What does anon want of me? De-idealizing transgender digital media on 4chan’s/lgbt/imageboard

Abstract

Popular narratives centered on online trans communities implicitly associate transgender digital networks with forwardness and social radicalism. This association has become idealized, or taken as theoretically granted, after the “transgender tipping point,” which causally associates trans people’s appearance in the media with progress. Extending communication and media studies’ critiques of trans media visibility, this essay attends to backwards attachments cultivated by trans subcultures on a notoriously harmful digital platform. Through an attachment genealogy of transgender identity categories on the imageboard 4chan, I argue that depressive, recalcitrant, and self-negating affects play a constitutive role in online trans identity construction. Trans people on 4chan deploy the platform’s ironic mode to identify within an array of deliberately confusing, insincere, and antagonistic genders. Adoption of these identities affords users legibility on the platform as they develop a sense of everydayness opposed to the drives for authenticity and legibility which typify mainstream platforms. These unredeemable yet constitutive affective attachments reflect transgender users’ habitual appearance within and resentment toward the Internet’s trans misogynistic visual culture. The heuristic of de-idealization promises to plumb rose-tinted attachments to the constitutive habits of queer and trans digital subcultures.