Being Trans on the Internet: The inherent fear of existing online
It may go without saying, but being transgender on the internet is not a good experience. That is, depending on where you are on the internet.
With the internet's ability to connect disparate groups of people with both very similar and very different ideas of what the world should look like, you often find uncomfortable collisions and large groups of like-minded people.
Almost no social concept is as charged as being transgender in the United States right now. So let's talk about the reality of being transgender on the internet.
Pre-Internet & The Patriarchy
Let's consider the concept of being outside the norm or going against social standards prior to the existence of the internet. We can fairly easily reason about the type of consequences you might face socially.
Your immediate peers may isolate you. You could lose your job. Your family might disown you. You may be denied access to services. This is just a small part of the difficulty that people face for violating perceived social norms.
In a way, these actions serve a sociological function. Shunning those who violate the rules of a society ensures that the idea is not encouraged to spread and limits its reproductive potential. However, this doesn't mean that the shunning group is always correct. We humans, as a general society, have been wrong, many, many, many times. A fairly innocuous example is that Galileo was tried by the Inquisition when he taught that the sun was the center of the solar system, not the Earth. They found that this challenged their view of Earth as the superior celestial form, and it contradicted their religious texts. This same ideology has been used to oppress countless marginalized groups. A perceived violation of a group's beliefs or expectations leads to injustice. Usually, this type of behavior is used to maintain social hierarchy. One of those social hierarchies that is especially prevalent when it comes to queer people is the patriarchy - the elevation of masculinity as a superior social power.
Transness and its rejection of the patriarchy
Being trans is, at its core, a complete rejection of the patriarchy and the concept of gender as a whole (as it is understood by cisgender society). When someone with the social power and privilege that comes along with being born male takes that social power, and throws it away, those who associate their strength with their masculinity feel appalled, as if their very belief system has been attacked. And it has! If you hold the fundamental belief that males are more assertive, powerful, smarter, faster... and then you're forced to confront the complete reality of the diverse ways in which people exist, you'll see:
- There are countless men who lack these traits
- There are countless women who have these traits
Someone who holds on to typical gender norms tries to ignore these groups. They associate people that don't match their expectations with opposite genders - call a woman 'tomboy', or say a man is 'beta' and feminine. They associate a value with this belief. A feminine man is weak. A masculine woman is unattractive. If you can only value a man by his strength and a woman by her beauty, you lose the script - it is of no concern to you!
Our only job as humans is to live our lives to their happiest and fullest. The social hierarchy in which you are more powerful than those with 'weaker' gender classifications than you holds no meaning outside of your own thoughts and feelings.
Now back to being trans - someone who explicitly renounces these perceived normalities and breaks the inherent association of sex and gender completely rejects this social hierarchy. That rejection is appalling to those who cling to it. This is especially the reason that so much additional hate is directed toward transgender women, as opposed to transgender men. Because transgender women more directly reject the idea of masculine superiority, those with masculine social power are more inclined to feel attacked.
Due to the way in which masculine social norms are ingrained in our present society, these feelings often come out in the form of aggression. "Boys don't cry".
That leads to the internet.
The Internet and its consequences for hate
Now, imagine, you have a herd of angry, angry, people. They really dislike how many weirdos and freaks are breaking the rules of society. They're hungry for retribution and reprieve. Every downfall of another 'snowflake liberal tranny' is another boost to their ego. Another credit back to the patriarchy.
This hatred is so widespread that it has reached sophisticated levels of organization. Obviously, there are countless angry people who sit alone, commenting out wherever they see, throwing some anger here and there. But then there's the organized haters. These places are real! There are dedicated websites and forums made possible by the internet to explicitly seek out content they disagree with. I'm not going to mention any single one by name at risk of pissing them off, but they're very real.
Now imagine, you are but one, single transgender person who happened to post something innocuous on social media about your day. Imagine that one of these individuals finds your post, through whatever machinations of fate, and decides that you are the new problem with society. You are what is destroying their ego, ruining their families, taking away their happiness!
At any moment, by just being transgender and existing on the internet, you risk opening the floodgates of hatred. They're always flowing, always directed somewhere, but now, you, one single individual, could be the target of that absolute torrent.
That is the reality of being transgender on the internet.
Privacy & Moderation
Due to the decentralized nature of the internet, there's no big boss you can call to say "hey, these guys are being mean!!", and if there was, that would probably be detrimental to the free flow of information. But I think there's a lot to be said about the modern uses of the internet and its consequences for hate.
Most social internet use happens through centralized social media platforms. That's things like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok. The good thing is, these platforms actually do have a big boss you can call, and sometimes, that can help. But there's also so much hatred that's disguised, subtle, or outside the domain of these platforms. Platforms are also imperfect moderators. They only have small teams of staff and large amounts of AI models that try to filter content on keywords. Those models can't capture the greater societal context required to identify hatred. They're also limited in volume. You can usually only request a few comments to be removed, not an entire flood of them. At that point, your solution is to delete your account and hope you don't get found again. If your haters are organized, that will never, ever work.
The other problem is connection. Younger generations are increasingly dependent on the internet to survive and perform daily functions. Some people rely on social media to maintain friendships and social connections, people rely on the internet to make a living whether that be through a business or for work. Important services like healthcare and finances are accessed through the internet.
When the internet turns on you, there are increasingly dire consequences. An organized group of haters would have no issue with attempting all sorts of methods to specifically ruin your day. A determined enough hater could use personal hacking techniques like brute-forcing, phishing, or credential stuffing to attempt to break into your accounts, steal your information, and find more things to be angry at - post them online, send them to your immediate peers. Imagine you're just living your life, you get a group of haters on the internet, and all of a sudden, they're calling your job every single minute yelling about how you're a plague on society, yelling slurs, being a liability. Your employer is not always going to have your back.
A trans person on the internet, with sufficient effort, can lose their job for simply existing, even in a position where their peers may actually be neutral or supportive.
At any point, you could have a very angry group of stalkers who believe you have personally wronged them, who may do anything possible to ensure you have a horrible, horrible day. There is no 'turning off the computer', because the consequences can follow you into reality. And as work and life become increasingly online, separating yourself (and your identity) from the internet is impossible.
That is the inherent fear of being trans on the internet.