I don't expect my perspective to be rocked sideways early on a Monday morning by some joker called Barry, but here we are. I don't think he knew he was talking about the trans experience either, so perhaps the joke's on all of us. Anyway, let's do this before the thoughts run out of my ears.
Barry, of Barry's Economics on YouTube is a successful comedian who (rightly) took Steven Bartlett to task in a video taking apart the fake promises of self improvement gurus. When Bartlett unexpectedly responded it led to a new video that examines para-social relationships, our sense of community and the phenomena of the 'constructed self'. Yup, a minor exchange in the comments section resulted in a fascinating dive into psychological research, studies of air-stewardesses and celebrity breakdowns. It's worth watching, but I'm making you read this first. Link at the bottom of the article. Stay with me.
Two things really struck me that were nothing to do with either self-improvement or air-stewardesses. A huge part of the trans and gender non-conforming experience is centred around social acceptance. We're an identifiable minority that has often grown up with conflicting information about how we want to behave and be seen. We have to try to fit that into our family and community lives, and often have to unlearn and relearn social roles and habits as we develop our identity. So when recent studies talk about the emotional labour various cisgender groups perform to construct public personas, I suspect a lot of trans people will recognise something they do, or had to do to be part of their community.
On top of that, though, there is the wider question of how we learn those roles and where we look to for acceptance. This second strand is particularly relevant to trans people who have only relatively recently been provided community they can relate to through the dystopian magic of social media. The internet has been a blessing and a curse in finally allowing us to discover people who 'think like us' and share our experiences and feelings. When Barry starts tugging at the strands of community sizes, people we relate to, para-social leadership and role models, he's mainly focused on the weird impact of Bartlett and Jennifer Aniston on millions of people (and vice versa). I suspect he's unaware that minority groups like trans people experience this in a uniquely distilled format.
Millions of years of evolution have produced brains that are designed around our real world communities. In particular, we're physically wired to keep track of up to about 150 people in our community group. That reflects the natural size that villages, neighbourhoods and social connections reached before some idiot invented radio, tv and then the internet. Within the 150 or so people we 'know', we identify leaders, colleagues, enemies and threats as well as role models and supportive friends. Our brains physically keep space amongst our neurons for each of those people, so just seeing a picture or hearing their name produces a response - trust, fear, warmth or caution. This has worked for millenia to help us figure out who to follow and who to avoid.
If you're trans though, there's a problem. Between just 0.5% and 1% of the population are estimated to be trans - and an even smaller portion of those are 'visibly trans' (out to their community). That means that for the majority of trans people, their immediate community is likely to hold no other trans members. No role models, no comparators, no shared learnings. Things get better if you live in a large city that might support trans and queer spaces, but these aren't accessible for many especially in the early stages of coming out.
This is where online communities step in. And where things become para-social. We turn to YouTube, forums, social media to find our tribe - and the miracle of our times is that we find them. Streamers, vloggers, people posting about their everyday lives. People just like us. Genuinely, this is a wonderful thing. We learn from them, feel validated by them and feel accepted for who we are. As Barry points out, our brains that evolved for millenia to deal with people we meet in our village do not distinguish between someone we see on screen and someone we're physically talking to. We get the same emotional and even physical responses from a video of someone as we do from talking to them in person. That's where things get complicated. The little people in our computers are as real to us as the people we live and work with. Our brains make physical space for them, and that space has the same 150-ish person limit for tracking members of our 'community'.
For trans and other minorities, that means we can end up with a 'split brain' - the community we have in the real world, and the community we are part of online. We get the same emotional value from both of them, and from the earliest days of the internet, trans communities provided vital support, education and understanding for anyone who found them. But... the way social media works is not like a village of a few hundred people. It doesn't connect you to the nearest available gender warrior. Instead, it concentrates attention on the most vocal, visible and 'successful' people in a community. We're in a village of a few million people where a relative handful are appointed as representative of the whole group.
Suddenly, a significant portion of the voices we turn to for validation, support and role models are shared with thousands or tens of thousands of others. The relationship is para-social. They still have the same ape brains as the rest of us, still limited to tracking about 150 people, and still trying to manage social signals that are usually confined to a village. We can name them - prominent YouTubers, brilliant activists, hilarious streamers - but in our masses we are largely background noise to them. Worse still in this age of division and aggression towards LGBTQ+ people, they are only able to process us as potential threats. Was that comment on their last post angry or sarcastic? Did it disagree with their viewpoint? Is it an attack or a challenge? Are they going to have to manage a pile-on, or defend themselves?
Minority communities then end up with the problem that the people who represent them are gifted a kind of celebrity status that isolates them from that same community. They're not responding to the same social signals we are any more, and they're forced into compartmentalising their lives. They're being trans in the real world, and trans online. Performing an identity about performing an identity. That is a lot of emotional labour. It also means that we're not getting the 'full fat' validation or support that we seek from our community. We give (or, the algorithm gives) the prominent voices priority time on our newsfeeds when by definition the relationship is essentially one-way. They can tell us we're doing trans things just right, but it carries the weight of a bad self-improvement guru repeating wellness mantras. In turn they're pushed into performative role-modelling, hoping to keep follower counts high and imagining that it might lead to one or two real human connections.
This is not a criticism of the amazing people who genuinely capture the experiences (good and bad) of being trans in the world. It's recognising that even early radio shows broke our social brains, and social media dials that up to eleven. I think minority groups do get real value from being able to create virtual communities. At the same time, quite a few of our 'friends' are not really friends, but co-opted representatives. We're learning how to exist from people who don't know we exist, and who are peforming a part of their lives publicly for us. That's a strange relationship, and undoubtedly skews our idea of what is 'normal' in our 'abnormal' existences.
Weirdly though, the exact same disconnect is also a part of the trans experience for many of us. How many trans people have grown up feeling they have one internal identity, but publicly performing a different persona dictated by their assigned gender at birth? The act of compartmentalising, or diassociating between a public self and private self is not at all unusual. We already 'put on a face', or later have to relearn our authentic selves, so interacting with people who are doing the same thing just to be visible online is perhaps more natural to us than cis communities.
The question has to be how healthy this is for minority communities, and how healthy it is for those who are pushed (or who fight) to be prominent voices? We have a kind of second hand support from people who are unable to meaningfully process the firehose of social information being thrown at them. Perhaps we need to figure out new ways to build communities online.
Here's Barry's Video, with study references, statistics, and a lot more jokes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dqh17U3tymU