“We Are Detective”: Transvestigations, conspiracy and inauthenticity in ‘gender critical’ social media discourses

Abstract

This article explores the socio-behavioral phenomenon of “transvestigations” in social media discourses. This phenomenon is most often characterized by users referring – erroneously – to apparent physiological cues of one's assigned sex at birth, which motivate their interpretation of one's transgender status, particularly among those who do not identify as transgender and focus primarily on cisgender celebrities. It is difficult to know whether these behaviors and interactions are symptomatic of an authentic “gender critical” ideology or inauthentic practices that only fan the flames of antagonism in an ongoing social struggle. In this paper, I explain how transvestigations are primarily based on transphobic “gender critical” discourses and are fundamentally underpinned by a conspiracy of transgender ubiquity. I also explain how transgender users and their allies troll transvestigators by mocking the same discourses and assumptions. To do so, I analyze social media data using methods from cultural political economy and social-cognitive discourse studies. I argue that the possibilities and uses of social media for misinformation, conspiracy, and mimetic antagonism facilitate a discursive landscape in which authentic "gender-critical" discourses are indistinguishable from potentially inauthentic conspiratorial discourses. By highlighting how social media and its users (re)construct a world without distinction between authenticity and inauthenticity, this article raises questions about the im/possibilities of change in contexts of ongoing and ever-increasing antagonisms.