Only out online | The Verge

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.