Transsexualism & Online Extremism
Two trans women found an unlikely support network on far right social media
Bea and Diana (both names changed) are male-to-female transsexual women. They are also members of far right Social Media chat rooms. This may seem like an impossible juxtaposition and yet it isn’t. Bea is in her late 20s, white and lives in Oregon. Diana is 24 and does not want anyone to know her location. While both state that their political beliefs are not linked to their transsexual identity, there are some similarities in their personal experiences that have influenced their slide to the far right.
Both Bea and Diana come from challenging family backgrounds. Bea grew up in a lower middle class home. Her parents divorced when she was a child and she had minimal contact with her father. When asked about the impact of not having a father in her life she says “It’s probably why I’m a tra*ny” [my edit]. Unsure what to make of such a statement I ask if she is serious. She reaffirms. Her relationship with her mother was superficially pleasant — “My mother is very nice but also doesn’t give a shit”. When asked if she would confide in her mother about personal issues — such as transitioning — she states “I would [talk to her about] practical issues but I would never talk to her about my feelings or anything like that.”
Diana grew up in a lower class home but spent most of her time as a child moving because her parents were Evangelical Christian missionaries in south east Asia. While both of Diana’s parents are still together today she states that her relationship with them as a child was “never very close emotionally, but they were good parents.”
Crucially, as with Bea, she did not feel close enough to discuss her desire to transition with her parents. Even today both Diana and Bea’s parents do not know that they are transsexual.
Both chose to transition after university. While Bea didn’t have exceptional difficulty maintaining a peer group as a teen, Diana was a lonely teen and spent most of her time alone reading and watching YouTube videos. She was homeschooled and attributes having no friends to that. Since transitioning at age 25 Bea spends “all day” online on social media. Similarly, Diana spends up to six hours per day on Twitter. When asked, both stated that their best friends are online in chat rooms. As Diana put it in relation to her transition, “My support system right now is the friends I made on Twitter. They make me feel like I’m not alone in this.” She further indicated that Twitter (DM groups) has a major effect on her emotional wellbeing: “It makes me feel accepted. It’s where my friends are and it’s where I vent. I need those friends when things get rough.” It’s fair then to characterise both individuals as living something of a dual existence. Their terrestrial existence is lonely, isolated and devoid of people they can confide in. It is only online that they can exist as transsexual — and even then it is from behind anonymous avatars and accounts outside of trusted DM groups.
Social Media has played a prominent role in Bea’s political evolution. Her current political beliefs are hard to pin down. Ideologies are for “mid-wits” she states before mapping her personal journey. “When I was 14 I read a book on Marx and was big into community service and believed that self-denial and extreme altruism were virtues. Then I became a Christian and dialled that up to 11. When I was 20 I smoked a lot of weed and communed with the entities from Sirius B…and spent six years as an ascetic monk with a big long beard like Jesus. Then I got into anime and now I’m a tra*ny”. [my edit] Currently Bea believes in radical individualism with an emphasis on the primacy of property rights. She also believes that Jews are literally aliens from another planet (Tiamat) and should be killed, and states that she wouldn’t even pause if she saw someone drowning as she has no moral obligation to help anyone else. She also sincerely believes that all journalists should be hanged. She trumpets Discordianism (a parody religion made up in the 1960s) as the closest thing she has to a core belief system. To what degree Bea believes in any of the things she’s saying is up for debate — she may well be trolling me, she did say I should be hanged several times during our interview, incorrectly identifying me as a journalist. But what is clear is that the hodgepodge of beliefs are all keenly discussed primarily on 4chan but also in certain Twitter and Discord DM groups — an influence she readily acknowledges.
For Bea, an isolated and lonely individual who has jerked from one extreme belief to another in search of community and belonging from the age of 14, far right DM groups and 4chan are happy to offer a home.
Diana has self-identified as a Libertarian since the age of ten. She states that for her the key principles of her political belief system are“protecting the freedoms of individual citizens…In general I think that anything that is victimless should not be a crime. Free speech is very important to me. On social issues I’m very liberal because of this.” Diana is in three Twitter DM groups. She would only describe one as far right. The other two she describes as “mostly centrists that like right wing memes and dislike left wing extremism.” While Diana is not far right personally, she spends up to six hours per day confiding in, and has found community and support among, the far right as she goes through her transition journey. For her, the greatest challenge to transitioning was her extremely religious upbringing. Not only did she feel unable to talk to her parents about her transition but she also felt an enormous amount of guilt. “As a child I kept telling myself I wanted to be a girl, not [just] pretend to be a girl so I didn’t think I was violating the command against effeminate behaviour. I’d tell myself that only God could make me a girl and then try to force myself to be masculine which would trigger what I now know is dysphoria.”
In Diana’s case, YouTube was instrumental in helping her decide to undergo hormone treatment as part of her transition. “I became aware that I wanted to transition about a year after college. I was watching Blair White often at the time and that’s how I became aware that transitioning involved more than just wearing girls’ clothes…within about a month I started taking hormones. All it took for me to decide to transition was discovering it was possible.” This is where Diana and Bea differ. They have very different definitions of what being a trans woman means. Diana believes that with hormone treatment and perhaps surgery she will be a woman. Bea disagrees. Bea has taken the decision not to undertake any hormonal or surgical treatments as part of her transition and believes that anyone who undergoes sex reassignment surgery is most likely to commit suicide from the “endless suffering they inflict upon themselves.” For Bea, trans females are “gay men who like to cross dress.” She believes that any further steps — hormone treatment or SRS — are simply a sprinkling of “delusion on top” and even when fully reassigned trans women remain gay men who have simply altered their bodies. For Diana, hormone treatment is not a step taken lightly. She understands the profound life-altering changes it brings. She faces further complications due to an ongoing battle with psychosis — most likely bipolar disorder or schizophrenia. She is currently seeing a psychiatrist, a therapist and a doctor for this.
The question then of what impact being a trans woman has on their politics is difficult to answer. Both of these individuals are socially isolated. Their social network is solely based on online connections. Both have endured turbulent periods of searching for ideological and personal satisfaction and both have found whatever comfort they now possess in primarily far right circles online.
When asked if being trans inherently attracts one to political extremes, Bea’s response is profound; by stepping outside of the male/female binary there is no boundary to stepping outside of the political left/right binary also. In fact, that is far less challenging.
She shared this tweet (by another unrelated trans female twitter user) to support her position.
As if to reinforce this point, I received a follow up DM from Diana five months after our initial interview telling me that everything we had spoken about (and recounted above) is no longer true. She had since become a socialist having met an Anarcho-Communist in real life and having immersed herself in Philosophy Tube — a Contrapoints-type leftist channel aimed at emulating the alt-right’s successful use of YouTube for educational and propaganda purposes. In other words, though Diana has undertaken what appears to be a monumental ideological shift, the pattern is the same. She has found recognition from another radical (albeit terrestrial) relationship and has, with the aid of social media, jerked to another politically extreme position.
Both Bea and Diana are trans women. Both have had challenging upbringings and have faced prolonged and ongoing periods of ideological and emotional turmoil. In their daily lives they are lonely, isolated and unable to speak about their struggles to their families. They have few if any terrestrial friends and the life they lead in the real world is incomplete. In response to this they spend the overwhelming majority of their time online. Here they can be trans women and here they have forged the relationships that help them deal with the daily challenges of being trans. In the place of confidence and understanding from their parents and peer groups they are reliant on YouTube stars and DM groups. And in searching for some form of satisfaction with who they are, they are drawn to the peripheries of the political spectrum where community and belonging is emphasised. While Bea claims that her political beliefs are not influenced by her status as a transgender woman, it seems to be the case that taking extreme leaps of ideological faith is a defining characteristic of the transition process, certainly in that period prior to realising one is trans. Similarly Diana states that her political beliefs are not shaped by her transgenderism. However, her dramatic swing to the far left is entirely consistent with her reasoning for flirting with the far right and with Bea’s conversion from Marxist to Evangelical Christian to Asceticism to 4channer. When one steps outside of traditional gender binaries one is ripe to question all other societal norms. However, the ever present push factors of loneliness, isolation and social media immersion make it a strong likelihood that young trans individuals are at a very high risk for radicalisation and extremism online.
I began researching the social, economic and mental health of individuals attracted to far right chatrooms on Twitter in 2017. The aim of my study was to identify who was at risk of radicalisation, what drove those risk factors and then to suggest a number of interventions to help prevent other at-risk individuals from following in their footsteps. The project is ongoing and currently includes observations of group chats over a two year period as well as fifteen in-depth interviews with members of said chatrooms. The amount of information is so vast, I have decided to begin compiling some of my observations here.
NOTE — all interviewees gave informed consent for their words to be published for research purposes at the time of interviewing. All information shared here is done so with the consent of the interviewees and every effort has been taken to preserve their anonymity. It is not the purpose of this article (and the wider project) to make any personal judgement about the individuals who have interviewed rather the aim is to open a discussion about the root causes of far right radicalisation and is focused on providing constructive solutions to help other at-risk individuals in danger of being radicalised.
