Community Online Originally conceptualized by Jourian (Admin, 2017), the neologism cislation indicates “the translating of seemingly illegible (i.e., not understandable)

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genders for cis [nontrans] recognition” (Jourian and Nicolazzo, 2019, para. 2). That is, in a social sphere where trans ­people are deemed epistemologically and ontologically unknowable (itself a prerequisite for the ongoing proj­ect of the epistemic ← → ontological killability of the trans subject), t­ here is often a mandate that trans ­people can only discuss our lives through terms that make sense to nontrans p­ eople. Moreover, b­ ecause structural vio­lence is so deeply socially embedded, trans communities may even further the curtailing of profuse understandings of gender by taking up / demanding cislation ourselves. As Jourian aptly put it, “­Because so much of our own hirstory [sic] and language is inaccessible to us, we might ourselves engage in cislation. As trans folks, we are also at times ­limited by our own internalized cisgender worldview and lack the ancestral know-­how to articulate ourselves in a more authentic-­to-us way, or try to simplify our complexities so that we are not too much to deal with for cisgender p­ eople” (Admin, 2017, para. 6, emphasis added). In other words, trans ­people do not necessarily need nontrans ­people to demand cislation, as the logics of gender binary discourse and the ongoing cultural unintelligibility of transness—­itself a willful act—­enhance the presence, precision, and effects of internalized trans oppression at the core of the notion of cislation itself. Jourian’s neologism articulates both an epistemic ← → ontological real­ity (Nicolazzo, 2022), as well an ethical mandate to think about what it means to be in loving care and community alongside each other as trans ­people, as well as with nontrans ­people. Understood through the refraction of the Internet as communal, then, the notion of cislation requires trans online communities to confront how, when, and to what extent they further this form of corrosive, harmful rhe­toric. And if/when/however trans online communities do (re) invest in such (internalized) harm, it requires t­ hose of us who analyze such a phenomenon to not place blame on ­those who reproduce such narratives but on the social conditions that restrict the ability for dreaming of worlds ­free from trans oppression. While participants engaged with the Internet as a tool for sociability and community, they w ­ ere not immune from cislation, both from nontrans and some fellow trans p­ eople. That is, not only did nontrans p­ eople impose cislational demands on transcentric Internet communities, but some trans p­ eople also participated in furthering cislation b­ ecause they/we have also been socialized in a cultural milieu that demands a specific hatred of and distancing from gender profusion as a standard by which one can secure even a nominal hold on citizenship within the nation-­state. For example, several participants wondered aloud during interviews about ­whether they ­were “trans enough,” which, as Catalano (2015b) noted, is a logic imposed on trans p­ eople rather than anything based in real­ity (as if ­there is any set standard of enoughness by which one moves from “not trans” to “trans”). Participants also noted discourse regarding “truscum” and “transmedicalism,” which are terms denoting trans p­ eople

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who practice/participate in cislation. Truscum and transmedicalist are markers for trans p­ eople who define transness through a certain constellation of experiences, including but not l­ imited to experiencing dysphoria, desiring/seeking biomedical modes of transition, and other essentializing productions of the trans self. As has been discussed in previous lit­er­a­ture, to assume such markers of bodily engagements as the bar for one to have a “real trans experience” is to assume a white-­centric paradigmatic orientation, which is to say, to take up an essentializing positionality to determine who is “­really trans” is to further discourses that center and promote epistemic enactments of whiteness, class privilege, and settler logics regarding how bodies must show up to be read as “properly gendered.” For example, Estelle talked about her move away from Reddit and t­ oward Facebook groups in relation to transmedicalist discourse, stating, ES T EL L E:  ​I realized that more of the ­people that I was meeting over time as I

got involved [and] started ­doing a lot of like trans activism as I came out . . . ​ a lot more ­people ­were on Facebook than on Reddit. And the Reddit community unfortunately, in a lot of t­ hose groups, tends to have a more . . . ​ You might have heard the term transmedicalist? And that w ­ asn’t the direction I was g­ oing, so Facebook seemed to have more of the broader nonmedicalist community. IN T ERVIE WER:  ​Mhm. And talk to me a ­little about what that term means specifically for you. ES T EL L E:  ​So it would refer to p ­ eople who believe that t­ here is a clinical definition of being transgender. You know, gender dysphoria, that sort of ­thing, and that the preference, [who] they considered to be trans p­ eople are only p­ eople that have gender dysphoria and want to transition. IN T ERVIE WER:  ​Right. Right. And so it seems like, then, your move away from Reddit was, one, about coalescing with ­people that w ­ ere interested in ­doing similar types of activism as you, but also about finding places where your own humanity was recognized in more liberatory ways it seems? ES T EL L E:  ​Yeah.

­ ere, Estelle shared how discourses harmful to her own unfolding senses of H selves as a trans ­woman mediated her seeking and finding community in certain online spaces, as well as how ­these spaces shifted across time. ­There is also a trace of how such discourses influenced participants’ understandings of f­ uture pos­si­ble selves, online spaces, and sartorial de/re/fashionings in the previous chapter, particularly in relation to how trans beauty standards mapped onto bodily becomings. Similarly, cislation showed up through trans Internet communities in the ongoing division between binary and nonbinary trans ­people. To be sure,

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this bifurcation—­itself a reinvestment in the very sort of bifurcation that transness eschews—­was not wholly created by the trans community itself. Given how trans ­people continue to cultivate gender self-­determination and the bio-­and necropo­liti­cal machinations that rearticulate such moves as impossibilities, it would seem to make sense that one of the ways some trans ­people have de­cided they can be “seen” is to create a hierarchy through which binary trans p­ eople are more or less trans than nonbinary trans ­people (see chapter 7 for a deeper discussion on the trap of visibility and desiring readability as trans by nontrans ­people). This iteration of internalized oppression is rooted in a desire for a social legibility and legitimacy trans ­people lack ­because we are often told we are not who we claim to be. This is especially the case for trans w ­ omen and trans femmes, who are ensnared in violent transmisogynistic spirals through which they are falsely positioned as “men in dresses” who desire to harm “real ­women” and ­children. It also borrows and feeds into tactics used by trans-­exclusive radical feminists (TERFs) as a means to punish trans ­women for desiring more than the catastrophe of binary gender and biologically essentialized articulations of femininity. One can see yet another example of how cislation, itself a manifestation of harm that harms the broader trans community, is not just a form of trans oppression but one of transmisogyny/transmisogynoir. ­Here again we find it incredibly impor­ tant to understand how trans oppression + sexism + racism commingle to trap trans ­women in ways that place them at heightened risk for harm and vio­lence through the social logics of killability, which then ­ripple out to ­others within the trans community. Jonesy provided an example of how cislation harmed him as a trans man. Speaking about his disengagement with Tumblr, he shared, “I left Tumblr ­because the weird thoughts that they had and the weird ideas that they had about trans guys.” The impor­tant words in Jonesy’s comment are “they” and “weird thoughts/ideas.” The “they” to whom Jonesy gestured was other trans ­people—­perhaps some of them also being trans men—­and the “weird thoughts/ ideas” they expressed being ­those demands of cislation that require interpretations, embodiments, and structures of feeling that define one’s trans experience. Yes, some of the demands of cislation Jonesy confronted likely came from nontrans ­people. And also, it is especially impor­tant that, given our previous discussion of the transness of Tumblr as a virtual location, one not overlook how other trans ­people—­including other trans men—­were likely involved in demanding/forwarding a cislational politic. This politic caused a rupture between Jonesy and a vital segment of his communal online life. Moreover, it was—­and remains—­a way through which one can understand how the absent presence of transmisogyny and transmisogynoir creates extreme precarity for trans ­women—­especially Black trans w ­ omen in the United States—­and how such precarity r­ ipples out to also harm broader trans populations.

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While Jonesy left Tumblr due to cislation, LE’s sharing of her trans self was something she tightly controlled as a result. Remarking about how she used the platform, she stated, “I d­ idn’t used to r­ eally post about trans stuff. I was just like, she/hers and that was it. And then eventually I was like, ‘I might as well be talking about how I am trans on the Internet.’ ” H ­ ere, LE elucidated the (sub) conscious fear of transmisogyny that undergirds cislation, which operated to the extent that she did not “­really post about trans stuff” beyond sharing her pronouns. Understood in tandem with how trans ­women in this proj­ect de/ re/fashioned their bodies online (see chapter 5), the tight control trans ­women had over their expressions of trans femininity and womanhood can be seen as a way of managing the cislational online swamp. While LE ­later began “talking about how [she was] trans on the Internet,” her use of the word eventually signals a length of time that might have allowed her to decouple her sense of self-­worth as a trans ­woman with that of how she was misread through cislation as never being “trans enough.”

Conclusion Despite the strug­g les and frustrations that come with online trans sociality, ­there remained a strong desire from participants to keep finding ways to make the Internet as communal work for them. As we often remark as an authorial group, the Internet may not have been built by trans ­people, but trans ­people have made it their home in vari­ous ways. As Jackson, one of Z’s former participants from an ­earlier proj­ect noted (and we quoted in the introduction to this book), “I exist primarily on the Internet, you know? That’s pretty much my hometown.” Similarly, ­there ­were always visions of an online elsewhere where participants could cultivate beautiful, affirming, and necessary forms of sociality with and among other trans ­people. As Jonesy remarked about one of his trans online communities: They w ­ ere so inclusive and ­every l­ ittle ­thing . . . ​like, to a cis person it’s nothing, but to a trans person it means the world. When I get gendered correctly, I get so happy. And when I share that on a subreddit and then every­one ­else responds being so happy . . . ​[trails off]. So I think that’s why I stayed [online]. It’s just that feeling of community and that l­ ittle t­ hings [sic] might seem easy to an outsider or might seem trivial to an outsider, t­ hose communities r­ eally re­spect that and honor that and celebrate when [that] happens to you.

For Jonesy and many of the participants of this proj­ect, trans sociality online, while not a utopic vision in and of itself, held multiple promises for the creation of underworlds reflecting the re­spect, honor, and cele­bration that has long been made an impossibility through IRL worlds.

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During the writing of this book, mainstream culture reporters began commenting on what trans communities had long known to be true (and trans scholars had written about; see Keegan, 2018): the science-­fiction trilogy The Matrix, written and directed by the Wachowski s­isters (themselves trans ­women), was a trans allegory. That is, Neo’s taking of the red pill was a movement ­toward gender-­profuse underworlds where space could bend, time could stretch, and sociality among other (trans) ­people who sensed the world in similar ways could be cultivated. It is also apt that in taking the red pill, Neo (and Morpheus, Trinity, and other [trans] characters) “plugged in” to their alternate (read: underworlding) real­ity. In taking the red pill (a meta­phor signaling the dissolution of nontrans worldviews that violently impose restrictive gender binary discourses), Neo plugged into the underworlding possibilities of trans sociality online. And, while the logics of killability followed Neo into the matrix / online (represented by the character Agent Smith, who insisted on misnaming Neo as “Mr. Anderson”), Neo still desired to create a sociality with ­others like him and to do so through the matrix itself. As Neo sought out the city of Zion (which one may understand as a vision of a virtual trans elsewhere), he did so with a level of clarity about the risks as well as the rewards of such a (trans) sociality and kept on plugging in to find and protect it. In the same way, participants kept ­going online to seek and protect the rewards of their forms of trans sociality, of their trans Zions. They may have been fleeting and may have risks associated with their presence, but that did not stop participants from recognizing the latent promise of the Internet as communal.

7

The Internet as Visual Much has been written about the proj­ect of visibility in relation to queer and trans life, creating a scholarly conversation in which this text also intervenes. Critical trans perspectives on visibility suggest that while it can be an impor­ tant aspect of queer and trans life, visibility o­ ught not be considered the only po­liti­cal horizon through which trans p­ eople imagine life. In fact, t­ here may be ways that visibility hastens death. Visibility, visuality, il/legibility, and their attendant effects and affects can all shift with disconcerting ease, making the notion of being “out and proud” precarious at best and dangerous at worst. As Malatino (2020) wrote, “Passing is a fragile art, dependent on, among other variables, the light. Flood lights are transphobic. Hypervisibility and the drive to transparency, and the technologies that enable it, are not trans-­friendly” (p. 27). Multiple scholars and activists have also pointed out the acute transmisogynoir embedded in what Spade (2008, 2015) has referred to as the “LGBfakeT movement,” or the mainstream movement for queer rights that has been consumed by a largely white, wealthy, and homonormative respectability politics (e.g., cárdenas, 2015; Marks, 2015). For example, in an interview for Mask Magazine, Tourmaline stated, “Yes, we might have a lot of visibility of trans ­women of color, but w ­ e’re also seeing the highest rate of trans ­women of color being murdered right now. I’m not interested in trans visibility u­ nless it’s supporting movements for self determination” (Marks, 2015, para. 37). Indeed, visibility may be liberating for some, at some times, and in some spaces; and also, the overarching proj­ect of visibility and the ongoing press for structural repre­sen­ta­tion as the gateway to queer and trans livability are riddled with anti-­ Black, settler colonial, and transmisogynist logics that place ­those who are the 127

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most vulnerable in increasingly precarious positions. Simply put, if one envisions visibility as the main road to queer and trans liberation, it is a road along which trans ­people of color, trans ­women of color, and two-­spirit p­ eople necessarily continue to be rendered killable subjects for the benefit of a small segment of white, upwardly mobile, trans ­people. Visibility does not deliver the “it gets better” promise it seeks to deliver; in fact, as Puar (2010) noted, it “might actually contribute to Making Th ­ ings Worse” (para. 9). Our intention with this chapter is not to retrace well-­trodden ground about which ­others have written and spoken better than we can. That visibility is a trap for queer and trans livability is well documented. What seems unique, however, and what we wish to do in this chapter—­and, in some re­spects, what we see as a major contribution of this overall book—is to think not about if one should be in/visible but how one is/desires to be in/visible. That is, we use this chapter to think about how the participants used the Internet to create and desire modalities for living in/visibly. In so ­doing, we introduce the notion of selective visibility as a mode by which trans participants w ­ ere able to manage their choices regarding in/visibility online. Put another way, t­ here are indeed ways that being online can make one far more vis­i­ble; however, participants demonstrated t­ here are also ways to be highly invis­i­ble online and ways to use online spaces to share vari­ous iterations of selves strategically, some of which act as foils for re/de/pre­sen­ta­tions of themselves in dif­fer­ent, safer spaces online. Participants spoke often about their creating multiple accounts on the same online platform (e.g., Snapchat, Facebook), allowing them to be selectively vis­ i­ble to certain groups of p­ eople. In this sense, participants used the Internet to hide in plain sight and to create multiple worlds in which they could explore senses of selves and build the communities they need to thrive. As was the case with our previous writing about defashioning the self online, readers should not misunderstand participants’ concurrent, seemingly conflicting re/de/pre­sen­ta­tions of trans selves as equating to a false sense on consciousness, “identity confusion,” or any similar negative rendering of what participants ­were d­ oing. Their selective visibility was specific, mea­sured, and meaningful. The multiple iterations of selves they w ­ ere re/de/presenting demonstrated a lack on behalf of the concept of identity to hold them, not their lack of ability to hold an identity. H ­ ere one can see it is the notion of identity itself that ruptures as a result of how participants engaged selective visibility, not trans p­ eople as subjects. We discuss this critique of identity further in the next chapter, posing the concept of extraidentity as an alternate vision for dreaming selves. However, for now we find it imperative to be exceedingly clear that the ongoing presence of multiple selves—­and selves that may, to ­others, rupture notions of both continuity and coherency—­was an active choice made by participants. Selective visibility is an agentic happening, a strategy through which participants proliferated possibilities for who they ­were and could be. As such,

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participants ­were imagining at the conceptual edge of the discourses of gender—­which is to say, in the very heart of transness. That is, participants w ­ ere using the capaciousness of transness—as a category, a concept, an analytic, an aesthetic, a method, and a politic—to stretch beyond the self as a singular, coherent, and settled construct. They did not just re/de/imagine trans re/dis/ embodiment (singular) but re/dis/embodiments (plural), and they did so through the visual register of the Internet. Selective visibility, as we have come to conceptualize it through this proj­ ect, is both a refusal and an invitation. Connected to Castro Samayoa’s (2019) notion of willful opacity, the concept marks agentic, purposeful choices participants made to defy fixity and to do so through the Internet as a visual medium. How participants lived online was a form of refusal and dismissal to the social pressure to be “out” or “visibly trans” in a singular, specific, coherent, and uncontradictory way. ­These choices ­were willful, and participants made them in part to refuse harm, disavowal, and loss as the only manner through which to understand their transness. As Z has written previously (Nicolazzo, 2021a), “Trans* ­people may be from oppression, but we ourselves are not of oppression” (p. 517, italics in original). So while trans ­people may never be able to get beyond the oppressive forces that delimit our lives/livability as trans ­people, we can and do seek and desire beyonds, other­wises, and elsewheres. Selective visibility as an act of refusal is such a seeking and desiring. We may never escape the necropo­ liti­cal machine that moves us ever closer to death (epistemologically and ontologically), and yet selective visibility is a robust, agentic form of refusing such damaging and violent pasts/presents/futures. Furthermore, selective visibility is a refusal of the presumed coherency, stability, and static nature of the self (i.e., identity) and, thus, a rupture of the anti-­Blackness and settler colonial logics upon which such presumptions rest. To be clear, it does not absolve or eradicate ­these logics, but selective visibility may cause fissures and cracks in what is other­wise a way of coming to recognize/see “the self” through anti-­Black and colonial lenses. For if “identity” and “the self ” are constructed and shared through the hegemonic proj­ect of visibility, then identity / the self as singular constructs invest in anti-­Black, settler colonial, and transmisogynist logics that defy the expansive and imaginative nature of Black, Indigenous, and transfeminine profundity. We assert, then, that selective visibility could be one pos­si­ ble mode through which to invite new interpretations of trans (life) (online). Participants also invoked selective visibility as an invitation to explore the transness of the Internet as a visual medium. That is, participants cultivated profuse re/de/pre­sen­ta­tions through the Internet to manage who, how, and when they revealed their selves. The visuality of the Internet was itself the mode through which participants invited new imaginings of their selves, including ­those that ­were corrosive to the visual register. For example, some of the re/ pre­sen­ta­tions of trans selves w ­ ere depre­sen­ta­tions, or a questioning of the

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primacy of trans embodiment(s) through the visual nature of the Internet. Conceptually, one could understand selective visibility as an invitation to imagine beyond the self (i.e., extraidentity, which we discuss further in the following chapter) and to do so in a way that even invites the dissolution of an embodied self as one of t­hese imaginings. Dif­fer­ent from defashioning, though, depre­sen­ta­tion as a form of selective visibility occurred through plurality. The way participants created depre­sen­ta­tions of selves was to create multiple accounts on the same online platform, calling into question which “self ” was “real.” Rather than stripping/discarding embodied notions of the self—as was the case with the practice of defashioning—­depresentation was a practice in excess, which is itself a deeply trans notion. Depre­sen­ta­tion invited profuse manifestations of selves as a way to undo pre­sen­ta­tion in the singular. ­Here, selective visibility again is a seeking and desiring and one that indeed invokes Black, Indigenous, and transfeminine ways of thinking and being in the world. The concept of selective visibility pushes one’s understanding of how participants used the Internet to do the work of wanting and desiring more from gender and, as a result, from notions of identity / the self. It also uncovers how, in direct contrast to the well-­worn phrase, seeing may not always—­indeed, it cannot always be—­believing, which is where we begin in the following subsection. As our analy­sis shows, the participants’ use of selective visibility also asks broader questions of identity beyond trans p­ eople. That is, participants’ investments in the Internet as a visual register signal how the proj­ect of visibility, as it affixes itself to one living in their “au­then­tic—­which is to say, singular, coherent, and stable—­self” is overly sanguine and simplistic. Indeed, the participants’ be­hav­ior online suggests that life is far more complex, and thus, t­ here is a need to provide a more nuanced vision for the selves we—­trans and nontrans ­people alike—­always already practice, on and offline.

Seeing ≠ Believing Living online allowed participants to unsettle the presumed believability of the visual. It was not that participants ­were themselves unbelievable but that they twisted virtual platforms in ways that tore at the seams of a coherent, static “self.” Not only did participants use the Internet as a threshold across which to take up trans life differently than they did offline, but several participants also used the same Internet spaces to articulate dif­fer­ent visions of their pre­ sent and f­ uture transness. Th ­ ese two uses of the visuality of the Internet—as an opportunity to live differently than offline and as creating multiple pos­si­ ble selves online—­are both modes of selective visibility. Th ­ ese strategies also highlight how participants w ­ ere able to mold the Internet to their own benefit and use online platforms in ways they wanted and needed. Participants w ­ ere

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able to imbue corners of the Internet with a de­cided transness that ­were not a part of their original design. For example, while not designed by/for trans ­people, the way participants used Snapchat breathed a level of transness into the app, bursting open multiple possibilities for trans knowledge acquisition, information sharing, and sociality. This, along with finding and existing in spaces that w ­ ere intended to be trans online (e.g., Trans Twitter, Trans Tumblr, and trans-­specific Discord and Facebook groups) expanded possibilities for trans life in ways that surpassed ­those that ­were (un)available offline. S. H.’s discussion of their migratory pattern online was an exemplar of why selective visibility was so impor­tant. In describing their pathways around the Internet, they shared, When I first started social media, I very much just used Facebook, and it was more of interacting with ­family, interacting with liked pages; it ­wasn’t r­ eally [me] interacting on a person-­to-­person basis. And then from Facebook, I moved to Twitter for a short time. And then from Twitter, I moved to Tumblr. And I found that Tumblr was the social media that I found fit the most, ’cuz on Facebook, I felt like it was kinda . . . ​I ­didn’t r­ eally enjoy it that much. I was more just d­ oing it b­ ecause my f­ amily members ­were like, “When are you gonna get a Facebook? I wanna friend you on Facebook.”

Not ­every trans person has a difficult or negative relationship with their ­family of origin; however, S. H.’s comment points to some level of confliction. As they said, they “­didn’t r­ eally enjoy [Facebook] that much” b­ ecause “­family members ­were like, ‘When are you gonna get a Facebook [account]?’ ” However, Facebook became a gateway to finding online spaces through which they could cultivate trans life in dif­fer­ent ways. That is, they did not feel (as) safe being trans with ­family on Facebook and so moved to Twitter and then to Tumblr, which “fit the most.” ­Here, the importance of Tumblr as a space for a proliferation of trans imagery can be read alongside the desire for S. H. to maintain a par­tic­u­ lar sort of opacity to elucidate the vari­ous registers through which the Internet as visual operates. S. H.’s movement from Facebook (where they desired visual opacity) to Tumblr (where they felt they “fit the most”) demonstrates how participants engaged in selective visibility to create trans life online. Mavyn talked about how they practiced selective visibility to come out online, using the Internet to test how coming out may work before what they referred to as “a mass coming out.” As they explained, “Digitally, it [coming out] went r­ eally well ’cuz I just sent the same text to like all of my closest friends. It was like six, seven ­people that I came out to in general. And then ­after that, I basically just like paraphrased it [the text] and then put it on my Snapchat story where I basically had all the ­people that I went to school with on my snap.” Mavyn used the Internet not only to become selectively vis­i­ble over time but

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to practice what coming out may sound (or perhaps more accurately, read) like. They started by text­ing their closest friends, and when that went well, they came out over Snapchat to “all the p­ eople that [they] went to school with.” What is impor­tant ­here is not ­peoples’ responses to Mavyn coming out but that Mavyn made ­these decisions on and through the Internet and used (nontrans-­engineered) online platforms to come out as trans. Additionally, Mavyn used the Internet to cultivate a sense of visuality that made sense for them. At no point during Mavyn’s interview did they suggest a seeming need to come out in offline spaces. While Mavyn may indeed have been out in offline spaces, they did not discuss it as a specific trans milestone. In this manner, then, Mavyn used Snapchat to be selectively vis­i­ble online and to be vis­i­ble at first with close friends and then with p­ eople with whom they went to school. Their transness was not a function of being out offline, being out to every­one they knew and interacted with online, or even being out across all online platforms they used. Instead, they made careful, agentic decisions regarding how, when, where, and with whom they would share the gift of their transness. Similarly, Karen talked about making dif­fer­ent choices online than offline. Specifically, online allowed for a level of editability she did not have IRL, which she discussed in this exchange with her interviewer: IN T ERVIE WER:  ​I know that you had mentioned that your online and offline

worlds kind of overlap, right? And so now w ­ e’re g­ oing to come back to this point that you had raised e­ arlier. What’s dif­fer­ent, if anything, about the spaces that you share with t­ hese overlapped ­people? Like, in real life versus online. K AREN:  ​More editing, ­because I’m not g ­ oing to make a post on Facebook where a bunch of potential coworkers and former teachers can see it.

LP articulated much of the same, discussing how they used online platforms to be selectively vis­i­ble: IN T ERVIE WER:  ​How did you use Snapchat in a way that you are only out to the

­people you are out to? Does that make sense? L P:  ​Yeah. Well [with] Facebook, it’s like if you post a picture or something,

then it kind of [goes] automatically to every­one on your friends list, from your [laughs] conservative u­ ncle to someone you only knew in ­middle school for a while. While Snapchat, it [the snapped image] goes away ­a fter a certain amount of time, and you can choose who you send it to. So I could choose to . . . ​[trails off]. And just in general, most older p­ eople d­ on’t have Snapchat. So I could just choose to send it [snaps] to my friends from school, and then it [the snaps] could go away, and I w ­ ouldn’t have to worry about anyone e­ lse seeing it.

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Both Karen and LP’s selective engagement with visuality online produced dif­fer­ent forms of livability they did not necessarily have access to offline. For Karen, selective visibility came about through the editability of online content, whereas for LP, it was the impermanence of visuality over Snapchat (i.e., “it [the snaps] could go away, and I ­wouldn’t have to worry about anyone ­else seeing it”). In a dif­fer­ent engagement with selective visibility, LE had multiple Snapchat accounts. As she described, “Um, I [have] two dif­fer­ent Snapchats [laughs]. I just have them separated: one that’s all my IRL friends that I’m not out to yet and the other one that’s for all my friends that I am out to. So I just have two dif­f er­ent Snapchats.” ­Here, LE obscured a coherent, static notion of the self by creating two visual archives on the same digital platform. In no way did LE feel conflicted about her choice to do so; nor did she ever suggest she was lying or inauthentic in her curating multiple selves for vari­ous audiences. Instead, LE pushed the Internet as visual to its limit through her engagement with selective visibility. She was si­mul­ta­neously vis­i­ble and invisible and curated her in/visibility over one platform by creating multiple accounts. Moreover, the self/selves LE shared with the friends she was not out to was no more or less of a truth than ­those she shared with her friends with whom she was out. Neither repre­sen­ta­tion was false; instead, LE created two archives of self that expanded beyond coherency and stasis. And, while she was eschewing notions of a consistent “self” that cohered across time and space, her selective visibility also demonstrates how visuality and (un)believability are not synonymous. She was herselves across both accounts, defying any sort of unified understanding of gender, identity, and authenticity. As LE and other participants demonstrated through their practices of selective engagement, seeing may not always be believing, but it is also not always unbelievable. In other words, the Internet as visual ruptured the yoking of the vis­i­ble with that of truth and believability, which then provided new possibilities for trans life online that participants did not have access to offline. Participants’ practices of selective visibility also signal cracks in the surface of singular, unified, consistent, and coherent notions of “identity” and “the self,” as well as the idea that such notions indicate a movement t­ oward or holding of any semblance of “authenticity.” We return to t­ hese cracks ­later in the book, but for now, we find it impor­tant to note their presence, as well as how trans life online leads to their exposure.

Visual Thickness The notion of being “the only one” has come up several times in this book, as has how the Internet provides a rebuke to the isolation and loneliness that resides within such a thought. ­Whether ­people are indeed “the only” trans

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person in their immediate social sphere is immaterial; it is the affective field that is produced through such an orientation to their offline existence that the Internet helps to resist. Thus far, we have written about this from a sartorial perspective as well as a communal one. For example, we wrote in chapter 5 about how participants w ­ ere able to witness vari­ous sartorial choices through online platforms, which then gave them access to re/de/imagine their trans embodiments. Additionally, in chapter 6 we wrote about how the Internet provided spaces for community / the communal that may have other­wise been foreclosed to trans p­ eople offline. Be it due to safety concerns, desires for par­ tic­u­lar communities that are not readily pre­sent in one’s immediate offline geographic area, or other engendered reasons, the Internet was an impor­tant intervention in the cultivation of trans sociality for all participants. In a manner of speaking, then, the Internet as both sartorial and communal provides ave­nues down which participants could see (as in, experience) themselves in dif­ fer­ent ways and could do so in a way that helped resist the sense of being “the only one” that was pre­sent in their offline world. Be it through the re/de/fashioning of their transness or the creation of community, participants ­were able to use the Internet to push back against an affective sense of isolation. What we w ­ ere unable to get at through ­these two previous chapters, though, was the importance of how the visual register of the Internet created a sense of visual trans thickness. Hearkening back to ethnographic notions of thick description (Geertz, 1973), we create the neologism visual thickness as a way to signal the richness and vital importance of the Internet for participants to experience an increased volume of transness online. Whereas the Internet as sartorial focused on a re/de/fashioning of trans embodiment, and the Internet as communal focused less on visuality, the refraction of the Internet as visual suggests how experiencing increased visual repre­sen­ta­tions of transness on the Internet—be they dis/connected to trans embodiment—­became a way of developing trans worlds foreclosed to participants offline. In other words, visual thickness, the increased, multilayered, and rich density of trans online imagery, was fertile ground from which participants ­imagined and cultivated their virtual underworlds (Gossett and Huxtable, 2017). Participants no longer felt as alone, isolated, or disconnected; while they may have indeed experienced geographic isolation, they had access to a visual field vis-­à-­vis the Internet that operated in direct contrast to this sensorium. That is, they had a rich set of visual evidence to the contrary—­and a voluminous and always expanding set of evidence, at that. LE provided a robust example of how visual thickness worked to create an online experience that was far more comfortable than life offline. As she shared, “I’m mostly out on the Internet, and I’m only out to a few p­ eople in person. On the Internet, it’s a lot easier to be out ’cuz ­there’s so many more ­people that are [trans]. Like, ­there’s a much higher volume” (emphasis added). LE provides

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an impor­tant trans perspective on visual thickness. That is, while many of the ­people she was seeing/experiencing through the visual register of the Internet, she recognized ­there was “a much higher volume” of trans p­ eople online. Furthermore, that higher volume of transness online led her to being out in dif­fer­ent ways online than she was offline. This is not a suggestion that her offline experience as trans (but not as out) was somehow false or that she was “less real” offline; instead, it marks how the visual thickness LE experienced online allowed her to share her transness in dif­f er­ent ways ­because she amassed evidence of not being “the only one” in ways she was unable to do offline. Eddie also talked about how visual thickness helped resist his experience of isolation offline. As he said, Usually, I was the only one, or one of two or three [trans p­ eople] at best. I just . . . ​gah, I mean, ­there’s nothing. I mean, we had a library and you have my friends, but it r­ eally . . . ​you know, when ­you’re up at night and y­ ou’re alone in your room, it’s not like you can be like, “Mom, Dad, do you know any genderqueer per­for­mance artists who wrestle with masculinity that I can listen to?” I ­can’t do that. It’s kind of difficult, also, where I’m at, to find other adults or meetings or therapists, et cetera, so you have the Internet. . . . ​What solidified the idea in my head like, “Yeah, we [trans p­ eople] can go online to find ­these ­things out,” is that my few friends who w ­ ere also trans or queer ­were often sharing ­things with each other, so when I see, like, “Oh, they go on YouTube and search t­ hese ­things,” ’cuz ­they’re telling me about it, so I could do that. . . . ​ But I think such a big t­ hing is the isolation aspect. Even if ­there happens to be more than one trans person in a room where I’m at, it’s very often someone my own age who is in a similar spot as me where w ­ e’re just like, “I dunno.” W ­ e’re both g­ oing to the Internet [to learn].

­ ere, Eddie spoke about isolation from/through his ­family, as well as through H broader social spaces. For Eddie, ­going online and experiencing visual thickness had a decidedly ontological edge in that he was able to see more trans ­people. Visual thickness also had an epistemological edge in that he could see/ experience deeper volumes of trans knowledges. As Eddie said, “Even if t­ here happens to be more than one trans person in the room where I’m at, it’s very often someone my own age who is in a similar spot as me.” In other words, Eddie went online to explore the visual thickness of both trans p­ eople and trans knowledges. In d­ oing so, Eddie recognized how the visuality of trans life online produced a panoply of transness that was far deeper and richer than what he (and other trans p­ eople) experienced in their offline lives, familial and other­wise. However, in a move similar to what we explore in the outset of this chapter, visual thickness can itself also be a trap. While the voluminous visuality of

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transness online can provide a variety of comfort, security, and sociality foreclosed through offline space, it would be falsely totalizing to say that this form of visuality was always to be believed and/or that it provided the same comforts and connections across trans p­ eople. Th ­ ere w ­ ere nuances through which visual thickness acted in contrasting ways for participants, especially in relation to participants’ racial and gendered experiences of their transness. Recalling AB’s and Ororo’s experiences of racial melancholy online, the overwhelming whiteness of trans life online had an alienating effect—­and thus, an isolating affect—­for trans participants of color. The reproduction of white transness—­and thus, the reproduction of transness as white—­was something that signaled how visual thickness operated as a mode of whiteness. In other words, while ­there may have been an ever-­expanding set of trans imagery online, the vast majority of ­these images ­were tethered to whiteness (epistemologically and ontologically). While the participants of color w ­ ere able to find pockets of the Internet through which they could come into racialized visual thickness, it was something they had to strive for consistently and per­sis­tently. Visual thickness for white participants was a given, thereby reinforcing the whiteness of the phenomenon (and, thus, the racialized work for participants of color to disidentify with the phenomenon). By ­going back to AB’s comments from the previous chapter, one can start to understand how a trans + race perspective creates a more complex picture for how participants experienced visual thickness. As AB noted, I felt like when I first was using trans social media it was very white centered. And over time, I just feel I was being ­really assimilated into white culture. I felt like I ­couldn’t be trans and Latinx. I felt like I had to choose one or the other, and I feel like over time, especially once I started entering spaces in person, I started to realize that’s not the case. Like, I d­ on’t have to do this. And I started noticing that other [trans] ­people [of color] felt the same as me, where they ­were like, “Yeah, this ­really white, trans-­centered media is kinda taking over and that ­doesn’t give us a lot of room.” (emphasis added)

While the visual register of the Internet created a form of visual thickness (as evidenced by LE’s and Eddie’s comments above), AB noted how t­ here was a rupture when it came to thinking about visual thickness from a trans + race perspective. As AB said, the whiteness of visual thickness for trans life online “­doesn’t give us [trans ­people of color] a lot of room.” And while AB continued to seek and ultimately found online spaces to be trans and Latinx, it took time and work. Trans visual thickness caused a rupture for participants of color, as it presumed a white perspective, and thus marked transness as a white phenomenon requiring time, energy, and work to confront, contend with, and overcome. To be sure, ­there are and continue to be many vis­i­ble trans ­people of

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color; and yet the whiteness of transness as an epistemological barrier made visual thickness something with which participants of color had to wrestle. ­There w ­ ere also parallels regarding the trap of visual thickness across participants’ gendered experiences of transness. For example, while participants expressed a comfort in experiencing visual thickness in relation to transness in the broad sense, it was sometimes hard to find visual repre­sen­ta­tions of how they came to know their gendered selves. ­Going back to Ororo, one can see a further example of how this works through a trans + race + gender perspective. During their interview, Ororo explained: I was never feminine to begin with—­that was something that was imposed on me [and] now coalesced into this phase where I’m somewhere along the lines of nonbinary, agender, something or other. All I can say is that I’m trans with an asterisk at this point. I ­don’t know what to do with that. And when I read the call for participants for this [proj­ect], ­there was like a long list of [gender] terms, and I was like, “I d­ on’t even know what some of t­ hese mean.” Like, I ­don’t exist in a space yet where I can ­really ask ­those questions. I ­don’t feel comfortable ­doing that. And I ­don’t have someone to mentor me through all of this, not in a real and personal way. (emphasis added)

In Ororo’s above comment, they note how ­there is yet to be a space in which they exist where they can ask questions about gender and do so as a way to find ways ­toward their gender(s). Based on how we articulate spatiality throughout this text, one can come to understand Ororo’s use of the word space to encompass both on-­and offline space. So although Ororo at one point said, “If it ­weren’t for online spaces, I w ­ ouldn’t be the person that I am right now,” they also point to the ruptures in visual thickness when taking a trans + race + gender perspective. Ororo’s comments denote how, despite desiring the comforts of visual thickness in some ways, they still strug­gled to locate ­people and places online to allow them to imagine f­ uture pos­si­ble selves as a trans person of color who was trying to sift through what their relationship was (or what their relationships w ­ ere) to gender. The focus ­here is therefore less on Ororo using the visual thickness of the Internet as a way to find or locate their gendered selves; instead, our point is to layer analyses such that one can never have a wholly consolidated understanding of how visual thickness works; nor can one assume that it operates the same across time even for the same person. Just as transness denotes a capacious unpindownability, visual thickness is a trap door through which trans ­people can experience a range of vari­ous potentialities and pitfalls online. Moreover, it is impor­tant to recognize that t­ hese potentialities and pitfalls are related to vari­ous subjectivities (e.g., racialization and gender) and, as such, are also related to vari­ous structures of harm, threat, and vio­lence (e.g., anti-­Blackness, settler colonialism, white supremacy, transmisogyny). As

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we discuss throughout this book, ­there is no Internet that is not ensnared in the same structures of vio­lence p­ eople experience offline. Therefore, our nuanced approach to visual thickness should be read with the caution that it, like the rest of participants’ engagements with the Internet, must always be subject to revision and further (and further and further) refraction. Th ­ ere are, ­after all, worlds upon worlds through the looking glass of our screens.

The Possibility of Invisibility and the Challenge that Poses for Higher Education Impossibility may very well be our only possibility. What would it mean to embrace, rather than shy away from, the impossibility of our ways of living as well as our po­liti­cal visions? What would it mean to desire a ­f uture that we ­can’t even imagine but that we are told c­ ouldn’t ever exist? (Bassichis, Lee, and Spade, 2015, p. 42)

If the proj­ect of visibility is contested terrain, then perhaps it is time to won­ der: What might the promise of invisibility hold? We do not intend to flatten the complexities of in/visibility in asking such a question but instead seek a refusal and an imagining in offering a “what might . . .” package. The response to the vexing nature of visibility cannot be a blanket rejection and reversal. Visibility and the visual remain impor­tant po­liti­cally, aesthetically, sartorially, communally, affectively, and existentially. And yet, in imagining what the promise of invisibility could hold, we as authors join a cadre of queer and trans scholars, activists, and cultural producers to desire new ­futures untethered from the demand to be seen in par­tic­u­lar ways. Our question, then, is an extension of that which Bassichis, Lee, and Spade (2015) asked above: “What would it mean to desire a ­future that we ­can’t even imagine but that we are told ­couldn’t ever exist?” ­Here, we won­der what invisibility could mean as a strategy for approaching life in the university. How could trans invisibility, specifically ­those forms of invisibility offered through the visual register of the Internet, crack open possibilities for life across higher education landscapes that have always been hostile, obtuse, and violent t­ oward transness and trans p­ eople? ­There can be l­ ittle quibbling about the ongoing epistemological ← → ontological vio­lence in which the institution of higher education continually invests. Such an investment happens concurrently alongside the university’s desire (and demand) that trans ­people be vis­i­ble in a coherent, static, and manageable way, with the notion of manageability linking to Spade’s (2015) articulation of population management and administrative vio­lence. Trans p­ eople—­and especially trans ­women—­are desired in the acad­emy insofar as we show up in ways that are

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categorizable (capturable), useful (extractable), and palatable to / in ser­vice to the furtherance of the institution as a liberal proj­ect(ion). Trans p­ eople are—­ and transness is—­only wanted visibly based on what it can do to bolster the institution of higher education. And b­ecause the university continually invests in trans killability (Nicolazzo, 2021b, 2022), it would stand to reason that the institution of higher education wants trans p­ eople—­and transness broadly speaking—to render it killable and to do so while we are used to cover over this institutional vio­lence. For example, institutions participating in the Campus Pride Index suggest they are ­doing well by trans ­people. Institutions often use their index score as a recruitment tool, which belies the structures of vio­lence embedded into the psyche, architecture, and overall work of the university. However, b­ ecause ­these practices are routinized across the landscape of higher education, their vio­lence is obscured, and the killability continues in plain sight. Again, it would seem to be a fitting question to won­ der out loud: What might the promise of invisibility hold? It is also essential to think about the pre­sent question about the possibilities of invisibility while recognizing how the demand for visibility is itself an anti-­Black, settler colonial, ableist, and imperial proj­ect(ion). Trans students of color continue to experience collegiate life offline in modes that enhance their precarity and senses of isolation and alienation. Similarly, Miller (2017) articulated how queer and trans disabled students found comfort being online in ways they never had in offline college settings. Th ­ ere are indeed ways that college life creates pockets of possibility for t­ hose of us who are visibly trans, be it by design or by demand. We as authors continue to choose being ensconced in higher education, a­ fter all, signaling not just our place in the machine but our desire to remain (however loosely that may show up at vari­ous times). However, it would be overly facile to suggest that our location in higher education means we o­ ught not critique higher education; nor should we point out how the proj­ect of the university, through the romanticization of visibility, is deeply invested in ­those very structures of vio­lence, erasure, harm, and threat that place ­those who are most vulnerable at continual danger. So what does invisibility look, feel, and sound like in higher education? What could the possibility of obscurity offer when trans p­ eople actively choose it rather than our being obscured through the institution’s investment in trans killability? What challenges to the university must the possibilities of invisibility necessarily pose to the point that such offerings work against the furtherance of the social institution in and of itself? And how must we always remember that any imaginings and desires for other­wise worlds in higher education may also be co-­opted and used by the institution to further trans suffering? As Brown et al. (2020) suggested in their work on rearticulating calls for reparations in higher education, “One must always understand any move to envisioning beyond, and of cultivating underworlds of Black(ened) life, as

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always already conditional and corruptible” (p. 24). Therefore, while we find the questions we are asking to be urgent and necessary, we suggest ­there is a need for ongoing vigilance, as well as an ongoing insistence to keep asking questions, as any tentative answers at which we arrive may be taken up institutionally to embed structural harm further. One offering of what invisibility may mean in higher education is holding more space for trans ­people, as opposed to holding more programs about trans ­people. As Marine and Nicolazzo (2014) found in their study on LGBTQ centers, t­ here was an overt lack of time, space, and energy focused on trans p­ eople. Combined with Nicolazzo’s (2017b), Catalano’s (2015a), and Jaekel and Nicolazzo’s (2017) scholarship, many nontrans ­people are ­under the assumption that to be visibly trans on college campuses is an invitation to educate, explain, and hold space for nontrans anx­i­eties regarding gender. Even when trans p­ eople are in positions of authority and leadership, we often face pressure to comply with this ongoing sense of educating about our lives rather than refusing this task and making the space we need to breathe beyond the nontrans gaze. In other words, what invisibility as possibility may look like is taking up Moten and Harney’s (2004) call to criminality as a position of refusal ­toward, against, and within the acad­emy. By this we mean that t­ hose of us who are trans in the acad­emy use our positions to redistribute resources and to say, actively, loudly, and without regret, no (when, where, and with whom we can, recognizing the asymmetrical nodes of power that dis/invite us to do so across subjectivities; some ­people, ­after all, are criminals based on their very being, which makes movements t­ oward criminality as a disposition all the more complex and precarious). The participants for this proj­ect have indeed themselves said no, both in word and by choice. In their moving online to seek and cultivate sociality, they have chosen a par­tic­u­lar form of obscurity in offline collegiate spaces. Ororo, for example, stated they would not be the person they w ­ ere without the Internet and that despite having an LGBTQ center on their campus, it was their refusal of that space, their taking up of a visuality online by way of an obscurity offline, that allowed them to explore the capaciousness of their trans real­ity. While not a panacea (seeing cannot always hold believing, as we discussed above), it is an opening, a possibility of/for/by invisibility. Furthermore, while this proj­ect was set in a collegiate context (e.g., we spoke to trans college students), ­there was a de­cided lack of conversation by participants and content through our online observation that centered the institution of higher education. This almost slipped past us as authors given how intensely familiar it became as a facet of the empirical data we collected. However, in making this familiarity strange, we see a kernel of possibility in the turning away from the institution of higher education. Participants w ­ ere not invested in re/creating a kinder, gentler form of higher education; they ­were not interested in the liberal humanist fantasies of repair, reform, or redemption.

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Perhaps they ­were aware that such fantasies ­were accommodationist at best (and perpetually violent at worst), or perhaps we just did not ask enough pointed questions about college as researchers. However, the acute lack of college talk signals a possibility in how letting go of the need to render higher education as “good” could ­free up space, time, energy, and resources to love transness and trans ­people more. The lack of college talk may signal that the possibility of invisibility lies in focusing on transness, not the institution of higher education. And while we may use the (often paltry) resources offered up by universities to do the work of focusing on transness and trans p­ eople, it ­will not be with the aim of institutional repair. In other words, perhaps invisibility could look, sound, and feel like leaving the university ­behind in ­favor of transness and trans ­people. Perhaps invisibility requires that one love transness and trans p­ eople to the extent that they stop loving the institution of higher education and that one recognizes that to love both at the same time may be incommensurate to the extent that d­ oing so necessarily c­ auses harm t­ oward transness and trans p­ eople. ­These are uncomfortable realities for many in higher education, especially nontrans ­people. However, if we are to take our own advice—­led, as we have been, by the participants and our digital ethnographic “deep hanging out” (Clifford, 1997)—­our role is to leverage the notion of invisibility to the point that it makes ­people (and, by proxy, the institution of higher education) quake with ner­vous­ness. Thinking through the visual register of the Internet, even as it relates to invisibility, o­ ught to invoke this feeling, as the vibrations ner­ vous­ness induce are a signifier of the shakiness of the overarching proj­ect of visibility. If the proj­ect of visibility was more secure, it would not create the agitated sensorium it does. That ­there is an unsteadiness that coincides with forwarding visibility is a further signal of the possibility of invisibility as both a refusal and an imagining. Furthermore, to not address the potential of invisibility due to the discomfort it produces/evokes is a disavowal of trans ways of thinking and being, which is decidedly contradictory to this proj­ect. While it may make nontrans ­people and ways of being unsettled, we as authors find this to be one of the very points of our work; to think/feel/do/embody transness is itself both a refusal of nontrans realities as well as a dream for better trans ­futures both on-­and offline.

Conclusion Visibility and visuality are linked yet distinct notions. Visibility is agentic in that it requires an active response, an affirmative yes to the question “are you trans?,” which then coheres into one being a trans subject. While the “goodness” of one’s coherence as trans may be in further question—­vis-­à-­vis the nontrans-­centric construction of passability—­the fact that one is indeed a trans

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subject is interpellated through an Althusserian call and response. Conversely, visuality is concretized through archival volume. One need not be vis­i­ble to be a part of the trans visual archive or to access the trans visual archive. In relation to this proj­ect, participants turned to life online as a way to access this archive without necessarily having to articulate themselves as trans in a socially legible way (and perhaps to do so in ways that w ­ ere decidedly socially illegible). So, while visibility relies on visuality, the same is not true in reverse. This, then, creates a pocket of possibility when thinking about trans life online, specifically in relation to the invisibility one can maintain while exploring the Internet as visual. As we have also shown in this chapter, the way trans + race + gender map onto each other (and then onto each other again) produces vari­ous effects for understanding visuality as im/possibility online. Neither visuality nor visibility are panaceas, especially when one considers the structures of vio­lence that increase precarity for ­those trans subjects who are the most vulnerable. And, ­because the institution of higher education furthers ideologies of trans killability, one would be well advised to maintain a healthy disregard for the university as desirous of the liberal disposition it espouses, even—or perhaps especially—­when transness and trans p­ eople seem to be embraced (e.g., the advertising of a high score in the Campus Pride Index). Visuality may indeed provide opportunities for moving ­toward trans selves and communities, but ­these movements are not uncontested or always positive. Furthermore, how the institution of higher education desires to consume and commodify transness and trans p­ eople also mediates how, when, why, and to what effects and affects trans students move online to seek visuality in dif­fer­ent (potentially but not necessarily liberating) ways. This movement, that of ­things being potentially but necessarily liberating, brings us to the third act of this book: imagining ­future possibilities for living online. As we discuss in the ensuing section of the text, we do not seek to create an easy set of answers, a one-­through-­five stepwise path down which one can create more trans-­inclusive environments. Indeed, ­these sorts of best-­ practices lists are figments of the liberal imagination that rely on the idea that the complex prob­lem of trans oppression—­which is to say, the complex prob­ lem of transmisogyny—­can be solved by a ­simple checklist of policies and practices one can implement. Instead, what one ­will find in the following section is a series of provocations, questions, and ideas that ­will hopefully open new tabs and win­dows of online exploration. We think of this next section as a further investment in transness as profusion, an ever-­expanding collection of possibilities into which one can tumble (or perhaps written in a more apt way for our proj­ect, Tumbl) to love transness and trans ­people (even) more.

Part 3

Prismatic Possibilities

8

The Multiplicity of Trans Life Online

It is common practice for ethnographers to seek to make the familiar strange and the strange familiar. In a way, ethnographers seek surprises and hope to be surprised by ­these surprises, coming as they often do from explorations of the ordinariness of life. The work of ethnography is to orient, re­orient, and then re­orient again as a way of capturing the strange, peculiar, and otherworldly in the mundane. Thinking back on the meta­phor of the prism that courses through this text, we as researchers have endeavored to turn t­ hese data over and then over again, hoping to explore the vari­ous nuanced refractions of light contained within each turn. Our work has not been so much a practice of finding any one singularity or any unified truth to how trans p­ eople do life online; instead, our research was always about examining the quotidian nature of trans life online by turning it over and then over again, all with the desire to be surprised by the strange possibilities that such turns may illuminate. As is often the case with ethnographic undertakings, the pro­cess has also changed us as researchers, including our own dis/investments in the very ideas at the heart of this proj­ect: materiality, virtual life, attention to the affective in-­betweens, and trans sociality. Th ­ ese changes have meant more than just a dif­fer­ent tack or approach to our work. In some cases, they have meant a continued re­orientation to how we come to know our unfolding trans un/becomings, as well as what it means to do the sorts of work and thinking we desire to do. Our ethnographic work has not only been invested in that which is external to us but has also been, as we argue it should always be, internal and 145

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intra/inter/personal oriented. Who we are is dif­fer­ent now on the other side of engaging in this proj­ect; our own prisms have turned over (and over again). And in the turning, in the transposing of what was once familiar with that which was once strange, we offer the following prismatic possibilities for living online. In so d­ oing, we also invite you, our reader, to break the fourth wall of the theater that is the practice of reading. We want to extend a proverbial hand to you as the reader and implore you to place yourself into the prism of this work, to turn over and then over again your own dis/investments in online life and, therefore, in possibilities for elsewheres beyond the material plane. In essence, we seek to proffer not just a series of implications for a par­tic­ u­lar trans student body but to envelope ourselves, alongside you as a reader, in a continual, strange pro­cess by which we can tumble into the excesses of the virtual and just see what comes of it. In this chapter, we invite you to be changed alongside us and to be changed in and through the ways the participants ­were changed through their online lives. Before dipping into how we as authors are making sense of the data from this proj­ect, it is impor­tant to note that what we share is not all ­there is to be shared. Similar to how participants used online platforms to stretch beyond their corporeal selves/worlds, we strongly encourage you to think through and beyond what we share below. An impor­tant aspect of any ethnographic proj­ ect is the overarching importance of context, especially how that which is familiar (e.g., the profusion of life online) is made strange through a variety of contexts and histories. How you as a reader may understand, interpret, and implement data from the previous chapters ­will invariably shift from how we as scholars have done so. This is as axiomatic as it is vexing in that t­ here is nothing s­ imple or plain about how to move forward. The “so what?” of our work continues to extend beyond our own interpretation and analy­sis in the previous chapters. As such, we invite readers to expose and explore the excessive nature of the data, especially as they make sense in the situated contexts and histories you as a reader may encounter them.

Extraidentity and the End of Identity Development Across fields of study, as with much of the public discourse regarding gender, ­there is a lot of commentary about “real,” “true,” or “au­then­tic” notions of the self. Indeed, in 2018 when Z was giving a talk about this nascent proj­ect, one of the audience members asked how we as researchers would address the way ­people “faked” their identities online. Embedded in the question itself was not just the notion of ­people catfishing o­ thers through fake social media profiles but also the discourse of trans ­people not being who we say we are. The logic would then go that if we are not who we say we are offline, then we cannot possibly be who we say we are online. This illogic suggests this cannot be the case,

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which leads to the sort of extreme gender policing pre­sent through material social spheres (think of ­every single bathroom-­related piece of legislation that is forwarded/adopted, or all dress code policies that enact gender binary discourse as two easy examples). Indeed, the literal policing of corporeal possibilities of gender, rooted as it is in transantagonism and, most specifically, transmisogyny and anti-­Blackness, then posits that the un­regu­la­ted nature of the Internet provides a platform where “anything goes.” In short, offline transantagonism, transmisogyny, and anti-­Blackness are used to weaponize trans ­people’s moving online to explore and enact their genders, suggesting that whoever we are online is, as with offline, “fake,” “untrue,” or other­wise “inauthentic.” Such an illogic comes to its end in suggesting ­there can only be one sense of self, and to be anyone e­ lse, let alone to do so without coming out or being public to broader nontrans offline publics (and then living your trans life according to nontrans notions of respectable gender and beauty), is incommensurate with any pos­si­ble desired f­ uture. Moreover, across education disciplinary discourses, ­there is a strong developmental psy­chol­ogy underpinning that suggests ­children and adults move from less to more formed/refined iterations of themselves over their life span. As c­ hildren and adults age, t­ hese theories argue, they come into a more complex understanding of who they are. One’s racial, gender, sexual, disability, and class identities, for example, can and do develop throughout one’s life, with the ultimate end of achieving some semblance of unified, cohesive, and singular sense of self. This then leads to many writing positionality statements through their scholarship that read as “a list of attributes separated by t­ hose proverbial commas (gender, sexuality, race, class), that usually mean that we have not yet figured out how to think the relations we seek to mark” (Butler, 2011, p. 123). Put another way, the notion of identity development leads one to clarify and proj­ect identity as a unified, monolithic, and stable sense of self in ways that— as the data presented throughout this book and Butler’s above quote signal—­ may actually move one further from the profuse, complex, and perhaps conflicting senses of selves they could have. In this text, we introduce the neologism of extraidentity to represent the multiple selves trans participants ­were able to explore, invoke, and dis/embody across on-­and offline realities. We use this term both to recognize how participants proliferated senses of selves by living online and as a necessary rebuke of the proj­ect of identity development itself. We not only find extraidentity to mark the excessive nature of trans life online in relation to profuse notions of who one was / is / can be, but it also stands as a clarion call to the need to rupture the technologies of whiteness and transmisogyny that frame trans ­people—­and, we argue, vari­ous dispossessed populations—­out of view due to how the self is situated as a coherent, knowable, and stable singular construct. Our claim is, then, that identity development should no longer hold a

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place—­let alone be the leading edge—in the ways educators come to know, make sense of, or teach about youth. Furthermore, taking this trickle-up approach (Spade, 2015) to extraidentity by situating ­those who are most vulnerable as central, we argue that the proj­ect of identity development, as it has been operationalized and used throughout vari­ous academic disciplines, including most/all of ­those in education, invests in the killability of trans and other dispossessed populations. Simply put, ongoing investments of normative notions of identity and identity development are rooted in a form of epistemic ← → ontological vio­lence that is based on the notion of trans ­people—­especially trans ­women—­being nonhuman and, therefore, of being deemed killable (Nicolazzo, 2021b, 2022). While recognizing participants’ extraidentity occurred through their trans-­ online lives, t­ here is nothing exclusively trans, online, or trans-­online about extraidentity. The notion of extraidentity as excessive, profuse, and capacious necessarily leaks across subjectivities. Such an understanding is reflective of how one comes to experience the interior/exterior life of such subjectivities as racialization, class, gender, disability, and sexuality. ­Here, extraidentity recognizes not merely an externalized “solidity” that is vis­i­ble / can be “seen” by o­ thers but takes seriously one’s interiority and interior conceptualizations of selves. As we discussed in chapter 1, transness is an always unfolding relationality across externalized, bodily manifestations of gender and one’s internal searching and explorations of gendered be(com)ing. Such searchings happen online and also occur in t­ hose micromoments that make up the affective residue of material life. For example, several scholars have discussed how transness is understood through classroom contexts and pedagogy, particularly as it relates to corporeal trans becomings (Jaekel and Nicolazzo, 2017; Keenan, 2017; Malatino, 2015; Nicolazzo, 2021b). Moreover, the field of Black studies is replete with explorations of how Blackness operates as a field through which to understand sexuality, gender, and humanity across material and virtual planes (e.g., Jackson, 2020). Thus, extraidentity as a conceptual tool is not just about trans, not just about online, and not just about trans online. The concept itself can be leveraged in vari­ous settings and both animates and is animated by a richer understanding of interior/exterior life than normative theories of identity and identity development can hold. Extraidentity also embraces how the interior/exterior life of subjectivities cannot help but be understood in relation to one another. G ­ oing back to the aforementioned Butler quote, t­ hese attributes are not separate, a point the grammar of the comma often belies. Much to the contrary, t­ here is no way to understand subjectivities than as always being in constant relation to one another. For example, as participants of color note throughout this text, ­there is no way to understand transness without understanding race, racialization, and the ways anti-­darkness (Love, 2019) manifests as a function of trans life online.1

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Where identity / identity development seeks to explore attributes in singularity, extraidentity calls, “Bullshit.” Where identity / identity development desires to make ­simple the complex relationality of subjectivities, extraidentity responds, “Not so fast.” Where identity / identity development encourages coherent misunderstandings of self, extraidentity proclaims, loudly and often, “This is not how any of this works.” Extraidentity desires a commitment to the ethereal, the transreal, the extrareal. Extraidentity is, as we have explored in this text, a belief in ghosts—­ namely, the haunting absent presence of transness. To move ­toward extraidentity and to grasp fully the potentiality of this construct is to recognize that seeing is not always believing, that invisibility is a place of latent possibilities rather than a forever wasteland of death, sorrow, and misery (Nicolazzo, 2019b).

Invisibility as Possibility For years, trans scholars(hip) has been signaling the proj­ect of visibility as a drive t­ oward normativity. Whereas this rebuke has become commonplace within spheres of trans studies discourse, ­there has been less exploration of just what is pos­si­ble when we move across the threshold between in/visibility. Invoking the language of Gossett, Stanley, and Burton (2017), if visibility is a trap, then perhaps it would be worth thinking about what possibilities lie through the doorway to invisibility. This is not to suggest that invisibility is a panacea to the pitfalls and confining nature of the proj­ect of visibility but that within invisibility t­ here exist vari­ous alternate realities and ways of thinking/being/ doing trans that resonate with participants’ online lives. In thinking about the possibility of invisibility, it makes sense to think first about how one comes to recognize one’s own transness and move into one’s own relationship with trans becoming as an ongoing, unfolding phenomenon. To recognize one’s transness is, before anything e­ lse, an interior feeling. To utter ­those words “I am trans” is, first and foremost, a verbalizing of that which one comes to know about one’s self/selves in relation to one’s interior and exterior worlds. And yet, recognizing one’s trans becoming does not necessitate an externalizing of that becoming. Put another way, one may come to know oneself as trans, but that does not mean one necessarily desires to share such knowledge with o­ thers. And, more to the point, to not share one’s trans becoming with ­others does not in any way signal the flimsiness or untruth of such a claim. One does not become trans through o­ thers—­usually nontrans p­ eople—­k nowing and then passing judgment on such a speech act (i.e., “I am trans”) but on the utterance itself, be it internally or externally oriented. Already one sees that the latent possibility of gender, and specifically of trans as a mode through which to re/think life, begins to bloom in invisibility, the recognition of ­future pos­si­ble selves to and by the self. Perhaps even ­there is a

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recognition of ­future pos­si­ble selves through a remembering of misrecognitions of the former self. And from this interior feeling, participants often moved online to learn, to seek, and to desire f­uture selves. They did not decide to come out in order to re/confirm their existence as trans; they went online to use the Internet as a shadow space through which to explore the potentialities of their newly acknowledged gendered orientation to the world. Or, if they did come out, it was by coming into trans online communities. Thus, ­there is a twisting of the outward proj­ect of visibility t­ oward an inward proj­ect of being together with other trans ­people in invisible, dark, or other­wise shadowy corners of the Internet. What is also telling of the participants’ experiences through this proj­ect is how they used Internet platforms to play with dis/embodiment. For example, multiple participants discussed using avatars, flags, or pictures of animals as repre­sen­ta­tions of themselves online. Several participants also discussed investing in Internet platforms that used text rather than audio, allowing them to show up in ways their voice may other­wise belie. For example, Twitter, which remains a largely text-­based application, became a place to be trans in wholly dif­fer­ent ways for some participants who would regularly be clocked or have their gender questioned in material IRL spaces. Th ­ ese types of online re/configurations of ­future pos­si­ble selves are not benign; nor are they random. Participants thought carefully about who and how they wanted to convey their transness, sometimes even having multiple accounts on the same platform (e.g., Snapchat). This sort of multiplicity did not suggest a false sense of self where one account was their “true” self and the other, a “fake” self. Instead, ­these accountings of how participants had multiple accounts on the same platform signal both a profusion of pos­si­ble selves and an investment in the invisible. That is, both/all accountings of who they w ­ ere / are / could be w ­ ere “real,” and participants ­were walling some versions of themselves off, allowing only a select few into their invisible/interior trans worlds. And yet ­there is a deep adherence to the ongoing proj­ect(ion) of trans visibility throughout higher education. The Campus Pride Index, for example, is steeped in the notion that having certain markers of visibility (e.g., gender identity/expression being listed in a university nondiscrimination policy) signals a more friendly campus. ­There is a certain ­simple hopefulness in visibility, one that wants a college campus that can be good just by having certain ­things, ­people, or words in full view. However, this is clearly not the case. Bad ­things still happen on good campuses (with “good” ­here signaling a higher score on the Campus Pride Index), and good campuses are oftentimes marked as such by the hiding of bad t­ hings that happen. At the University of Arizona, where we (Z and Sy) work and learn, the existence of the Transgender Studies Research Cluster—­heralded as the first-­of-­its-­kind trans cluster hire in the nation and, thus, a good ­thing—­operates to cover over the lack of trans-­inclusive health care

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or administrative investment in funding and supporting a trans studies academic program of study, two bad ­things. What is seen by the light of day, that which is made vis­i­ble, is in many ways not as good as one may believe, hope, or want it to be. In other words, if all that we have as trans p­ eople is that which is made vis­i­ble, then it would seem we are letting in a lot of bad along with the good. In light of the above visibility analy­sis (pun intended), participants moved online and reveled in its shadowy, invisible nature. In much the same way, ­people who teach, work, and study at institutions of higher education might do well to think about how to support trans p­ eople without institutionalizing such support. Thinking alongside Ferguson (2012), the question higher education prac­ti­tion­ers may want to ask is: How can my work in support of trans f­ utures be in but not of the institution? Furthermore, thinking alongside Moten and Harney (2004), higher education prac­ti­tion­ers may ask themselves the further questions: How can I position myself so as to have a criminal relationship to the institution at which I work? How can I steal the resources to which I have access as a means to redistribute them to t­ hose dispossessed and marooned populations who are pre­sent but may not be showing up in the vis­i­ble ways the institution demands due to institutional vio­lence? What am I willing to give up, question, or other­wise do to dismantle the logics of visibility that trap and promote vio­lence for trans students? ­These are not easy questions, but we never said the necessary work of leveraging the invisible to cultivate trans ­futures would ever be easy. Moreover, that which is easy is often so b­ ecause it does not last or only gestures ­toward freedom without ­doing the work to create the conditions whereby freedom can flourish more than in name only.

Virtual Racism I contend that the Western internet, as a social structure, represents and maintains White, masculine, bourgeois, heterosexual and Christian culture through its content. ­These ideologies are translucently mediated by the browser’s design and concomitant information practices. English-­speaking internet users, content providers, policy makers, and designers bring their racial frames to their internet experiences, interpreting racial dynamics through this electronic medium while si­mul­ta­neously redistributing cultural resources along racial lines. Th ­ ese practices neatly re­create social dynamics online that mirror offline patterns of racial interaction. (Brock, 2011, p. 1088)

Simply put, our research indicates that racism mediates trans life online. That t­ here are racist corners of the Internet is not surprising, but t­ hese vitriolic spaces ­were not the ones in which participants w ­ ere engaging. Some may

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share an overly optimistic hope that the Internet spaces where trans participants would spend time would be committed to a level and depth of egalitarianism, and in many ways they w ­ ere. However, this did not stop the omnipresence of racism from disrupting how, where, and when participants engaged online. Racial stratification not only existed throughout trans life online but replicated similar effects as it did—­and does—­throughout trans life IRL, which is to say, trans participants discussed feeling distanced from spaces and modes of repre­ sen­ta­tion due to the embeddedness of racism and white supremacy. This real­ity resonates with what Noble (2018) referred to as technological redlining, or how racism and sexism foreclose the ability for p­ eople of color and ­women (and especially ­women of color) to comfortably exist in vari­ous spaces online. As she wrote, “Despite the widespread beliefs in the Internet as a demo­ cratic space where p­ eople have the power to dynamically participate as equals, the Internet is in fact or­ga­nized to the benefit of power­ful elites” (p.  48). Given the entrenchment of how the “power­ful elites” Noble noted come to and maintain positions of power through continually reasserting discourses of dominance—­including among them racism—it makes sense that the participants of this proj­ect would experience forms of racialized harm that would dissuade or preclude them from ­going certain places or engaging in certain ways online. Quoting again from Noble’s (2018) work, she wrote, “­There is a missing social context in commercial digital and media platforms, and it ­matters, particularly for marginalized groups that are problematically represented in ste­reo­typical or pornographic ways, for ­those who are bullied, and for ­those who are consistently targeted” (p. 35). The missing social context is that of racism and how it mediates life chances for ­people of color. And while Noble’s work does not address gender or sexuality in a substantive way, our ethnographic research pairs together with Noble’s work to provide an understanding of how technological redlining negatively influences trans life online. Specifically, our data suggest trans participants of color may well have experienced similar refractions of the Internet to their white trans peers, but the way they experienced them was always already influenced by the overwhelming presence of racism online—or what we are terming virtual racism—­ making their engagements necessarily distinct. If this is indeed the case, though, one may well won­der what to do about it. Racism—­specifically anti-­Black racism—is not only a founding princi­ple of higher education (e.g., Wheatle, 2019; Wilder, 2013) but has proven itself to be an intractable real­ity of social life in the United States. Racism is not only an institutional commitment in higher education but also a deeply held social value that continues to mediate life chances in the United States. And yet the omnipresence and intense press of racism does not mean one can or should do nothing. Our data add to the ongoing call that in the face of mounting evidence and experiences of racism, one has ­little choice but to do as much as one can to

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create more equitable lives for ­those who experience the ongoing assault and indignities of racism, especially anti-­Black racism. The same, we would argue, holds for life online as it does for IRL existences. One of the impor­tant, and perhaps easiest, ­things to do given ­these data is to recognize and (re)assert, over and over again, that transness is not the sole provenance of whiteness. That is, while transness and whiteness have been tethered together through a Western social imaginary—as well as through the pro­cess of academic/institutional incorporation—­the ongoing presence of this false rendering is itself nothing more than a reflection of white supremacy and colonial logics. While it may seem ­simple to think about the enduring Blackness and Indigeneity of transness, we as authors are reminded at just how often gender and race continue to be severed from one another throughout the U.S. social sphere. Platforms like the ­Human Rights Campaign continue to champion ­causes and forward ­people who represent mainstream, white agendas relating to queer and trans life. Also, communities across racialized subject positions often willfully ignore how race and gender comingle as vectors of power to further ongoing precarity in the material—­and, our data would add, digital—­lives of trans ­people of color, p­ eople of color of trans experience, and two-­spirit p­ eople. Thus, to (re)assert and (re)articulate the Blackness and Indigeneity of transness is itself a necessary ongoing form of re­sis­tance to the possessive desires of white supremacy. Furthermore, while educators could always talk with students about media literacy, especially as it pertains to racialization, our data demonstrate that participants of color already know that virtual racism exists and have developed practices of resilience (Nicolazzo, 2016b, 2017b) to navigate it. Thus, what we propose is that educators and students—­especially white educators and students—­find ways to unearth, make meaning, and work through their own investments in virtual racism. That is, our research suggests trans students of color know and continue to develop ways to navigate the virtual racism that structures their online lives (Simms, Nicolazzo, and Jones, 2021). However, the white trans participants largely did not demonstrate this level of racial awareness. Similarly, white educators continue to convey a misunderstanding of the breadth, texture, and urgency of racism in higher education (e.g., Ahmed, 2012; Stewart and Nicolazzo, 2018; Whitehead, In review). Th ­ ese realities congeal to require ­things not of trans p­ eople of color but white p­ eople in higher education, educators and students. It is past time for white ­people to recognize the harmful effects of white supremacy and to take steps to redress such vio­lence. It is vital for white educators and students to recognize how racism has always been pre­sent online and how they may engage online in ways that reproduce the virtual racism that then negatively influences the online life chances of trans ­people of color. Once white educators and students do the work to recognize their investments in online racial animus, they must act to change this real­ity

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in which they are complicit, often and in as many ways as pos­si­ble. Virtual racism may indeed be h ­ ere to stay; however, we assert this only heightens the importance of working ­toward elsewheres and other­wise worlds in which trans ­people of color can find pockets of relief—­online and IRL—­from the rippling effects of racialized trauma and vio­lence that foreclose pos­si­ble gendered f­ utures. It is ­toward ­these elsewheres and other­wise worlds we now turn.

The Internet as a Gesture to Elsewheres and Other­wises One of the many gifts of both Indigenous and Black studies scholarship has been their consistent focus on imagining new worlds unencumbered by the pernicious vio­lences that frame the current conditions of life for Native and Black populations. As King, Navarro, and Smith (2020) described, t­ hese pos­ si­ble worlds are essential not just for the h ­ ere and now, but t­ here is a need to draw from our collective historical pasts as a way to desire and seek a better ­future. Specifically, they wrote: “By considering our ­human capacity to create and conjure a better world into existence, we have the potentiality to reorder the coordinates of our lives. This in no way erases the historical and pre­sent realities of genocide and slavery, but instead seeks to feel where we come from to arrive at where we want to be, together” (p. 13, emphasis in original). Not only do King, Navarro, and Smith signal the importance of feeling the past—­a nod to a historically rooted sensorium—­but their use of the word together is an indication of how the dreaming work required to call forth better worlds must always be done in relation: with h ­ uman and more than ­human species, with the land upon which we move, with each other, and with an attention to the affective dimensions that frame much of how we make meaning of and navigate our social worlds. ­W hether referenced as other­wise worlds (King, Navarro, and Smith, 2020), other­wise movements (Crawley, 2015), elsewheres (la paperson, 2017), or underworlding (Gossett and Huxtable, 2017), the overarching sense of urgency and possibility for envisioning, seeking, and cultivating manifold iterations of space/time that do not reassert the same violent logics that are presently imposed on dispossessed populations is at the core of ­these proj­ect(ion)s. At the outset of this book, we quoted the first lines from a special issue of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly focused on trans ­futures. It would appear that trans studies has, as it should, taken guidance from Indigenous and Black studies in seeking other­wise worlds. This seeking is both a rebuke of the pre­ sent social conditions that frame trans life as killable and a per­sis­tently unending knowledge that we have, as marooned ­peoples, made life in and around ­those spaces where t­ here was seemingly no hope for life. It is striking, too, that one of the coeditors of the aforementioned special issue to TSQ, micha cárdenas, has been invested in searching for trans life online. Her notion of the

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transreal, which we discuss throughout our text, and her recent work in thinking about the entangled implications of climate change alongside racial and gender justice through virtual real­ity are signals of virtual possibilities. In fact, it was cárdenas’s theorizing that was profoundly influential as we developed the original study that grounds this book. Throughout this book, we have discussed the Internet as an enactment of underworlding for the participants. Described as a “temporary fabulousness zone” by Gossett and Huxtable (2017), underworlding is both a pro­cess and a product. That is, underworlding describes both a seeking for an elsewhere and the elsewhere that one seeks. The prefix under-­also marks the way/places queer and trans life has long proliferated. Namely, queer and trans worlds have long been developed under­neath, under­g round, or ­under the cover of darkness. ­Here, one can think of bars that existed under­ground and the drag ball scene that operated during the eve­ning hours in the shadowy recesses of tucked-­away locations. Z has also detailed elsewhere how even modern depictions of transness operate in the shadows and how the notion of willful opacity—­first developed by Castro Samayoa (2019)—­can be used to un/think pedagogical trans futurities (Nicolazzo, 2019a, 2020). While not a panacea, the participants have developed multiple ways of thinking, feeling, and dis/embodying ­f uture pos­si­ble trans life online and of creating underworlds through the binary code that would, at first blush, seemingly limit such transgressions. To be clear, t­ here are multiple examples we detail in this book and elsewhere that rupture an overly sanguine reading of the Internet as possibility (e.g., Simms, Nicolazzo, and Jones, 2021). Especially in relation to racialization, femininities, or disability, the Internet has continually proven a fraught, if not downright hostile, environment for t­ hose trans ­people who are most vulnerable. That said, the Internet also serves as a potent reminder that other worlds are indeed pos­si­ble, that dif­fer­ent f­ utures can and are crafted amid the mounting rubble of late capitalism. Th ­ ere is no pure answer, no way to untangle ourselves from the unending harms of the material world, and yet the participants have shown us not a way out but ways under­neath, which then lead to the elsewheres and other­wises that can hold us in altogether new and profoundly enriching ways. Fi­nally, it is impor­tant to recognize that movements t­ oward elsewheres and other­wises may not always be repetitive but ­will likely be iterative. Seeking elsewheres and other­wises is not about d­ oing what has been done before (­unless the “what has been done before” is a ­going back to that which happened before the structuring vio­lences of settler colonialism and anti-­Black racism). Instead, elsewheres and other­wises desire iterative explorations of pos­si­ble f­ utures, which is to say that as one seeks and continually crafts the worlds one wants and needs, one may do well to use past/present experiences to shape present/future engagements t­ oward what­ever may occur in the henceforth. For example, reforming

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po­liti­cal modes of demo­cratic citizenship as narrowly understood through the two-­party electoral system currently in operation in the United States w ­ ill not be what brings one closer to an elsewhere. However, proj­ects designed through a lens of mutual aid, such as localized initiatives that focus on the re­distribution of wealth and resources, or investments in communal ways of being, as one may experience through the rubric of abolitionist praxis whereby no one is disposable, may get one closer to elsewhere. ­Because elsewheres and other­wises are pro­cesses and places—­albeit places that are fleeting, as with Cooper’s (2013) articulation of “everyday utopias”—it is impor­tant not to get too caught up in the where of t­ hese pos­si­ble f­ utures. That is, the pro­cess by which one seeks and desires elsewheres and other­wises is just as impor­tant as where they lead, if not more so. G ­ oing back to the King, Navarro, and Smith (2020) quote we used at the outset of this section, it is impor­tant to focus on the word we. Significantly, this word registers a collective, a coming together. The desiring of elsewheres and other­wises is perhaps best done with and alongside other ­people. We may do our seeking through vari­ous and varied mediums (e.g., artistic/aesthetic encounters and engagements, community gardening proj­ects, reading circles, collective vision sessions), and we may—as the participants in this proj­ect did—do our seeking online, just as we may concurrently continue to do so offline. What we find impor­tant to note is that desiring elsewheres and other­wises is not about mastery; one need not—­and perhaps cannot by design—­master the pro­cess of such a seeking. The ability to engage in creative re/de/construction of that which has happened, is happening, and can happen in the ­future is the very pro­cess we invite readers to think and feel through as you all—as readers—­move out from this text. This was, ­after all, how participants approached trans life online and, in so d­ oing, gestured to an other­wise pro­cess that may have profound effects/ affects for imagining ­future pos­si­ble gendered selves and communities.

The Truth of Fiction, or When We De­cided to Give Up Scientism and Embrace Unknowability Speaking to the effects of the growing dominance of scientism and Western/ white conceptions of rationality in higher education, Duran, Blockett, and Nicolazzo (2020) wrote: In many senses, the push t­ oward scientism, and the increasing investments of higher education in neoliberalism, has meant a turn ­toward facts that are immutable, unimpeachable, and beyond reproach (Lather 2006; Pasque et al. 2012). In terms of research methods, then, scholars(hip) in higher education have been compelled to articulate exactly how such facts are derived, with t­ hese details scrutinized. Again, it needs to be said: we as authors are not saying that

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such scrutiny of research methods should not occur. However, we are saying that when t­ here is a focus on a purist understanding of facticity, trained heavi­ly on ­those phenomena that can be “proven,” and an audit trail can be created to show how they came to be, the queerness and trans*ness of methods—to say nothing of the queerness and trans*ness of lived experiences and phenomena— is largely missed. In other words, we suggest that a purist focus on facticity, as has largely been taken up in higher education research (Lather 2006), is itself an investment in normative sexuality/gender discourses, and as such, scholars and prac­ti­tion­ers would do well to question what is meant by the word “facts,” and to what end some answers are deemed “not enough.” (pp. 41–42)

As Duran, Blockett, and Nicolazzo (2020) unfold, one ­ought to hold a healthy skepticism for regimes of knowability, both as an epistemological orientation as well as its concomitant effects on material life. Simply put: if “seeing” cannot be equated to believing/believability, then institutional mandates for scientism and facticity cannot be equated to any sort of desired elsewhere for dispossessed populations. This is not to suggest that truth or facts are rendered meaningless; it does, however, mean that it would be prudent to investigate to what ends a drive ­toward unified and static knowledge regimes achieve. Specifically, it is impor­tant to recognize the inherent normalizing effect of such epistemological stances, which then are used to tame, quell, or other­wise erase from view the unruly and irrespectable potentialities of gender/sex. ­Here, it feels impor­tant to ask rhetorically in response: What is so impossible about fiction anyway? In many ways, one reads fiction to find pieces of themselves through the stories authors weave, just as authors place pieces of themselves through the stories they write. Moreover, while perhaps laced with traces of life histories, fiction extends outward as an example of other­wise worlds. What novelists and fiction authors provide is a space through which they can articulate how the workings of imagination can produce something altogether otherworldly, no ­matter how similar or close to readers it may feel, seem, or be. Fiction invests in the not yet ­here and the could possibility be. It is a literary genre marked by excess and profusion, much in the same way as trans is as a gender/sex genre. Therefore, to deny the potential of fictive re/un/tellings is to deny the potential unknown and unknowable profusions of trans online life. At its core, the Digital Me proj­ect explored what could be rather than what is. We as researchers ­were—­and still are—­more invested in the Internet as possibility rather than any supposed(ly objective) facts of how trans ­people use the Internet. Our proj­ect was one that sought the expanse of fictional re/un/ tellings of selves and communities. By this, we do not mean that what participants told us was “fake” or “untrue”; we mean that our work has always been about promoting the vari­ous pos­si­ble f­ utures for participants, many of which

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germinate in fantasy, fiction, and tenuous desires for what might be pos­si­ble if only . . . To engage with fiction, then, is a reckoning for investments in the scientism throughout higher education. It is a way to desire and sense forward rather than stay rooted in the pre­sent, a place that continues to crumble and corrode around ­those dispossessed populations who want more than the slow march t­ oward death t­ oward which they are oriented. Fiction marks an affective wanting, a seeking of what could be rather than remaining trapped in the what is and therefore must be. To believe in fiction is not to eschew truth but to imbue it with a sense of won­der, to recognize the inherent playfulness and plasticity of that which we have been socialized to believe are our limits. This is not to deny the effects of fiction on material life but to allow for a stretching beyond being solely rooted in ­those effects, to move into the possibilities and otherworldly spaces that subjectivities and contexts may take us. For example, Patel (2015) noted how the fiction of race still has “crushingly real consequences” for Black life. In so d­ oing, she was signaling the baselessness of race as a biological “fact” while still recognizing the violent realities of anti-­Blackness as a racial formation. Similarly, the fiction of gender/sex is a catastrophe, which is to say it is catastrophic for t­ hose of us who desire more than the restrictive gender/sex knowledge regime forced on us. To move with fiction, then, is to take seriously the violent structures that are maintained by suggesting that certain ideas (and, by proxy, certain p­ eople) are “not real.” More than that, even, to believe in the unbelievability of fiction is a way to push back against the epistemic ← → ontological vio­lence that courses through trans histories, providing the grounds for presents/futures that could be other­wise. While fiction denies practicality by its very being, we as authors understand ­there may be a fair bit of trepidation on our reader’s behalf when thinking about what this means for the ­future of educational praxis. We do not offer easy solutions or remedies but pose questions for consideration. In so d­ oing, we seek to performatively disrupt notions of the known and knowable, as well as to stoke reader imagination t­ oward that which is excessive even in our thinking. For example, what might it feel like to scrap a strict adherence to methods of data analy­sis such as multilevel coding or the construction of “themes” out of which “outlying data” tumble? What might it mean to chase traces of data to their theoretical ends, to explore t­ hose ghosts that haunt through their absent presence but remain “unseen,” or to think about and with t­ hose participants who ­were not pre­sent through our proj­ect, including why they may not have been pre­sent and what their absence means in relation to our retelling of who was pre­ sent? What does it mean when we as researchers determine something is “too peripheral” to be brought into view through a manuscript? While page limitations are indeed pressing demands, it would be overly simplistic to suggest that what we allow into the margins is not itself a po­liti­cal act of un/making and

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un/doing pos­si­ble f­ utures. Moreover, how do we think of the temporal nature of the data we collect alongside participants? What is lost when we consider data “too old” to write and theorize from? How is the re/telling of stories a way to indulge in the excessive ways restorying can be necessarily edifying and electrifying through educational research? And how does this ­going on and on and on reflect the ongoing refractions of trans online life, creating a h ­ ouse of mirrors that multiplies rather than tames possibilities, other­wises, and elsewheres?

Open Tabs: ­Future Research Profusions While no study can ever fully encapsulate the entirety of an experience, nor was this the intent of our proj­ect, t­ here remain areas ripe for exploration in relation to trans life online, as well as its potential for a radical realtering of lives, selves, and interactions across planes of existence. Below, we describe some of what we hope ­will (continue to) happen in terms of exploring trans ­futures.

Theories of Trans Femininities We assert in our book that much of what ­people refer to as trans oppression—­ including some of our own previous works—is actually rooted in transmisogyny. We claim that the ongoing hatred and vitriol directed ­toward trans w ­ omen, which is especially violent in relation to trans-­women-­of-­color experiences, is what cements broader vio­lence ­toward trans p­ eople. This is not to say all trans ­people experience transmisogyny, which would negate trans ­people’s gender self-­determination; nor does it mean that only trans w ­ omen, girls, and femmes experience gender-­based oppression. Instead, it is our contention that transmisogyny is the main structuring technology through which gendered vio­lence is articulated and expressed throughout the U.S. nation-­state. We further assert that, if this is indeed the case, then to eschew such a real­ity by misnaming the broader vio­lence trans ­people face as trans oppression is part of the ongoing technology of transmisogyny. When scholarly communities are imprecise about the roots, effects, and affects of transmisogyny, they/we continue to further the waves of epistemic ← → ontological threat, harm, and vio­lence that asymmetrically attenuate life for trans ­women, girls, and femmes and that then ­ripple out to all trans ­people, ­people of trans experience, and two-­spirit p­ eople. One of the striking aspects of our data was how trans w ­ omen w ­ ere made to manage their lives online in tightly regulated ways. All the participants we spoke to recognized their online lives as expressions of (im)possibility in vari­ ous ways, and yet trans ­women’s experiences with on-­and offline engagement ­were ones of heightened attention to how they ­were, are, or may be un/made as ­women. Even when trans ­women ­were careful about how they engaged gender online, their very ­doing so was both a recognition of how they cultivated

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practices of resilience while at the same time faced the precarity of attenuated life chances via the technology of transmisogyny. The very fact that trans ­women participants had to be vigilant, thoughtful, or precise with their expressions of femininity was itself a recognition of how deeply transmisogyny curtailed possibilities for gender self-­determination—­which is to say, life—­online. ­Because the Internet is not wholly separate from offline sociopo­liti­cal contexts, ­these data further bolster the ongoing attenuation of trans w ­ omen’s lives offline and therefore add texture to the way that transmisogyny forms a mode of capture that leaks across on-­and offline contexts. The phenomenon of transmisogyny, however, has been woefully undertheorized. While ­there has been an impor­tant increase in trans ­women, girls, and femmes discussing their lives in public through vari­ous literary forms, such as memoir, autotheory, scholarly journal outlets, and non/fiction, t­ here has been a dearth of theorizing what trans femininity means for how trans womanhood can(not) be thought, felt, experienced, archived, or other­wise explored. Moreover, this paucity of theorizing trans femininities also means that trans remains tightly coupled with investments in the body, providing yet another limitation to the possibilities of trans as a capacious way of un/doing gender. The lack of theorizing at the limits of trans femininity means that what it has, does, and w ­ ill mean to be a trans w ­ omen has, does, and w ­ ill always be tethered to how one embodies her transness. As our data show, however, ­there are impor­tant ways that participants—­including, and perhaps especially, the trans ­women participants—­were disembodying their genders. If the scholarly community does not focus on this sort of theorizing, then they/we run the risk of limiting the profusion that trans femininity may already be trying to do. This form of epistemic foreclosure then may lead to ontological foreclosures in the form of the vari­ous vio­lences that continually reinscribe trans ­women’s lives as impossible, unlivable, or killable subjects. Considering the aforementioned complexities, we suggest more attention be spent on theorizing trans femininities. While we certainly believe much more of this could and should be done in relation to virtual landscapes, we would also argue our research exposes the limits of such theorization across offline environments, too. Thus, we would argue ­there is a need for heightened attention to the livability of trans w ­ omen’s lives, as well as what trans femininities can mean and mean across on-­and offline planes. We also find it particularly impor­tant to encourage ­people to think and theorize trans femininity at its limits. By this we mean trans femininity need not always attach to a bodily experience—­indeed, it did not always do so for the trans ­women participants who ­were a part of this proj­ect. Theorizing the ethical, po­liti­cal, aesthetic, affective, philosophical, archival, and semiotic possibilities (to name just a few) of trans femininities could all be potential directions for f­ uture research. Also, theorizing beyond white, settler colonial, upwardly mobile, and able-­bodied

The Multiplicity of Trans Life Online • 161

manifestations of trans femininities—­epistemologically, ontologically, and other­wise—is something we strongly advocate when thinking of what f­ uture work could and should look like.

Desiring Disabled Trans F­ utures I am yearning for an elsewhere—­and, perhaps, an “elsewhen”—in which disability is understood other­wise: as po­liti­cal, as valuable, as integral. (Kafer, 2013, p. 3)

­ ere are vari­ous ways transness and disability are un/done through each other. Th Some decry gender dysphoria—­previously, gender identity disorder—­being in the DSM as a signal of trans ­people being “sick” or “unwell,” thus posing trans and disabled f­ utures as not only opposed but necessarily separate. The under­ lying assumption is that ­were trans and disability to be thought in tandem—­ not just as connected but as similar—­that this would somehow be a stain on transness. The supposed undesirability of disability, and of making trans “presentable” as nondisabled, acts as a form of breakage between trans and disability, a severing not only of p­ eople, thought, and action in the pre­sent but also the past and f­ uture tenses. That is, to disallow this sort of conjoined real­ity signals a politic whereby pos­si­ble trans, disabled, and trans/disabled ­futures cannot coexist together. It is one or the other, never both, and certainly never both together. Conversely, ­others have worked hard to think trans and disability together (e.g., Baril, 2013). This thinking together is not only impor­tant conceptually and po­liti­cally, the argument goes, but also in terms of corporeal realities and solidarities. That is, to think trans/disability is to think a coming together across marooned subjectivities and to desire elsewheres and other­wises through which discourses of trans, disabled, and trans/disabled life undermine the violent logics of the nation-­state. In this coming together, some argue, ­there could be an unearthing of new possibilities for life, possibilities one is unable to recognize due to the ongoing structures of vio­lence, harm, and threat that pose trans and disability as necessarily opposed. We do not seek to rearticulate detailed arguments o­ thers have made; nor do we desire to imagine a ­future where e­ ither trans or disabled ­futures are furthered at the cost of the other. What we do want, however, is to recognize the always already conjoined realities of trans/disabled life, thought, and possibility. Through this proj­ect, we w ­ ere not only conscious that almost half of our participants identified as having one or more disabilities but of what that meant for their lives as disabled trans ­people. We certainly ­were curious about the coming together of trans and disabled subject positions; however, we w ­ ere—­and remain—­far more curious about what this sort of conjoining means epistemologically, affectively, and po­liti­cally. The questions for us, then, are not about

162  •  Prismatic Possibilities

“identity” (a move that may not surprise many given our previously articulated stance). Instead, we won­der: What are the epistemic possibilities of not only thinking trans/disability but of desiring trans/disabled f­ utures? And, if t­ hese ­futures are desired, what are the effects/affects of our trans/disabled desires? Ultimately, we are not as interested in thinking additively about trans/disabled life from the perspective of “identity”; we are far more curious about what dreaming trans/disabled as always already coupled means and how such an approach to how we come to know is corrosive to the nation-­state in deliciously profuse ways. That is, we offer that thinking, feeling, and organ­izing around trans/disabled f­utures may be a threshold across which we can envision a pos­si­ble end to the nation-­state as a technology of capture, extraction, and slow death. Miller’s work (2017, 2018) is perhaps the exemplar of thinking queerness and disability together in higher education studies. His work also resonates with this current proj­ect in that he demonstrated how queer/disabled life online created a more comfortable space through which queer disabled students could exist. We are also moved by Kafer’s (2013) insistence to desire crip ­futures. Her articulation of the importance of such a desire is one that cannot be overstated and is one that has po­liti­cal ends that meet the urgency of the ongoing current conditions of life for disabled/crip populations. It is with and between ­these thinkers—­among ­others—­that we extend an invitation for more thinking, feeling, and organ­izing around trans/disabled ­futures. In fact, we argue t­ here needs to be more academic thinking, feeling, and organ­izing that mirrors the radical thinking, feeling, and organ­izing around trans/disabled ­futures happening outside of the acad­emy. For example, the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement has been a po­liti­cal space of solidarity through which trans/disabled ­futures are being realized. Over the past several years, the Israeli state, through the deployment of the Israeli Defense Force, has followed a directive to maim Palestinians (Puar, 2017)—­itself a signal of an ongoing dedication to necropolitics—­and has marketed their country as embracing queer life and thus being a potential queer tourist destination. In response, queer and trans organ­izations in the United States have continued to be leaders in the BDS movement, forwarding visions of justice that imagine trans/disability as an always already past/present/future real­ ity. Groups like FIERCE, the Audre Lorde Proj­ect, and the Sylvia Rivera Law Proj­ect, which are largely led by queer and trans ­people of color, have recognized as a given the epistemically conjoined nature of transness/disability and have or­ga­nized accordingly. It is our contention that the incredibly rich organ­ izing possibilities happening beyond the acad­emy signal impor­tant possibilities for thinking, feeling, and organ­izing within the acad­emy, particularly in relation to trans/disabled ­futures on-­and offline. That is, just as trans/

The Multiplicity of Trans Life Online • 163

disabled organ­izing outside of the acad­emy is necessarily corrosive to the broadening necropo­liti­cal expanse of the Zionism demonstrated by the Israeli nation-­state, we won­der how desiring and seeking trans/disabled ­futures could have similar effects/affects to the broadening necropo­liti­cal expanse of the neoconservatism demonstrated by the U.S. nation-­state. This sort of corrosive desire, then, would not just mark a fall or a death (of the nation); instead, it would mark a generative growth ­toward the profuse possibilities (on-­and offline) that trans/disabled thinking, feeling, and organ­izing offer.

Conclusion What w ­ ill be in the times to come? What w ­ ill I be in the times to come? What w ­ ill we be in the times to come? (Chen and cárdenas, 2019, p. 472)

We end this book the way we began, with the above epigraph from Chen and cárdenas, ­because, in many ways, we find ourselves asking the same questions at the close of our proj­ect as we w ­ ere asking at the outset. Prismatic possibilities always expand, always move out, and always signal a desiring of more (and more . . . ​and more . . .). Thus, it would make sense that we continue to won­der what ­will be in the times to come. While our proj­ect has yielded some exciting new directions for de/re/thinking notions of selfhood, identity, corporeality, and sociality, it has also exposed just as many areas that still require further exploration. ­Needless to say, ­there are just as many threads left untied, just as many tabs left open, as t­ here are nuances we have been able to explore through our analy­sis. And yet all proj­ects are, by their nature, bounded by time and space. Deadlines loom, and page and word limits become exhausted. Sometimes, authors become exhausted as they exhaust page and word limits. That said, ­there is likely more to be said from and about the data that ground this proj­ect; perhaps ­there is even more to be made from the data we as authors portray in this book. We know we could not have covered every­thing that arose from the proj­ect data, even in a full-­length book such as this and even despite our best intellectual intentions. That said, we hope what we have sparked for readers an excitement to explore, envision, and desire more. We also hope that if t­ here are t­ hings we missed or aspects of the work we did not do full justice to, then readers can recognize ­these as invitations for us all to keep ­going and to keep theorizing through the prismatic possibilities of life both on-­and offline. We hope readers can view this proj­ect, and this book, as a way to keep imagining what we w ­ ill—­and what we can—be in the times to come.

Acknowl­edgments Z I wrote this book during a devastatingly intense period of my life when my ­mother died suddenly. In many ways, writing became a place of repair for me, as my ­mother and I shared a love of lit­er­a­ture; however, most of my days continue to be marked by moments small and large where I become full of memories of my beloved ­mother. The loss of her continues to overwhelm, and likely ­will for some time, and while ­going back to words has been a salve at times, ­there are days when I did not understand how I can continue to face the world without her, my biggest champion, in it. Over the course of my mourning, I have been comforted by her spirit, as well as the rememberings that surface, often at the moments when I am not even specifically attempting to conjure them. As my dear friend Eva has reminded me, the subconscious works in magical ways, and I am deeply thankful that my ­mother, who has reconnected with the ele­ments, continues to be by my side, teaching me ­things even in, through, and ­a fter her passing. Nancy Jane Nicolazzo, may this book stand as a monument to your legacy of love, kindness, and the steadfast joy for words and lit­er­a­ture you gifted to me as a child and that has allowed me to bloom as a scholar. ­There is no way I would have been able to make my way through the unmetabolizable grief I experienced in losing my m ­ other without the loving support of deep community. While ­there ­were so many ­people who provided love, support, meals, time, and space, I want to give an especially big thanks to Eva Hayward, Sy Simms, Dan Tillapaugh, Laila McCloud, Alex Lange, Jane ­Pizzolato, Kenny Importante, Darin Stewart, Andrés Castro Samayoa, Susan Marine, D.  Chase  J. Catalano, T.  J. Jourian, Rachel Wagner, Jill Koyama, Jenny Lee, Moira Ozias, Desiree Vega, Kadian McIntosh, Zachary Brown, 165

166  •  Acknowledgments

Robin Phelps-­Ward, Judy Kiyama, Susana Muñoz, Amanda Tachine, Heather Shotton, Reginald Blockett, Leonard Taylor  Jr., Gary Rhoades, and Regina Deil-­A men, all of whom took a large role in carry­ing me when I could not carry myself. I also want to thank my dear friend, thought partner, and intellectual companion Eva Hayward. When I first left Tucson in 2011 to pursue my doctoral studies, I knew I wanted to come back one day. I was worried life would not allow this possibility, but I knew I wanted more time in the desert to learn, grow, seek, and cultivate a world for myself and my communities. When I think now about my return to southern Arizona in 2018, I realize just how lucky I have been to have the chance to do so, most notably ­because of the chance to be alongside Eva. My life has been deeply enriched by being able to share time and space with her, and my work—­including several of the ideas that propel the theorizing of trans life (online) in this text—­has forever been changed by our ongoing, profuse, and enchanting conversations. More importantly, however, I have found in Eva one of the p­ eople I have been wanting and seeking my entire life: a ­sister. I could not be more thankful for our tgirl sociality, Eva, and I love you dearly. Thank you eternally for your care, trust, softness, and dedication to cultivating so many delicious moments and memories. I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge my doctoral advisor, Elisa Abes, as well as my late mentor, Peter Magolda. Th ­ ese two p­ eople have left an indelible mark on my intellectual life as a scholar and as an ethnographer. Perhaps more importantly, however, they have also shown me glimpses of the person I want to become in and beyond the acad­emy. It still surprises me we all w ­ ere together in, of all places, southwest Ohio, but I would not trade that time for anything. ­There is rarely a month that goes by when I do not tell at least one story about Peter, who was a masterful storyteller in his own right. Also, Elisa would be happy to know I do not go for long drives without snacks and that I am fi­nally slowing down ­these days to think more about the life I want to live beyond my work. Thank you both, Elisa and Peter, for the gifts of your very good com­pany. Life is often full of contradiction. As endings set in, beginnings can proliferate, and in times of deep grief, boundless joy and hope can si­mul­ta­neously spring forth. This is the situation I found myself in as I settled into the writing of this book. Just as my m ­ other shared her cancer diagnosis and then passed away three weeks l­ater, I was able to connect with someone who continues to leave a meaningful imprint on my life. She has read multiple versions of this manuscript (in part and in full), listened patiently to my fumbling through ideas, and given impor­tant feedback as I have wrestled with some of the ideas in this book. She has also reminded me that although ­there is extreme possibility in leaving bodies b­ ehind, t­ here is also deep plea­sure to be found in embodied life. And even more, she has reminded me that indulgence and opulence can be

Acknowledgments • 167

a form of re­sis­tance in a continually degrading social world. In many ways, moving into loving relationship with her has been a power­f ul coming (back) home into my own trans body and into a life I had all but given up on. Thank you, Moira Ozias, for your enduring tenderness. I am looking forward to tomorrow morning when I can again choose you and us all over again. Fi­nally, a special thank you must go to Susan Marine. Susan has been a dear friend and writing partner since we met in 2011. She also provided a soft landing space for me when I traveled back to the Northeast to lay both my grand­ mother and ­mother to rest. She has never given up on me or my ideas and was one of the first p­ eople to show me unconditional love in the often harmful space of the acad­emy. On the day I successfully defended my dissertation, Susan gave me a jewelry box with a quote from Emily Dickinson e­ tched into the top. I have kept this gift on my writing desk since that moment and appreciate the reminder to “dwell in possibility.” Susan, I hope you see me trying to do that very ­thing h ­ ere.

Alden I want and need to acknowledge the folks that held me up and kept me ­going when the world felt like more of a mess than usual. First, trans ­people online. When I needed to connect with my kin and folks who w ­ ere often far away (or quarantined), the Internet and the worlds we have made on/in it ­were where I went. The participants in this study and the team of folks who gathered the data, too, motivated me to keep g­ oing, to keep exploring and explaining the worlds we are making, creating an archive of our archives. To my friends who listened to me talk (ramble) about time and space and transness and the Internet and prisms and the matrix while we had lunch, swam, socially distanced, Zoomed, talked on the phone, and texted: Candace, Ericka, Ryan, Autum, Sara, and so many o­ thers. Thanks for letting me think out loud to find the way through the ideas. To my coauthors, Sy and Z, who let me grow alongside you both as we completed this book—­I ­will be forever grateful.

Sy If someone had told me years ago that I would be part of a proj­ect about trans life on the Internet, I would have laughed. This pro­cess has been a life-­changing experience and one I ­will never forget. Thank you so much to Z and Alden for inviting me to think, write, and create alongside you. I have been pushed and held, and I am truly better for it. I owe special thanks to Laila McCloud, Robin Phelps-­Ward, Alex Lange, T. J. Jourian, Melvin Whitehead, and Satveer Kleer for being my possibility models and scholar friends who pushed me into thinking deeper as well as being

168  •  Acknowledgments

more vulnerable with my scholarship and for reminding me to say the t­ hings I need to say. To R. Koh, DC, Evan Friedenberg, Janine Silvas, Lindsay March, Brendan Nee, and Evander Deocariza, thank you for being patient with me as I was writing this, being the cheering section I needed to get my thoughts onto the page, believing in me when I could not see past my own flaws, and for not getting mad when I canceled ­things so I could write. I have so much gratitude for my f­ amily who might not know or understand what I am talking about but who love me just the same. Fi­nally, to my love Romeo: thank you for being the person I come home to. We would also like to collectively thank Gary Rhoades for encouraging us to chase the idea of virtual kinship networks that Z wrote about in her first book a bit more (“I bet t­ here’s something more t­ here,” he said, and he was right!); Chris Barcelos and Ryan Miller for their reviews and generous feedback of our book proposal; Moira Ozias, Alex Lange, Eva Hayward, Leonard Taylor Jr., and Zachary Brown for reading an early draft of this text and providing feedback, as well as an extra thanks to Zachary for his editorial help in getting the final draft done and submitted to Rutgers University Press; the editorial and marketing teams at Rutgers University Press for their belief in this text; and Eva Hayward again for her beautiful(ly haunting) artwork that she allowed us to use for the cover of our book.

Notes Introduction Epigraph: Chen and cárdenas, 2019, p. 472. 1 It bears stating h ­ ere that the research for this book occurred prior to the COVID19 pandemic. This seems impor­tant to share mainly due to the ongoing salience of trans life online. That is, rather than suggesting this is an episodic phenomenon, one that ­will “go away” once the COVID-19 pandemic dissipates, the way trans ­people are crafting online worlds has a longer trajectory than the COVID-19 pandemic and, thus, ­will necessarily stretch beyond its end, whenever (or if) that may come. 2 As seen in our participant pool demographic ­table, not all participants who ­were ­women identified as trans ­women. This is not a denial of their transness but is a decision that may be a response to the subordinated and violent realities of being a trans w ­ omen in the United States. ­Because we did not want to misrepresent our participants linguistically through our text, we use the term (trans) ­women when discussing the subpopulation as a ­whole and are specific when discussing each participant individually. For further conversation about the ways in which transness mediates understandings of womanhood and femininity, and the ongoing threat of such in relation to race, disability, and class, please see Hayward (2017), Gossett, Stanley, and Burton (2017), and Serano (2007).

Chapter 1  Searching for Ourselves Online Epigraphs: Hayward, personal communication; Lorde, 2013. 1 This chapter is an adaption of an article Z first wrote and published in Thresholds in Education (volume 42, issue 1) ­under the title “In Search of Her: An Autoethnographic Search for Self in Virtual Landscapes.” To see the images, please refer to this publication. 2 Bitmoji allows users to change physique, appearance, and fashion accessories whenever they wish, all while maintaining vari­ous socially sedimented gendered 169

170  •  Notes

discourses. For example, Bitmoji disallows me from both being a w ­ oman and having a beard in their platform. Of additional note is that the first t­ hing one has to do when creating an avatar through Bitmoji is pick one of only two (im)pos­si­ble genders: man or ­woman. 3 As Spade (2015) noted, administrative systems such as federal, state, and local rec­ords act as a means of population management, often erasing who trans ­people are or can become in lieu of reifying binary gender regimes. Even recent attempts by some state governments to allow nonbinary ­people to replace the M or F on certain documents with an X is a way to further cement the immutability of the M and F, from which the X—­and only the X—­deviates. ­There are still only two genders (i.e., M and F), and the aberrant X, which w ­ ill not be widely recognized, may only invite further precarity, threat, and risk, especially for ­those nonbinary ­people with multiple marginalized identities. 4 It should be stated that what I am calling for ­here is not general trans theory. ­Were one to take seriously how trans want and desire operate, it would be essential to be specific in theorizing how gender/race influences our wanting. Especially considering how heteropatriarchy and racialized capitalism create vari­ous stresses across trans subject positions, I suggest it would be imperative for any theories of trans want and desire to be as specific as pos­si­ble. As such, my call falls in line with that which Hayward has invited readers to consider through her work (e.g., Hayward, 2008).

Chapter 3  The Internet as Temporal 1 Snorton’s (2017) analy­sis of Phillip DeVine’s near erasure through the remembering and telling of the murders of Brandon Teena and Lisa Lambert in his book Black on Both Sides provides an impor­tant counterpoint to Whittle’s claim. Moreover, Snorton’s discussion of how gender/race moderated this erasure—­itself a further form of anti-­Black vio­lence—­adds further nuance and texture to the argument we forward in this book about trans life online as produced through the grammar of racism and anti-­Blackness. In this way, then, trans life online also experiences what Sharpe (2016) wrote about as the weather of anti-­Blackness.

Chapter 4  The Internet as Affective 1 We would like to thank one of our anonymous reviewers for sharing all but the last of t­ hese questions with us. While the masked review pro­cess disallows us from honoring their impor­tant contributions to our work publicly, we hope they ­will see this note and know the indelible mark they have left on our current and f­ uture work (and depending on who is reading this, maybe yours as well).

Chapter 5  The Internet as Sartorial 1 It is impor­tant for us to note that while we recognize and reflect that Tourmaline has changed her name, the website she maintains and where this cited content can be accessed is ­under a dif­fer­ent name. Even citing the YouTube video of her commencement speech would be equally challenging, as it has a dif­fer­ent name listed for her in the title of the video. We are choosing to cite her own website, as we feel it provides Tourmaline the greatest level of agency to name herself how she

Notes • 171

wants across multiple spheres and platforms, as well as moves the curious reader to her personal site, which has a plethora of her own content. 2 The notion of liberation is quite tricky and, for some, deeply romantic. In hailing the notion of liberation ­here, we do not suggest t­ here is an endpoint at which one can arrive and experience ongoing gender freedom. Instead, we offer a reading of liberation that is far more temporally and ontologically ethereal. That is, participants may experience, feel, or sense moments of something other than or could have a reprieve from the current ongoing moment of structural vio­lence ­under which they/we live as trans p­ eople. In this sense, liberation gestures t­ oward elsewheres and other­wises rather than being a static “place” where one can go and reside in perpetuity.

Chapter 6  The Internet as Communal 1 It is worth noting h ­ ere that a number of the trans users harmed by FOSTA and SESTA w ­ ere also engaging in some form of sex work. We share this b­ ecause of the ongoing impact (economic, interpersonal, and other­wise) of ­those who are at heightened vulnerability, especially trans ­women of color. As we have previously stated, one should understand FOSTA and SESTA as deeply anti-­transwoman, as well as deeply invested in furthering the transmisogynoir that foments trans killability. For more on sex workers from an educational perspective, please see T. J. Stewart (2021, 2022).

Chapter 8  The Multiplicity of Trans Life Online 1 See also Simms, Nicolazzo, and Jones, 2021.

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Index References in italics refer to tables/figures. AAU (Association of American Universities), 9 affect theory, 37, 73–74, 154 algorithms, 52–53, 79 anti-­Blackness, 115, 129, 147, 152–153, 155 Asians Wear Clothes on the Internet (Pham), 89 Association of American Universities (AAU), 9 Audre Lorde Proj­ect, 162 autoethnography, 29–30, 37 Bitmoji (avatar creation platform), 22, 30–31, 83, 91–92, 95, 169n2 bloggers, 20, 89, 107 blogs, 20, 68 Boycott, Disinvestment, Sanction (BDS) movement, 162 Bryanboy, 89–90, 107 Campus Pride Index, the, 139, 142, 150 chat rooms, 18, 20–21 Chicanx spaces, 81, 114 cislation, 121–125 Conway, Lynn, 59 corporeality, 38 Craigs­list (virtual advertising platform), 118 crowdfunding, 6–7 cyberspace, 44–45, 60

dating/hook-up (applications), 6 depre­sen­ta­tion, 129–130 Difranco, Ani, 19 “digital campus,” 45 digital ethnography, 11, 16 digital kinship (NIcolazzo), 20. See also virtual kinship networks Digital Me Proj­ect, 10, 11, 12, 13, 157 disability: in higher education studies, 14; and the internet, 155; and online subjectivity, 46–47, 88, 105, 147–148; and transness, 161–163 disability studies, 25 disabled p­ eople, 118 education. See higher education “everyday utopias” (Cooper), 156 extraidentity, 128, 130, 146–150 Facebook: and administration of gender, 49; community-­building, 114; evolution of, 62; “memories,”66; participant use of, 48–53, 57, 96, 101, 123, 128, 132; policies regarding, 118; role of Facebook groups, 25, 48, 52, 113; and self-­concealment, 49–50, 131–132; and transgender ­people, 6, 19, 24–25; trans p­ eople of color use of, 114 femmephobia, 35–36 fiction, role of, 111, 156–158

183

184  •  Index

FIERCE (LGBTQ youth of color organ­ization), 162 Fight Online Sex Traffickers Act (FOSTA), 118–121, 171n1. See also Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (SESTA) Gamergate, 46 gender: administration of, 48, 92; agency, 32; ambiguity, 90; binary discourses, 9, 14, 18, 25, 38, 64, 69–70, 79, 95, 109, 118, 122, 126; constructions of, 34, 58; desires, 37, 50, 76, 116; disconnections, 12; discourses, 16, 18, 25, 32, 36, 69, 129; and education/schooling, 5, 9–10; euphoria, 73–79, 87–88, 97, 114; expansiveness, 14; expectations, 20, 77; exploration, 4, 18, 20, 24, 30, 57, 67–68, 104, 109, 137, 148; expression, 16, 48, 64; and Facebook, 48; fantasies, 83; features of, 4, 15; feelings, 24, 140; identity, 51, 120; identity disorder (gender dysphoria), 123, 161; liberation, 14; lives, 52; monstrosity of, 34; moves, 15; multiplicity of, 5, 32, 35; narrative, 18, 35, 48, 63, 89; nonconforming p­ eople, 10, 20, 102; in online spaces, 64, 111, 159; and other identities, 14, 22, 32, 74, 79–80, 88, 107, 108, 114, 137, 147; perception of, 48; per­for­mance, 21; policing, 147; pro­cess, 32; profusion, 122, 126; proliferation of possibilities of, 32, 44, 50, 69, 150; as property of whiteness, 79, 82; regulation of, 9; as relational, 15, 18, 48, 63, 73, 89, 137; roles, 105; searching for, 56; self-­determination, 124, 159; sense of self, 24, 30, 32, 44–45, 50, 54, 65, 96, 156; similarity, 113; and transgender ­people, 21, 25, 30–31, 46, 48; transgression, 32, 120; transition, 61; and transsexual p­ eople, 29–30; understandings of, 16, 20, 72, 122, 133; vio­lence, 9, 38, 99; wanting more from, 32, 38, 83, 112, 130; within systems, 33 hashtags (tags): archival, 92; categorizing feature of, 96; Instagram, 50; #TransIsBeautiful, 103–104; and trans ­people, 27; Twitter, 57; use of to locate trans ­others, 61, 67 Hayward, Eva, 15, 27, 29, 90

higher education: fomenting whiteness, 95; gender binary discourse and, 9, 109; marginalized populations, 34; and nobodying, 98; and online spaces, 5; as producer of knowledge, 9; racism within, 152–153; and rationality, 156–157; rendered as “good,” 140; as steeped in whiteness, 95, 114, 152; structural vio­lence within, 98–99; studies of, 14, 26, 37, 162, 167; trans (in)visibility within, 138, 140, 149–150; and transgender p­ eople, 5, 9, 10, 16–17, 22, 34, 139–142, 148, 151, 138; transmisogyny within, 15 hormone replacement therapy/treatment (HRT), 60, 93 hormone time (Hormak), 60 House of Flourishing, the (Lange, Duran, and Jackson), 10 Hudson’s FTM (female to male) Guide, 47–48, 59 identity: affirmation, 80; construction of, 128–129; critique of, 128; critique of developmental theory, 88, 147–148, 150; evaluation of, 51; gender, 120; “identity confusion,” 128; interaction with, 64; language, 64; limitations of, 25; malleability of, 8; notions of, 128; possibilities of, 162; questions of, 130; racial, 113; static notions of, 88, 129, 133, 147; theft of ­others,’ 95; transgender ­people and, 77, 104, 133; use of Internet to explore, 70, 77, 121, 128. See also ­under gender image space (Kellerman), 44 In Real Life (IRL): community building, 43; conceptualized as opposite of online life, 4, 10; false binary of, 28; internet as substitute for, 21, 25–26, 68, 76, 109, 114, 117, 130, 132; questioning notions of, 22, 83; race and, 23, 43, 74; schooling experiences, 45; sense of not knowing trans p­ eople within, 46 Instagram: algorithm, 66; as archival space, 57; as community-­building space, 50; features promoting trans sociality, 50; guidelines, 116; hashtags, 50, 96; as self-­promotion space, 90; as space to

Index • 185

document transition, 51; and transgender ­people, 6, 19, 24–25, 48, 50, 94; #TransIsBeautiful, 103 Internet, the: as affective gateway, 72, 75–76, 88; as affective in-­between, 75, 145; agentic power of, 10, 19, 21, 23, 100; archival nature of, 56–57; and autism, 47, 82, 105; and belonging, 21, 25; “both/ and” nature of, 54–55; as community-­ building space, 108–126; as confidence-­ building space, 83–84; as connection space, 43, 60, 70; as digital meeting place, 3; extracorporeality of, 72–73, 88; as “fabulous zone,” 73, 155; and hiding, 19, 25, 99; history of, 58; negotiating use of, 52; passivity of, 113; perceived speed of, 68; possibilities, 4, 157; as potentially harmful to marginalized ­people, 4, 7; privacy of, 113; quotidian nature of, 18, 110, 145; as racially segregated/Balkanized space, 12, 53; as “safe place,” 46; sartorial nature of, 90, 97, 100, 106–107; as shadow space, 150–151; as site for creation of self, 4, 8, 10, 11, 16, 96; as site for gender feelings, 24; as social institution, 74; as space for self-­ knowledge, 19, 21, 23, 69, 75; spatial nature of, 43–45, 55, 60, 64, 69, 111; as substitute for real life, 132, 140; temporal nature of, 56–58, 60, 63–66, 69; as tool for world making, 22, 93; and transgender p­ eople, 4, 5, 6, 8, 59, 112, 117; transition archive, 21; transness of, 129; and underworlding, 21; uses in activism, 45; as visual space, 127–142; youth-­ focused nature of, 59, 62–65 Internet space (Kellerman), 44 Jourian, T.J., 121–122 Latinx spaces, 95, 136 “LGBfakeT movement” (Spade), 127 melancholia (racial) (Muñoz), 54, 78, 80–82 mimicry (notion of), 89, 96–98, 101, 107 Noble, Safiya Umoja, 53, 79, 152 nobodying pro­cess (Tourmaline), 98–102

nonbinary ­people: and binary ­people, 123; cislation and, 124; of color, 114; as undertheorized in higher education, 14 nontrans illogics, 28–29, 38 notions of “the real,” 28–29, 48–49, 87, 109, 135, 146, 150 offline spaces, 5, 7 online spaces, 5, 7 “only one, the,” 133–135 postsecondary education. See higher education practice of freedom (hooks), 5 queer world making (Blockett), 21, 103 rabbit holes (internet), 67–69, 71 racialization: and affective structures, 87; of authors, 12, 22; of internet, 53–54, 114, 155; of media, 153; of participants, 115; subjectivities, 148; of trans melancholia, 79; and transness, 148; visual thickness and, 137 racism: in algorithms, 52–53; alongside misogyny/misogynoir, 36; on campus, 81–82; effects of, 5, 74, 152–153; foreclosing life possibilities, 54; on internet, 79–81, 87–89, 95, 114; systemic, 114, 124, 152; virtual, 151–154 Reddit (subreddits): platform, 48; as transgender online space, 78, 104–105, 112, 123 and transgender p­ eople, 51–52 refractions: affective, 75; community/ communal, 110–112, 122; conceptualization of, 23, 47, 54, 72–73, 159; entanglement of, 111; sartorial, 77; spatial, 75, 111; temporal, 112 regimes of knowability (Duran, Blockett, and Nicolazzo), 157 resilience, practice of (Nicolazzo), 10, 22, 84, 153, 160 selective visibility, 25, 47, 49, 128–131, 133 sexism, cultural, 15; effects of, 36–37; experiences with, 47, 85–86; internalized, 35; racism and, 152; systemic, 77, 89, 118, 124

186  •  Index

Snapchat (social media platform), 128, 131–133, 150 social media: and administration of gender, 48–49; harms from, 146; participant usage of, 26, 43, 44, 45, 67, 131, 136; policies regarding, 118; and self-­ definition, 45; tagging, 50; and transgender ­people, 48, 81; transition narratives, 61; use in curriculum, 45. and whiteness, 136. See also Internet, the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (SESTA), 118. See also Fight Online Sex Traffickers Act (FOSTA) Susan’s Closet (online resource), 48 Susan’s Place Transition Resources, 59 Sylvia Rivera Law Proj­ect, 16 Taste work (Pham), 89–90, 92–95, 97–98, 102, 106–107 technological redlining (Noble), 152 The Matrix (Wachowski ­sisters), 126 Tourmaline (activist) (Reina Gossett), 35, 98–99, 127, 170n1 trans archive, 11 trans bodies, fetishization of, 93–96 trans femininity/ies, 105, 119, 124–125, 160 trans futurity, 83, 154 transgender gaze (Halberstam), 93, 94 transgender students, 9, 15. See also trans students transgender studies, 6, 25, 33, 150, 154 Transgender Studies Research Cluster (University of Arizona), 150 “transgender tipping point,” 59, 104 trans invisibility (in/visibility), 138–140, 149 #TransIsBeautiful (Cox), 96, 103–104 transition: biomedical, 7, 20, 123; online documentation of, 24, 51, 57–59, 61; ­others’, 65; pro­cess of, 24, 51, 61; resources for, 48; stories of, 6, 77, 91, 103; Tumblr as site of, 115, 118 trans killability: ideologies of, 48, 63, 142; logics of, 70, 78, 98, 99, 103, 124, 126; regimes of, 69, 75, 78, 98–99; universal investment in, 139, 148 trans livability, 127–128, 132, 160 “transmedicalism,” 122–123. See also ­under trans w ­ omen

transmisogynoir: effects of, 36, 78; forms of, 124, 127, 171n1; FOSTA/SESTA roots of, 120; machinations of, 15; rubric of, 28 transmisogyny: discourses of, 119; effects of, 19, 36, 46, 119, 160; experiences with, 47; fear of, 125; forms of, 124, 137, 147; gender policing and, 100, 147; logics of, 129, 159; machinations of, 15; passability and, 84–87; prob­lem of, 142; rubric of, 28; as undertheorized, 160; as weapon, 77–78 trans negativity (Hayward), 90 trans oppression: epistemological, 9; forms of, 124, 142, 159; freedom from, 122; internalized, 122; presence of, 27; prevalence of, 109; systemic, 19; whiteness and, 114 trans p­ eople of color: bodies deemed as weapons, 33; as college students, 139; exhaustion, 95; finding ­others online, 82, 113, 115; lack of in participant pool, 12, 16–17, 54; as leaders, 162; and nobodiness, 99; online, 6; racism, 81, 115, 128, 153; resisting racism online, 81–82; vio­lence against, 27, 98–99; whiteness and, 80, 136; world making, 21, 154 transreal (cárdenas), 30, 55, 149 trans sociality: effects of, 72, 125; experiences with, 77, 145; forms of, 68, 74, 82, 104; and Instagram, 50; Internet as facilitator of, 110, 114, 134; lack of, 110; participants role in, 60; prohibition of, 70, 106, 110; and Tumblr, 117–121 trans students: adult learners, 62; of color, 139, 153; harms to, 151; in online spaces, 8, 10, 11, 22; subjectivities of, 14. See also transgender students trans technology (Haimson et al.), 7 trans time (Car­ter, Horak), 61, 65, 68, 71 trans visibility, 71, 127–128, 150 trans want, theory of, 28, 29, 38–39, 170n4 trans w ­ omen: agency of, 29, 125, 160; attenuation of life for, 21, 169; centering of, 14; desired, 138; erasure of, 102; existential threats to, 15, 27–28, 47, 63, 120; Facebook and, 114; and hormone time, 60; impossibility of being a girl, 77; lack of in participant pool, 16–17; meaning making of, 24, 87; as

Index • 187

monstrosity, 32–34; navigating online spaces, 47, 59, 160; passing and, 29; and poverty, 14; pressure to conform, 65, 114; and transfeminine body management, 84–86, 105, 159–160; transmedicalism and, 123; as undertheorized in higher education, 14; vio­lence against, 27, 87, 124, 159; voice, 100. See also trans w ­ omen of color trans w ­ omen of color: discrimination against, 104; erasure of, 28; existential threats to, 28–29, 38, 63, 78, 104; perceived nonhumanity of, 28, 148; “transgender tipping point” and, 104; #TransIsBeautiful hashtag and, 103–104; vio­lence against, 27–29, 38, 78; visibility of, 127–128. See also trans w ­ omen truscum, 122–123 Tumblr (social media platform): changing guidelines of, 17; cislation and, 124–125; as community-­building platform, 93, 101, 111, 116–117, 131; death of, 7, 115–116, 118, 120; departure from, 51–52, 121; as evil, 120; for gender exploration, 68, 93, 96; and harm to trans ­people, 4; loss of, 94, 119, 121; marking trans content as pornographic, 94, 118, 119; nobodying and, 101; and sartorial archives, 92; transness of, 124; and trans sociality, 19, 23, 118; use of by trans p­ eople, 7, 19, 24, 48, 50, 57, 92, 96 Twitter (social media platform): activist engagement with, 45; Black-­, 12, 17; images, 96; and timelines, 66; trans-­, 131; use by trans ­people, 50, 52, 57, 150 underworlding practices: creation of trans-­specific, 60, 110, 125, 134, 154; cultivation of, 3; Internet as, 155; locations of, 48, 59–60, 72; as queer

world-­making, 21–22; visual thickness and, 134 United States Transgender Survey (2015), 9 virtual archive (Fabian), 11 virtual kinship networks (Nicolazzo), 8, 19, 25, 168. See also digital kinship virtual landscapes, 3, 43, 75, 160, 169n1 virtual racism, 152–154 virtual space (Kellerman), 14, 44 visual thickness, 133–138 whiteness: active disavowal of, 39, 153; of algorithms, 43; container, 114; dominating nonbinary discourses, 54; enactments of, 123; ideologies of, 7, 80; as mediator of trans lives online, 14, 54, 79, 114–115, 136; of online spaces, 23, 43, 81; primacy of, 58, 95; property of, 79, 82; trans culture and, 81, 102, 115, 137; Tumblr and, 121; ubiquity of, 95; as vio­lence, 78 white supremacy: effects of, 5, 114, 137; embeddedness of, 152–153; logics of, 102, 104; presence of, 27; vio­lence of, 32. See also whiteness white trans ­people, as overrepresented in participant pool, 17 willful opacity (Castro Samayoa), 129, 155 World Wide Web (WWW), 45 YouTube (social media platform): algorithms and, 23, 25; departure from, 71; in documenting transition, 3, 58, 60–62; and harm to trans ­people, 4; as site for exploring transness, 19, 21, 24, 57, 112, 116; as site to build community, 6, 43, 48; Tourmaline and, 170n1; trans content, 117, 135

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