The internet has long been a source of information and support for transgender people. Now, trans rights and the internet itself are in a moment of crisis. What happens next?

How trans visibility became a trap

People who have documented their lives online are discovering the dark side of digital permanence.

The return of the trans underground

The internet once helped trans people connect and organize. Now it’s a dangerous liability. What comes next?

Doing it for themselves

How do resources on transitioning survive the era of surveillance and AI slop?

Only out online

The anonymity granted by the internet is a lifeline to many trans people. What happens when that privacy disappears?

The DIY and IRL energy of punk rock mutual aid

Bands like Ekko Astral are bringing the urgency of online solidarity into the mosh pit.

Trans women are building their own publishing world, and it’s under threat

Online platforms have created space for bold, biting work that’s challenging what queer fiction can be.

Ekko Astral is not a trans band. They may have a trans frontwoman in Jael Holzman. Much of their material may deal with being trans. Plus, they may have grown their fan base from word of mouth online in spaces such as trans Twitter. But at the end of the day, they are not a trans band.

This three-piece punk band is going to remind you of the bullshit that consumes everyday life, but give you “power anthems” to live by and help you overcome. The songs are short, brash, and aggressive — their debut full-length album, pink balloons, clocks in at less than 36 minutes, existing in what the band dubs the genre of  “mascara mosh pit.”

As a band, Ekko Astral wants to fight to make the world a better place. And that means speaking out on a variety of topics, including trans rights, Holzman says. Because harnessing the energy that people bring online into the physical world and bringing together people who are fighting for that through mutual aid — no matter how large the crowd size — is where magic happens. They’re a political project as much as a band, and it goes far beyond the identity of their lead singer.

Ekko Astral is also on the front lines of making sure that while the internet becomes less safe for queer people every day, there is a group of artists and musicians fighting to re-create those safe spaces in person. “People are increasingly isolated. People are increasingly just siloed onto their screens and their phones, so you need to actually try to develop campaigns to disrupt,” Holzman says.

Having worked as a congressional and climate journalist in Washington, DC, since 2017, Holzman knows the power of media narratives and how they shape the world around us. Seeing how major artists have spoken out about important political issues, she decided that it was time to leverage her connections in the music industry to kick-start this kind of energy for trans rights. 

This past May, that energy became Liberation Weekend, the largest trans-led music festival in DC. Over two days, 30-plus acts performed — such as Speedy Ortiz, Ted Leo, Bartees Strange, The Ophelias, and Ekko Astral themselves — in the nation’s capital to help raise over $30,000 for the Gender Liberation Movement, a nonprofit which works to “build a people’s movement for bodily autonomy, self-determination, collectivism, and fulfillment.” But the impact wasn’t just monetary. 

When Republican lawmakers sought to use a congressional budget bill to bar Medicaid coverage of gender-affirming care, Holzman and other artists leveraged the connections made from the festival to organize social media pressure campaigns aimed at bringing awareness to the cuts. She says that these moves helped push lawmakers to use the procedural measures available to them to fight, instead of conceding to Republican efforts. 

With the money raised from LIberation Weekend, the Gender Liberation Movement worked to organize protests outside the Supreme Court following the ruling in United States v. Skrmetti, which upheld a Tennessee law banning gender-affirming care for minors. Those rallies garnered international media attention, keeping the issue in the public spotlight.

This fall, Ekko Astral will be back doing the work that the band has continuously done when going around the country: mutual aid to directly benefit trans people. The reality of the trans community ”spending a disproportionate time” online compared to other groups is it leads to many of us being “hyper conversational,” according to Holzman.

That allowed groups of trans musicians to create new musical communities in the last five to seven years, and then use their existing knowledge of going on tour to create something “really beautiful.” Now, she says, they’re finding a way to leverage these burgeoning communities to work together and build something even bigger. 

“Imagine if bands just decided to take it upon themselves to use their platform as they’re on the road to say, ‘If you’re at the merch table, would you give, like, $5 to help this person pay their medical bills?’ Imagine how far that would go,” she says.

For trans artists, Holzman adds, many of them are “acutely” aware of just how tenuous access to robust, lifesaving healthcare is for our community. Add in the layer of being an artist, a group that rarely enjoys the benefit of healthcare access through employment, and you have a group primed to use tools such as mutual aid to make up for where governments and corporations lack.

This kind of ethos of mutual aid and finding support systems in the cracks of society is rooted in a musical tradition with a long history: DIY spaces. Trans musicians have historically thrived in these arenas, with less gatekeeping from traditional labels and media, and flourishing with the help of an online community is vital.

The DIY scene is known to have grown out of the punk rock scene from the late 1970s in the US, where bands shunned by major record labels would create their own venues to host shows in unsanctioned locations. A wide variety of groups, including anarchists, working-class people, people of color, and queer people, found refuge in punk rock and other DIY aesthetics. 

It was in these spaces that Nicolle Maroulis, a queer guitar player and songwriter, fell in love with music. They first started playing music around the age of 14, inspired by the DIY ethos. Eventually, Maroulis started their own project, Hit Like a Girl, and put out their first record in 2017. Today, they embody that DIY spirit by working as a hired musician, photographer, tour manager, and merch seller all over the music industry. They also run a nonprofit called No More Dysphoria that raises money on different tours to help trans people access necessary gender-affirming care. 

Maroulis started small: 20 poorly made T-shirts to be exact, they said, sold at shows where they knew the acts. That led to more opportunities to get No More Dysphoria at different concerts with larger and larger venues. As word of mouth spread, more bands got involved with some event-showcasing flags in music videos or onstage on tour. 

Now, the project is an official 501(c)(3) nonprofit continuing to help more and more people get access to lifesaving care — even if internet algorithms are doing their best to try and bury any transgender content. Platforms like Instagram were blocking LGBTQ content from being searchable by young people for months at a time. X, formerly Twitter, has faced allegations of algorithms “deboosting” certain words associated with the queer community.

“It’s harder now to connect with people online and make sure that the right people are seeing it because of just how things get buried so much,” Maroulis says. “But I think that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t keep trying.”

Even if our internet platforms continue to atomize and degrade — like the ever-changing policies on Elon Musk’s X that seem to allow for abuse to be hurled at trans people — that doesn’t mean that the knowledge passed around on tour will stop disseminating. In fact, it’s the opposite, Maroulis says. Selling T-shirts and raising money is only one part of the equation when people on tour are dedicated to sharing resources aimed at helping their community. Sure, those same resources can be shared through videos aimed at trans people seeking information about accessing transition care, say, on Instagram, but it lacks the human connection that meeting at a show generates, they say. 

As more and more bands work to harness the energy from Liberation Weekend, they’re remembering how important music can be as a unifying force, especially in more conservative areas of the country where bands don’t always tour. Tilley Komorny, the guitarist for band Home Is Where, grew up on the northeast coast of Florida, an area with an unfriendly reputation toward transgender people. After getting involved in her local DIY scene at the age of 15, she realized playing music could create tangible help for people in her community. Komorny worked to organize local trans-led music festivals to help pay for friends’ surgeries or name changes. During the covid-19 pandemic, they had to take these festivals online. 

Seeing just how many more people they were reaching, Komorny cites the online community she had access to as helping Home Is Where break out and connect them with more resources to organize more support for trans people on tour. Those connections made in that period were important for the band as they are preparing to head out on their largest tour to date with the opportunity to reach more people than ever.

The band works with the Campaign for Southern Equality, donating proceeds from every ticket sale to the group’s trans relocation fund, what she calls an “easily accessible form of social responsibility” that any band can draw from.

Coming from Liberation Weekend, Komorny says the biggest lesson she learned for Home Is Where is to prioritize local vendors to table at shows on their next tour. That may require a little more legwork before actually setting out to play these shows, but the potential of exposing crowds to smaller organizations with resources that may be available in their own backyard is worth it.

After building all that energy that the band has managed to harness online, now is the time to convert that potential into actual organization, Komorny adds.

“If you can get people who are stoked to go to a show, and then they see that there’s all this other stuff there that’s a part of the culture, that’s ideal,” she says.

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.” 

This is the kind of trans coming-of-age narrative that is routinely retold as a horror story — a young person, lured out into the deep waters of the internet without their parents’ permission or knowledge, there to be corrupted by Gender Ideology. In his infamous 2013 Atlantic cover story “When Children Say They’re Trans,” Jesse Singal approvingly quoted parents who had cut off their children’s internet access to put a stop to their gender questioning. In her 2020 book Irreversible Damage, Abigail Shrier cheerfully shares the story of a teenager who was “cured” by being sent to do hard labor on a farm without internet access: “The physical labor helped her [sic] reconnect to her body, and the lack of internet allowed her to leave her trans identity behind,” Shrier writes, cheerfully slapping parentally enforced “her” pronouns over the child’s now-erased “trans identity.” 

But Nico Lang, author of the bestselling American Teenager: How Trans Kids Are Surviving Hate and Finding Joy in a Turbulent Era, says that trans kids aren’t especially internet-pilled; this is just how younger people socialize. “It’s a very Gen Z thing, that so much of their social life is just online these days,” Lang tells me. “I’ve been hearing that from a lot of parents that I work with — that the way that their kids find community isn’t just through school. It’s the friends that they make from playing Fortnite together. Some of their best friends will be people that they’ve never met who live halfway across the country. I think that’s just become particularly normalized.”

When adults evolve to meet these social norms, it can be a positive thing — for example, LGBTQ+ centers are increasingly setting up youth support groups on Discord, which makes them accessible, not just to trans kids with unsupportive families but to kids from rural areas who might otherwise have to drive hours to get to their nearest meetup. 

Still, for many, the narrative about teens being seduced into a deviant lifestyle by the internet is hard to resist. There is increasing legal pressure to keep children away from “harmful” or “adult” online content — defined by some people as promotion of eating disorders or suicide, but by others as anything that suggests being queer or trans is okay. The UK Online Safety Act requires users to pass an age check by uploading their government IDs before they can access certain sites or platform features. In the US, KOSA would make web platforms potentially liable for “harm to minors” including depression and anxiety, compulsive usage, or sexual abuse — all of which can be real dangers online, but which LGBTQ+ advocates argue will be used to attack queer and trans content and communities. The fact that KOSA is backed by the ultra-conservative Heritage Foundation — which has claimed that social media access “turns kids trans” (“the spike in teens using social media and identifying as transgender is no mere coincidence”) — lends credence to those fears. 

If implemented, KOSA could result in a chilling effect wherein platforms are incentivized to ban or censor trans users. FOSTA-SESTA, which made it possible to sue platforms for enabling “sex trafficking,” led to very few lawsuits — but many sites, like Tumblr, pulled down or banned all sexual content in advance to prevent the lawsuits that might happen. At worst, we could end up replicating the Online Safety Act and instituting mandatory ID checks for internet users. 

Teenagers would obviously fail the ID check in most cases — and this can overlap in disastrous ways with other anti-trans attacks. Taylor*, a trans student living in the UK, says he can no longer use DMs on social media sites like Bluesky without verifying his age. The biggest impact, he says, is to DIY hormone networks, which have sprung up in the absence of adequate trans care, including an indefinite ban on all puberty blockers for trans kids.

“This’ll obviously affect trans kids more because their only option for puberty blockers is to do an ‘unofficial’ route,” Taylor says. “So if they’re cut off from social media they have little hope of finding good info.” The DIY groups he works with are trying to encourage their users to switch to Signal, an encrypted app. 

Again: Trying to find an escape hatch from your family or small town is a universal teenage problem. Most teenagers, including the trans ones, will grow up and build lives where they can be themselves both on- and offline. But not everyone who uses the internet to express their trans identity is a teenager, and not all of them will come out eventually. Not all of them can afford the risk. 

“I have, to date, lost four jobs, two volunteer roles, one school program, countless friends, and every family member save for one — all because of the instances where I have come out,” says Isaiah.* 

Isaiah’s early internet history sounds like a lot of trans kids’. He used male names and pronouns for online roleplay and video games. (“It usually fell apart,” he tells me, “not because of the gender, but because I was 13 trying to pretend I was like 17 for cool points.”) He joined communities like DeviantArt where he was able to avoid the question of gender, and where he made his first trans friend. He absorbed Tumblr discourse and lurked on Reddit’s trans advice boards, and eventually came out as a trans guy on Tumblr in 2012 or 2013, around the same time that Lowell was having his own epiphanies on that platform. 

In a typical narrative, you would expect this to be the part where Isaiah came out to friends and family or started hormone therapy. Both of those things did happen — but then, an escalating series of social and professional catastrophes, including multiple job losses, forced him back into the closet. 

“I learned at a point that it was not worth it to keep doing that to myself, at least not for now,” he tells me in an email. “I have faced violence and job loss at every attempt to come out more publicly. So I work as a woman, and live online as a man.” He doesn’t do anything different than most people — he reads advice on Reddit, drops in on all-trans Discords, updates his social media profiles — but he does it as himself. 

Isaiah maintains strict data hygiene to make sure the two streams don’t cross. Online, he avoids revealing any potentially identifying information, including selfies or even his line of work. Offline, it’s easier — no one knows his real name, so searching for the female name he uses at work doesn’t turn up anything trans-related. “I keep the separation by using different names and sharing different lives, basically,” he says.

But if the US adopts KOSA-style legislation in the near future, Isaiah may no longer be able to post on the social media sites that are the only places he can live as himself. He may be labeled “harmful” or “adult content” simply for existing. And, if the US adopts UK-style age checks, he may have to upload a government ID — featuring the “female” name and face he has carefully kept separate from his internet presence — to access those sites at all. 

Age verification could create a whole archive of closeted trans users whose identities are at risk of exposure through a security breach — and we know how high the risk is, because elsewhere on the internet, it’s already happened. Evan Greer, director of the digital human rights organization Fight for the Future, points to the ill-fated Tea app, created for women to share information about men who were abusive or “really shitty on a date.” The app verified users’ gender through methods like government IDs and face scans. But in July, the database of women’s faces — including IDs — was hacked and posted to 4chan, thus outing Tea users both to their own personal abusers and to any guy on the Internet who had an ax to grind with #MeToo. “We now have misogynists that are stalking and harassing all the women that uploaded these reports,” Greer says. “And this is exactly what we’re talking about doing to the entire internet.” 

This is all happening at a time when the costs of being out are higher than ever, on both sides of the Atlantic. In the US, the Trump administration — along with more or less the entire Republican Party — has targeted the trans community with inflammatory rhetoric, driving up the ambient hatred in the atmosphere as state laws and executive orders seek to restrict our rights. In the UK, institutional capture has progressed so far that even the nominally progressive Labour Party backs initiatives to restrict trans rights. 

When times are hostile, queer people typically seek more privacy and anonymity — and that’s precisely what they are losing. “I would not share my ID to access online spaces. Period,” Isaiah tells me. He also wouldn’t take a selfie or allow AI to perform a facial scan to verify his age. If those age or ID checks became the norm, Isaiah says, “I suppose I would just be my woman self 100% of the time, and no longer have a safe space to be me anymore.”

The choice of living a safe trans life would no longer be available. Isaiah, and the other trans people in his position, would either have to retreat back into the closet or engage on an internet that is just as dangerous, or more dangerous, than the offline world. 

The internet of 2025 is already far from private. Your DMs can be used as evidence in a courtroom; Facebook can out you to your boss; your phone can give the cops a record of your movements. The model of “surveillance capitalism,” a term popularized by author Shoshana Zuboff, means that vanishingly few of us — transgender or cisgender, queer or straight — have any real secrets. 

Yet these threats are scarcely understood as such outside of the communities most impacted by them, and internet censorship initiatives like KOSA still receive bipartisan support. Censoring queer information online doesn’t register as an attack on civil liberties in the same way that removing queer books from a public library does, and many politicians are unwilling to go on the record as opposing the “safety” of “children.” 

“Even some progressive Democrats, who have frequently, at least in words, said that they stand with the trans community, said that they’re gonna stand up and fight for our right to gender-affirming care, to express ourselves, for drag shows, [against] book bans, have gone along with these misguided age verification laws,” Greer says. “They’ve been sold the false idea that this is the only way to protect young people from the harms of these platforms.” 

Yet even in this heavily online age, the biggest and most violent threats children face overwhelmingly come from inside the home — including, for trans children, the violence inflicted by non-affirming parents. The internet can be a lifeline: a way to access support, and to know that the outside world is not unilaterally on the abuser’s side. 

“Many trans people don’t necessarily get to live as ourselves offline, and cutting us off from the internet could be a death sentence,” Isaiah tells me. “I’m confident it is intended to be.” 

* The names of some interviewees have been changed to protect their privacy.