The Crime of Being Trans and Online

Instagram declares open season on trans creators

Still a man.

His father cries himself to sleep.

Thank God Trump will put an end to this.

Your parents abused you.

Lately, being trans on Instagram Reels feels like a crime. A pathology, a satanic possession, a character deficit – the details change, but there is one thing people in the comments section want to make very clear: something is disturbingly wrong with you and the world that created you.

Ryan Bailey Potter, a trans person with 356K followers on Instagram, shared a video on the eve of TikTok’s unsuccessful ban thanking her followers for the supportive community they created. She juxtaposes her TikTok community with her experience on Instagram, saying, “I’ve been doing content for a decade, so I have relatively tough skin, but some of the comments are pretty brutal, to the point where they kind of bullied me off Instagram...” Her delivery is sanguine, but you can hear the hurt in her voice.

I imagine part of her pain is in the word bullied. Reading her comments puts me back on the middle school bus, knees to my chest, slouched under the vinyl seat, hoping the 8th graders in the back would forget about me. It’s a layered humiliation to both choke down their insults and contort yourself into submission.

In adulthood, we tell ourselves that we have outgrown our bullies, that our path to self-actualization has been swept clear of those painful parts of childhood. But scrolling Instagram Reels can put me in a type of maladaptive hypnosis – like I am strapped to my bed with speculums forcing my eyes open, nowhere to look except the endless stream of vitriol. I want to stop, but my conscious self relinquishes control; like a slot machine, I can’t stop losing. My thoughts race and my heart quickens, physiological defenses to protect against the paralyzing sense of doom. Our minds weren’t made to contend with millions of people wanting you dead.

Log off and touch grass. Okay, yeah, sure. Except for the brief times I used it for research on this essay, I try to keep Instagram off my phone, and my mental health is better for it. By now, everyone knows Instagram is a carcinogen, not just for trans people. But there’s a gaping difference between deleting Instagram of your own volition and deleting Instagram because you were excommunicated from the platform.

It should come as no surprise that trans people are being extricated from digital town squares, given that we are already banned from public spaces in much of the country. But this banishment is also a betrayal. Queer people have never been welcome in sports, in public bathrooms, in public life. During the 2010s, we nose-dived into our monitors and architected online communities on Twitter, Tumblr, and Instagram precisely because we were unwelcome in physical third spaces. Now, our safe havens have been found and pillaged.

At one point, the major social media giants ostensibly cared about creating healthy and safe online spaces. Meta banned Donald Trump for his role in the January 6th riots. The vast majority of major tech executives considered themselves liberal on all major issues (except regulation, the one that will turn out to matter more than them all.) Their Palo Alto birthright was amenable to the political overture, which was increasingly pulled leftward by a series of social injustices that climaxed with the murder of George Floyd in 2020. Investors and consumers alike demanded a commitment to diversity and inclusion, and executives were happy to comply.

Their featherweight commitments were quickly blown away by the cultural pendulum’s backward swing as a second Trump term became increasingly likely. Tech’s only commitment left standing, undressed of its therapy-speak HR and lofty lectures about purpose and mission, is its commitment to capital. And while they were always fearful of the Democrats' antimonopoly regulators, they are terrified of Trump’s dictatorial sway over whether a company lives or dies.

Mark Zuckerberg has been at the forefront of tech’s edgelord Trump train, which we all should have predicted when he started dressing like a 16-year-old hype beast who yells at his mom.

But the pace at which Instagram has increasingly become hostile territory for trans people is unprecedented. In a few short months, Zuckerberg dismantled Meta’s fact-checking and content moderation systems, removed tampons from the men's bathrooms in Meta offices, ended its diversity hiring goals, and opened the floodgates of hate speech by permitting users to call gay and trans people mentally ill. “It’s not right that things can be said on TV or the floor of Congress but not on our platforms,” he says because the words of politicians are famously a good moral barometer for civic discourse.

The consequences of Zuckerberg’s MAGA dick riding are only amplified by an algorithm attuned to rage bait. The difference between TikTok’s and Instagram’s algorithms feels far more significant than their content policies, though the flurry of 6-second videos makes it hard to distinguish exactly how. Anecdotally, Instagram is far cruder, making recommendations based purely on engagement without considering the nature or context of that engagement. A comment is engagement, even if the comment is a gif of a soldier spraying bullets, to mean, “We should kill people like you.”

On good days, TikTok can be a source of laughter and even fulfillment. On bad days, it feels like empty calories and artificial sweetener. On Instagram, there are no good days, and the bad days leave me wondering whether the right-wing zealots are right. I start to question whether my transition is nothing more than an escapist fantasy that I will only awaken from once it's too late. I see the hate comments as thoughts people have when they pass me on the street. You never know who is going home to seethe over the conspiratorial pedophile ring turning kids transgender. I’m only brought back to reality once I remove myself from the hamster wheel of online discourse about trans people; my mind settles, and I can remember that trans people have existed forever, and these accusations are nothing new.

We all have awoken to the havoc social media wreaks on young people, particularly young women. Our generation has revolted against the algorithmic mind virus that has made us depressed, anxious, and lonely. Nearly every day, I am recommended a Substack essay about the perils of social media and why you should delete your apps. This much we understand clearly. Yet, few have contended with the psychological warfare being waged specifically against trans people online. If you want to be a content creator on Instagram, transphobia is the price of admission.