Reframing Transnormativity as a Project of Exclusivity: Examining Transmedicalist Identity Formation in Online Spaces

• In Event: Platformed Belonging: Identity, Visibility, and Exclusion in Digital Spaces

Abstract

Niche communities under the larger LGBTQ+ umbrella have proliferated online, creating a new and rich discursive field where trans people are engaging in identity work to define what it means to be trans. This study uses comments from both inclusive and exclusive trans communities on the popular online forum Reddit to examine how transmedicalists themselves discursively define their transness in opposition to transgender and queer people. This project identifies both implicit and explicit strategies used by transmedicalists to define themselves in opposition to transgender and otherwise queer people by using both qualitative content analysis and a computational text analysis technique called word embedding. Results show that exclusion and ridicule of transgender people is a crucial part of identifying as a transmedicalist. I argue that this conception of transmedicalism helps re-focus our understanding of transnormativity as a political project that ultimately aims to depoliticize the trans rights movement through discourses of deservingness, validity, respectability, and productivity.

Authors

• Dakesian Woods, University of Illinois at Chicago

• Ian Kennedy, University of Illinois-Chicago