Today’s Gender Is No: Genderbot’s Algorithmic Platform Resistance

Abstract

Genderbot was a Twitterbot that used a word replacement algorithm to tweet a new, detailed “gender” every six hours. Through its thousands of tweets, this bot formed a shared space on Twitter where trans life was possible—an important, if small, act of resistance within Twitter’s broader trans hostility. This article uses intimacy as a framework to theorize the delegitimization of trans identities built into and reinforced through Twitter’s structure as well as Genderbot’s algorithmic resistance to these forces. Following trans of colour algorithmic operations of the cut, shift, and stitch, Genderbot actively supported trans life as not just possible but pleasurable, making joyful trans relations possible within Twitter’s networked public. Recognizing these relations challenges the “joy deficit” in studies of trans experience and presents the possibilities and limitations of small forms of algorithmic resistance against platforms’ capitalist modulation of identity.