Building from previous researchers' conceptions of queer technologies, we consider what it means to be a trans technology. This research study draws from interviews with Tumblr transition bloggers (n = 20), along with virtual ethnography, trans theory, and trans technological histories, using Tumblr as a case study to understand how social technologies can meet the needs of trans communities. Tumblr supported trans experiences by enabling users to change over time within a network of similar others, separate from their network of existing connections, and to embody (in a digital space) identities that would eventually become material. Further, before 2018 policy changes banning "adult" content, Tumblr upheld policies and an economic model that allowed erotic content needed for intersectional trans community building. We argue that these aspects made Tumblr a trans technology. We examine themes of temporality, openness, change, separation, realness, intersectionality, and erotics, along with considering social media platforms' policies and economic models, to show how trans technologies can provide meaningful spaces for trans communities.
In this article, I use queer ethnographic and autoethnographic methods to tell a story of how white trash trans people in the Deep South imagine futures amid a haunted colonial landscape. In conversation with feminist and decolonial theoretical frameworks of haunting and potential history, I show that trauma narratives haunt trans people in Louisiana and that trans trauma narratives are an artifact of settler colonialism. In contrast, I situate stories of trans people in the Deep South as multifaceted radical potential histories. [trans, autoethnographies, imagined futures, decolonial feminism, white trash] "At no point did my therapist ask me what I liked about being trans. This sent me into a really negative, haunted state. I was constantly thinking about and haunted by my trauma." -Stephanie
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