While conducting research for my master’s thesis on trans care geographies, which drew from narratives from the New York City Transgender Oral History Project, I began to hear stories from trans people about how digital spaces were central to formulating their gender identities. It sometimes felt like the Internet was all anyone could talk about! Oral history narrators discussed how they stumbled across or sought out trans resources, spoke to other trans people for the first time, and used the Internet to play around with their gender identity. Even narrators who came out as trans well before the Internet became public noted how it has shifted trans worlds.

At the same time, trans digital spaces have recently been weaponized as part of growing anti-trans rhetoric. Spaces like Tumblr, trans subreddits, and trans YouTube channels have been accused of "turning" people trans, although empirical evidence suggests that the increase in people who identify as trans or gender non-confirming is most likely correlated with improvements in trans legal rights, social acceptance, transmasculine visibility, and access to medical care in many places (as Julia Serano suggests). Clearly, there is something interesting (and deeply misunderstood) about how trans people use the Internet to connect with others and learn about themselves. I think that digital trans life is much more nuanced than has been portrayed in popular culture or the academy to date.

This qualitative mixed-methods research project explores how trans people have enacted care practices in digital spaces throughout the history of the Internet and how such digital care practices might provide political potential. Using a feminist methodological approach, I ask how transgender digital worlds and the material conditions of everyday trans life are intertwined, drawing from literature on digital geographies, care ethics, and critical trans politics.

This work is generously funded by the National Science Foundation's Graduate Research Fellowship Program and the University of Washington Department of Geography.

* Full Title: Theorizing the Political Potential of Care through Digital Spaces of Trans Belonging