Ugly Hate Machines: The Harsh Reality of Being Trans on Social Media

There are definitely advantages to being Trans in 2023, the age of social media. Social media allows us to define our identity, what name we use (assuming Facebook doesn’t flag us for not using a legal name), what images we use to define us, our pronouns, and so forth. But social media is also one of the scariest landscapes for trans people. Personally, I find that I experience relatively little transphobia in my real-life interactions with people and, shockingly, a ton more on social media. Besides the fact that bigots are emboldened by the anonymity of social media, there’s the fact that social media destroys geographical borders, so living in an area like Denver that’s pretty accepting of transgender people means very little online. On social media, everywhere is a red state.

Admittedly, it’s been suggested that I spend too much time finding and picking fights with transphobes, and that’s not entirely untrue. I did suffer the most harassment after discovering and intentionally starting a fight with a Facebook group known as “We All Know JK Rowling is Right.” As JK Rowling is, in fact, right about very little, I personally made it my mission to take down this group, forgetting how difficult it is to get even an obvious hate group removed from any social media site. But the simple fact that these groups not only exist, but are easy to find—even for those trying to avoid them—is part of the problem.

GLAAD does an annual Social Media Safety Index which assesses protections on the five major social media sites—Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, and Twitter—for LGBTQ individuals, especially trans and gender non-conforming people. While the scores for four out of the five sites improved in 2023—Twitter was the only one to lose points in 2023, for obvious reasons—the report also indicated that, on all five sites, the “safety and the quality of safeguarding of LGBTQ users remain unsatisfactory.”

Funnily enough, before Elon Musk bought Twitter—which I will continue to call Twitter in spite of the recent, stupid name change—it was probably the best social media site for trans people. Transphobes caught bans for hate speech and intentionally deadnaming or misgendering people. Naturally, that all changed once Musk came into the picture. Musk wasn’t exactly a champion of trans rights even before his girlfriend, Grimes, famously left him for trans rights activist and military whistleblower Chelsea Manning, but by the time he came to own Twitter,  he had become almost single-minded in his hatred of transgender people.

But then, marginalized groups on Meta know all too well that Mark Zuckerberg’s platforms aren’t much better. For years, Facebook has doled out punishment for making mildly rude comments about white people or men while obvious hate symbols—like swastikas or literal images of lynchings, both of which I have reported on Facebook in the past—supposedly don’t violate community standards. As recently as 2020, Medium writer Gregory Matthews proved that “men are trash” is still flagged automatically as hate speech on Facebook (although he found several variations that don’t get flagged). I considered posting the phrase on Facebook for the purposes of this article to see if it still gets flagged, but not wanting to lose Facebook access for the sake of the article when I’m fairly certain it’s still the case, let’s just assume that it still carries a similar punishment. Meanwhile, I’ve reported “We All Know JK Rowling Is Right” for many violations—including when I infiltrated the group and found the admin reminding members not to make death threats against trans people—and the group remains standing to this day. I even tried to report the group for its derogatory language regarding men, as the group routinely refers to trans women as “men” in insulting ways, but apparently Facebook was just fine with that as well.

As the GLAAD Social Media Safety Index points out, the stated rules for these websites and what they actually enforce are two very different things. Pretty much all social media sites have rules against harassing people for their LGBTQ identity, but none of them seem to actually be willing to enforce said rules. Some will try to argue that this amounts to “freedom of speech,” but there’s no guarantee of freedom of speech on a privately owned website and, as we’ve seen, the freedoms guaranteed by social media sites only go one way, with hate speech against privileged groups being the only type that’s punishable. And, while new social media apps have popped up recently, particularly with the intention to challenge Musk and his platform, the only one that’s caught on recently is the Zuckerberg-owned Threads, which doesn’t exactly do much to fix the current situation of ownership consolidation.

The unfortunate truth is that this whole situation is unlikely to improve until either the existing owners of these sites decide to change how their own rules are enforced or until a new player comes along to offer up a popular social media product with actual protections against hate speech. Both scenarios seem, unfortunately, very unlikely at this point. I wish I had a solution to offer trans people about this situation, but the solutions, unfortunately, are in the hands of those who control social media. So, instead of offering advice or a fix, I’m left calling on social media sites to improve the way they enforce their rules. Transgender people deserve better than this.