Politics is always antagonistic and tribalistic. But social media puts us in isolated information bubbles. We're not just disagreeing on politics. We're disagreeing on reality in very fundamental ways.
On YouTube, there's a right-wing extremism funnel. You start by watching a college student ranting about how dumb feminism is. It's wrong, but it's not especially sinister. And then, three suggested videos later, you're hearing about why we need a white ethno-state to save the race from a third-world invasion.
It's going to take me less time to wreck Ben Shapiro than it took me to curl my hair.
I carry with me from my male upbringing a sense that femininity is forbidden. So when I appear on YouTube with forty butterflies glued to my body and glitter all over my face, I have a sense that I'm getting away with something I'm not supposed to. I'm being decadent. I'm enjoying a forbidden pleasure. And that's fun, and it's funny.
I try to swim against the current as much as possible when it comes to the tribalism that defines the way people do politics on social media, and I try to present myself as an individual and humanistic voice. I'm interested in people, not just factions.
In grad school, I led a bit of a double life. I don't mean gender-wise - I just mean intellectually.
I've been harassed. I've been stalked. I've had every public pre-transition photo of me compiled alongside my deadname with the purpose of never letting me be my true gender.
I watch a lot of YouTube makeup tutorials. I also watch a lot of channels where all they do is eat inhumanly huge amounts of food. I'm trash, basically, is what I'm saying.
I dropped out of my Ph.D. philosophy program at Northwestern in the summer of 2015, in my mid-20s. I kind of had the idea of writing fiction, and so I was working on that for a year but without ever having very much success at it.
Almost as soon as I came out as trans, there was a spike in online harassment more vicious than anything I'd experienced before. It turns out there are many people who spend a good portion of their spare time making life as miserable as possible for trans people.
There's this artistic drive or something in me that impels me to sympathize with villains, but it's maybe not a great impulse as someone who wants to do activism as well.
