On the Meaning of Sex by Kajsa Ekis Ekman

Author:Kajsa Ekis Ekman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Spinifex Press
Published: 2023-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 22

Tumblr, Trans and Trauma – Testimonies from Teens

Testimonies from the current generation of young women reveal a picture far more complex than that presented by trans health care clinics. Their stories are not the classic transsexual tales of always having felt as if one was born in the wrong body. Mainly, they are about being a teenage girl and not fitting in. Through interviews, YouTube clips, blogs and autobiographies, young women speak about their transition journeys. The backgrounds and life experiences may differ – some had happy childhoods while others felt maladjusted; some refer to themselves as tomboys while others report having never thought about gender until their teens – yet the narratives follow a remarkably similar framework, both among those who claim gender reassignment saved their lives and those who say it was the worst mistake they ever made.

After a period of feeling lost at the beginning of their teens, with loneliness as a result of bullying and loss of friendships, sometimes coupled with experiences of assault and anorexia, what followed was a sense of not belonging and not being able to live up to others’ expectations of how to be a girl. As a result, they turned to online communities. Tumblr is often mentioned and several girls tell of how they created a non-binary, agender or tri-gender avatar for themselves only to later ‘go all the way’ and become trans men. The role of the internet is fundamental: it features in the vast majority of accounts. Indeed, it is through online searches and joining forums that the girls report ‘realising’ that they were trans. One user specifies: the videos which began appearing in the “recommended stream” were what “gave a name to [my] discomfort.”141

Gina from Sweden recounts:

At that stage, I had started watching more and more YouTube videos where young trans people told their stories, showed how hormones and surgery had changed their lives and transformed them into their real selves. I would become very emotional as I watched these videos and could sit in my bed for hours on end just crying. I felt I was the person in the video, that my story was theirs and that I needed the same help they had got. It felt somehow awful that I had not received this help before. The assessment and diagnosis took just over a year and after that I was ready for a mastectomy.142

“TUMBLR! Oh my God! TUMBLR! Youtube too. That’s how I found out that I was trans – it was from a YouTube video.”143 “I would never have discovered my true gender without Tumblr,” says a teenager who has started testosterone treatment. “It was after I started reading about trans and other gender identities that I discovered I was a boy,” says 18-year-old Eirin on the website of a young people’s sexual health and wellbeing organisation.144 Another describes her realisation happening just after she had come out on Tumblr: “The more I posted, the more I found that anytime I reblogged a

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