Transgender identity management across social media platforms

Abstract

Transgender people use social media for identity work, which takes place over time and across platforms. In this study, we interviewed 20 transgender social media users to examine transgender identity management across the social media ecosystem. We found that transgender social media users curate their social media experiences to fit their needs through creating accounts on different platforms, maintaining multiple accounts on individual platforms, and making active decisions about content they post, networks they are connected to, and content they interact with. In this way, transgender people’s social media curation is not limited to their own identity presentations, but also involves curating the content they see from others and whom they include in their networks. Together, these two types of online curation enable transgender social media users to craft social media worlds that meet their social and self-presentational needs.