YouTube Commentaries on Trans Time-lapse Videos: Transforming Misgendering Stances into Pedagogical Moments

Abstract

The distribution and consumption of transgender time-lapse videos on YouTube have increased over the last few decades, providing trans communities with a valuable resource for self-making. On YouTube, vloggers can present images and videos of their bodies as they document their gender transitions through several practices that rely on temporality and time-space compression. As a genre, time-lapse videos comprise creative worldmaking practices where users document their gender transformations using hundreds to thousands of still photos or video segments which show their social, somatic, and biochemical changes. Although scholars have discussed different worldmaking and community organising practices that take place as trans vloggers display their gendered subjectivities online, there is sparse scholarship studying the recurrent patterns of behaviour on the comment space below these videos. In this article, I draw on critical discourse analytic studies of new media and stance-taking as I review and analyse discriminatory strategies – principally misgendering and ungendering – that YouTubers used to denigrate the self-identified gender of a given vlogger. Stance-taking enables us to identify and track reoccurring attitudes steeped in cisgenderism. At the same time, capturing how vloggers and trans allies respond to (intentional or unintentional) text-based forms of prejudice, can create teachable moments for YouTube spectators. While misgendering stances aim to pressure their targets into certain kinds of gender and sex embodiments, insurrectionary stance-acts co-opt and call out the language of discrimination, lending legitimacy and authority to trans vloggers to create, enact, and live their own genders.