By Jude Doyle Oct 15, 2025, 1:30 PM GMT+1 Link
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For about a year of my life, from late 2019 through the summer of 2020, I was trans only on Reddit.
I don’t know why I chose Reddit. I don’t normally use the site heavily, or at all. But Reddit is a place where users ask for advice, and I needed advice desperately. So I rigged up a pseudonymous profile and spent guilty, panic-laced afternoons browsing r/asktransgender and r/ftm. My involvement was not vocal. I would sometimes like people’s posts, or, if I felt brave, leave a supportive comment — always a brief one, for fear some personal detail or quirk of phrasing would be used to trace the comment back to me. I had an extremely public life elsewhere on the internet, one that was heavily linked to both my real name and my job as a writer, and I was terrified of someone linking the anonymous, almost silent, possibly-trans Reddit user I’d become to the person I was “supposed” to be.
Without knowing it, I was taking part in one of my people’s time-honored internet traditions. “It’s okay to say you’re trans online without having transitioned IRL right?” asks one r/asktransgender poster. “Is it okay to be trans only online?” asks another. No matter how many times newbies ask this question — and they ask it a lot; in terms of overall popularity and frequency of repetition, it’s second only to this one — the answer is always “yes.” “This is in fact traditional for many people,” the asked transgenders of r/asktransgender assure us. “I did [it] for about ten years. It’s a great way to socially transition without the possibility to lose anything,” another says.
From anonymous chat lines to cheap Amazon-dot-com binders to tutorials on where to find men’s pants that actually fit, it’s hard for me to think of any step in my gender exploration that wasn’t heavily facilitated by the internet and the relative anonymity it affords. Of course, that anonymity is increasingly illusory. (Facebook, famously, can identify a user as gay based on three likes. It can also out them by splashing big, rainbow-colored targeted ads all over their work computers.) But the rapid growth of surveillance technologies may soon make anonymity impossible. An increasing number of countries are requiring users to upload government IDs or submit to facial scans for age verification before they can use the internet at all. Other bills — like the recently failed but reintroduced Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) in the United States — could make it legally precarious for internet providers and platforms to host any queer or trans content, which makes community-building and exploring one’s identity exponentially harder.
For many trans people, internet anonymity is only a temporary way station between the closet and living full time in their desired gender. But for trans people who can’t be out — those who are very young, or living in unsafe homes or family situations, or who fear losing their children or their jobs if the truth got out — the internet is the only place they have to be themselves. Their access to community and self-expression is entirely dependent on the internet, and the shaky, imperfect privacy it now affords them. What happens when that privacy is gone?
“I didn’t grow up with a lot of privacy,” says Lowell.* He lived in a small town. He was homeschooled. He had five-count-’em-five siblings, four of them younger than he was, and he shared his bedroom. So, when Lowell first started to realize he might be a trans man — a realization prompted by scrolling Tumblr — he didn’t have a lot of breathing room to process this information.
Enter the handheld device. “I had a smartphone at the time,” Lowell tells me. “And I was just furtively going in my room, or hiding out in the bathroom, or trying to find any excuse I could to go take walks around the neighborhood and find some wi-fi hotspots.” Once he was safely outside, he could log on to trans forums and start talking to other queer and trans people: “My entire world outside of my family was on a five-inch screen.”
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