Born in 1989, social media wasn’t really a thing for me growing up. The closest that most of my friends and I got was using MSN to communicate while we were gaming before moving to headsets sometime in the 2000s when we were playing World of Warcraft. Hell, although launched in 2005 I didn’t discover Facebook until a few years later and I was at Uni. Back then it was all about staying connected with school friends that had a habit of changing phone numbers. The explosion of social media in the years that followed just never interested me as it never seemed to hold much of a purpose. It wasn’t like there was any real news I wanted to prompt, I wasn’t doing anything interesting and connecting with random strangers seemed weird. So, I left it alone.
Finding a reason to connect
Accepting myself as a transwoman changed this even before I came out and started my transition. At first the foray into the world of social media started with a few tentative steps. Creating some new accounts to on Facebook and Reddit so that I could join a few trans communities. Private groups with active admin made it a pretty safe step but it still took me a month or so to even think about posting. Despite this the opportunity to read other posts and find a group of people struggling with similar experiences and learning from their stories made an enormous difference. It gave me a lot of confidence and validation that I was starting down the right path.
Eventually, I worked up the courage to post on these forums and suddenly my world opened. Not only did this provide me with an opportunity to voice my own questions or express some of the bottled-up emotions but it gave me a sense of belonging. At times, this freaked me out as someone that wasn’t used to social media. Afterall it can be a bit startling when the day after you come out there are 300 or so friend requests pending on Facebook. As someone that had been reluctant about social media this took me a while to really become comfortable with this newfound influx of connections. Making sure to review profiles and check mutual friends before accepting most requests. Potentially, my own hesitation may have prevented me from connecting with some valuable online friends. It is important to be comfortable in these spaces, especially when you’re in a fragile state of mind.
Even so despite my hesitation, those early connections were a massive step in building my confidence and managing the early days of my transition. Not only did I have this awareness of a large community out there ready to support my journey but there were specific connections I made through Facebook that gave me valuable people to talk to about transition and relationships. Several of which I continue to communicate with regularly as we move through our journey. This all started to change my outlook on social media as a positive tool for connecting with people.
Gaining confidence to prompt myself
One thing that has really changed in my overall mindset with my transition is an increased confidence to prompt myself on social media. As someone that has always dreamed of publication, I have been very afraid of really putting myself out there, which to a large part has to do with a long-standing fear of being seen as different and rejected by the wider community. However, to reach my dreams was always going to be something I needed to conquer. In some ways the journey of coming out and facing these fears in a personal way has meant that I have freed myself from the desire for social approval. As such my social media use quickly started expanding on Twitter, then to threads and more recently to TikTok as my three major platforms.
In these environments I have found support for my ideas to prompt this blog as well celebrate my journey. This hasn’t always been a positive experience as I have been the target of a couple of transphobic pile on. One of which led to a couple of conversations at work. However, learning to manage these negative instances are the disappointing negatives of social media. Ideally everyone would use such technology in a positive way but unfortunately, we can’t escape the reality of human nature with the desire to direct hate towards minorities and a sometime pathological need to seek validation in putting down others. In such situations I learnt quickly to use the tools available by blocking users, changing my privacy settings, reporting uses and taking short breaks from social media when things are getting too much. In all cases this has allowed the situation to die down but has also helped me to avoid falling into too much of a negative cycle, primarily because I don’t feel powerless.
Celebrating and sharing my story
More recently, these experiences have continued to grow my confidence and now as I progress in my journey, I have an increased desire to celebrate my progress. Not only for my own validation but also as I have learnt more about my own transness to inspire and support others. As such the social platforms that I use regularly have become more than simply a place for sharing my blog posts but have become a colourful expression of self. To some this is just a continual search for validation which is perhaps so important for most trans people but if this were all I wanted the safer option would always have been to stick with those private groups. While that is no doubt still part of my social media use it is clearly more than this as I want to share these positive movements with a wider audience to so not only my rejection of the fear that kept me buried for so long but also as sign for others.
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