A peek into the influence of social media and data science on transgender moral panic (chronological order)
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We looked inside some of the posts by panicbodies and here's what we found interesting.
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Notes Per Post
13
Likes Per Post
12
Reblog Per Post
1
Reply Per Post
0
Time Between Posts
2 minutes
Number of Posts By Type
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17
Last Seen Tumblr Blogs
Fun Fact
Tumblr has been providing a Korean-language service since 2013.
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Ericka Hart's post is in discussion with 'Bodies that matter' -- whose bodies matter in our matrix of domination?
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Matt Bernstein's post is a reminder of the inextricability of intersectional identities. Adding to this is the discussion of bathroom bans in the White House, where Sarah McBride, the first out trans person elected to congress, posted that she was "not here to fight about bathrooms" and that she would follow the bathroom ban. However, online users made a point that McBride will have her own private bathroom, leaving any other trans people who work in the U.S. Capitol without a private washroom to deal with the consequences due to lower status.
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Metaphors in my work!
The Cyborg is a metaphor in my work! Think of it as a stage of evolution between humans and machines.
The Cyborg is used in my work because it is genderless.
The ultimate goal is to free society from the categories of race, gender, and class!
Overall this would create a world where everyone is equal and receives equal opportunity!
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A misguided focus on the perceived threat of transgender people distracts from "real" threats that already exist, such as pervasive violence against women enacted by cisgender men.
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The political impact of Donald Trump's fierce advocacy for cisheterosexism persists.
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In 1977 in response to a question about whether politicians should be looking in the rearview mirror, Marshall McLuhan suggested that, in relation to widespread use of television,
"one of the peculiar things about the effects of media on politics is that parties and policies become very unimportant and the image of the politician takes on a tremendous new importance."
McLuhan continues to describe how with the development of television, societal interest has shifted from policies or party to a focus on the individual candidate and more specifically, the candidates "charisma"; and "charisma means looking like a lot of other people".
In 2024, this begs the question...how does Donald Trump resemble society? Or, how does Donald Trump convince society that he resembles them? With over 95 million followers on 'X' at the time of this post, Trump has the ability to leverage social media against transgender folks (and perhaps even more often, migrants) in increasingly threatening ways.
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In their paper focused on his initial term titled 'President Trump’s transgender moral panic', Christopher Pepin-Neff and Aaron Cohen discuss how Trump functions as a moral entrepreneur:
"Trump’s use of tweets as a vehicle to deliver a moral panic [...] is not simply an agenda-setting device, but rather a policy tool to spread exclusion, fear, untrue stereotypes, and second-class citizenship in ways that boost transphobia and mobilize transphobic extremism."
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Important to the point, key agents of moral panic per Stanley Cohen include:
Mass Media
Moral Entrepreneurs
Societal Control Culture
The Public
However, each of these agents is transformed by new digital technology. As James P Walsh describes,
"Historically, panics require the mass media to generate sufficient concern and indignation. Social media expand the pathways of panic production. Additionally, as architectures of amplification, their structural features can be commandeered to promote moral contests that are surreptitious, automated, and finely calibrated in their transmission and targeting."
Walsh also notes that "[social media] also appear to enhance the spread of information pollution, with scholarship revealing that, whether transmitted by algorithms or human agents, ‘misinformation, polarizing, and conspiratorial content’ not only ‘diffuse[s] significantly further, faster, [and] deeper’ on social media but also, during the final days of the 2016 election, represented the most popular informational content on Facebook, leading many to speculate that it played a decisive role in Trump’s victory.", demonstrating the power that social media and moral panic crusades have.
Image posted to reddit by u/profound_whatever
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Can data for queer lives count the countless?
In 'Data for queer lives: How LGBTQ gender and sexuality identities challenge the norms of demographics', authors Bonnie Ruberg and Spencer Ruelos describe how "Demographic data, through which individuals are categorized and counted, plays a particularly important role in setting the terms for identity. It therefore represents a key site of intervention for discussions of data and social justice." Throughout their paper, Ruberg and Ruelos describe flaws in the collection of demographics as it relates to folks who identify as members of the 2SLGBTQ+ community and consider new ways in which to include these historically unaccounted for identities.
However, as they note and as Keyes also describes in different words, "[2S]LGBTQ[+] people often understand their own sexual and gender identities as overlapping, incomplete, or in flux", and thus it is burdensome to try and categorize, count, or analyze the data which is not easily sorted or counted. In addition, attempts to include these identities only legitimizes them, something that Keyes suggests goes against the goals of the state in the first place.
This challenge of counting queer folks is demonstrated in Canada's first attempt to include gender identity on a census, whereby Egale writes,
"Notably, Statistics Canada did not include “intersex” as an option for the “sex assigned at birth” question in the 2021 census. They argued: “for reasons related to the small size of the intersex population and the challenges in identifying intersex people, Statistics Canada does not currently collect specific information on intersex people in Canada”.
This is in line with what Keyes is rather resolute about: "Attempts to negotiate and compromise with those systems (and the state that oversees them) tend to just legitimize the state, while leaving the most vulnerable among us out in the cold."
Keyes continues "...as currently constituted, data science is fundamentally premised on taking a reductive view of humanity and using that view to control and standardize the paths our lives can take, and it responds to critique only by expanding the degree to which it surveils us."
Ruberg and Ruelos echo this sentiment, "at the same time we encourage researchers to design demographic questions in ways that are more socially just, we recognize that queer thinking itself challenges the very notion that categorizations of identity, however nuanced, can ever be complete or “correct”. They continue, "Queer data stands as a challenge to the underlying, heteronormative and cisnormative logics that currently structure notions of demographics and data more broadly."
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