Taking refuge from the internet
I first found my way onto the internet in 1993 and immediately found it to be a wondrous thing. I suddenly could read, see, and even hear things from around the world that no library or classroom could bring to me, without the gatekeeping of librarians, teachers, or parents. I could even talk to people from around the world, in sketchy chat rooms, having conversations that weren’t possible in my small social world in my suburb of Portland, Oregon. This wonder with the internet was also bound up with my adolescent desire for independence and privacy. The internet was a kind of freedom.
The turn of the century brought a vision for a more interactive, social web, which amplified my sense of freedom. Suddenly, I wasn’t just consuming information about the world, but participating in it. I was on ICQ with friends across my university. I was on Facebook with friends and family from my past. I was buying things with strangers on eBay, selling things to strangers on Craigslist, and arguing with strangers about Bush, 9/11, and marriage equality. And twenty years later, the web is still a powerful tool: it’s a platform for my ideas, for connecting with my academic community, and for staying connected with friends and family. It is still wondrous, in a way, but a bit riskier. Seeing the world as a teener was one thing; being in it, with only the protection of some loosely enforced moderation systems and vague policies, feels exciting, but precarious.
Since I came out as transgender last September, however, this duality has been amplified. The web has become a place where my trans identity can be visibile, connecting me with community and affirming my identity. This, coupled with the pandemic, has made me more dependent on the internet to heal, find solidarity, and build affirming community. When I take breaks from it, I feel myself slip back into gender dysphoria, lost in my own negative thoughts about myself. Being around others helps who accept me not only escape those negative thoughts, but replace them with self-acceptance. And so many have shared with me how important my own visibility was to their own self-acceptance, just as others’ visibility was important to me.
But with all of that affirmation has also come unwanted communication. In the past nine months, I’ve experienced blatant sexism, overt transphobia, unwanted sexual advances from trans chasers, and numerous dogpilings on Twitter from mobs of strangers when I demand basic things like equal treatment under the law. I get dozens of emails that deadname me every day, and messages from strangers invasively asking about my past and my body. There’s a good chance that by the end of each day, I’ll have shared a bit of solidarity with other trans people and allies, but I’ll also feel ignored, attacked, and defeated by bullies. Many days end in tears.
This puts me in an information bind. When I confidently march out into the virtual world and say, “Hi, I’m me, can you see me?”, I largely get what I need from my communities, but also everything I’m trying to avoid. My Twitter feed will be full of validating and affirming things, but also hateful, transphobic things that people are writing to other people in reply. My Facebook feed will be full of solidarity and love, but also my extended family members sharing hateful, harmful, transphobic disinformation. My news feed will be full of informative, insightful journalism about social justice, but also conservative news stories, which thoughtlessly question the need for social change. Consuming the social web, and even more so producing it, inevitably brings both threat and opportunity.
This mirrors life in the real world. I’ve felt the exact same tensions trying to decide whether to go into a grocery store. Am I going to get correctly ma’amed or miss’ed, or misgendered, shaking my confidence for the rest of the day? Before the pandemic, this just happened on a larger scale, on the bus, at work, in restaurants and bars, and on the street. I remember one of my last trips before COVID-19, in New Orleans, in an Uber on the way to the airport. The driver was asking about my visit, and talking about Bourbon street, then suddenly verged into a transphobic diatribe, asking me my feelings on all of the [insert homophobic slur] in the city. Had he clocked me? Was he hitting on me? Why did he think this was an appropriate topic with a passenger? Was I safe? If I came out to him, would he be violent? At least on the internet, I can’t be killed.
All of these threats have required me to be far more thoughtful about my information filtering. If I have to be on the road, I’m more mindful about which stores I go to and which towns I travel through. On the internet, I studiously block bullies on Twitter, and defriend transphobic, homophobic family members on Facebook. I dislike stories from news sources that seem to derive from the premise of my inhumanity. I am, in essence, constructing a very carefully designed filter bubble—one that affirms me, while preventing harm.
I’m certain that others are doing the same, if for different reasons. I have friends who’ve taken long social media breaks. Some have removed themselves entirely from the social web. The news is writing about the anxieties that have come from pandemic doomscrolling. People in my trans community have written me advice on how to manage the psychological assault that comes from being out as trans online. And of course, writers and researchers have been actively discussing and investigating the effect of filter bubbles, political and otherwise, on people’s information diets, their beliefs, and political division, especially in the United States.
To some, this filtering is a threat to public discourse and democracy. The hotly debated Harper’s letter expressed concern about the fear of “cancellation” that some (empowered) intellectuals and writers face in expressing unpopular opinions online—such as whether Black or trans people are oppressed. In a debate about the letter, The New Republic’s Osita Nwenavu and Atlantic contributor Yascha Mounk, extended the debate further, one fearing the perceived chilling effect of the left’s supposed demand for total agreement, and the other arguing that whether one should be ostracized for speech depends on the substance of their speech. While the two debaters disagreed about what the consequences to debate should be, and what limits might be placed on debate, both agreed that debate is essentially good and necessary for democracy.
But neither of these positions, or the mainstream commentary on them, address the need for speech to be minimally safe and humane. My filter bubble, and more broadly, my resistance to debate about civil rights and my aggressive ostracizing of those who deny them, isn’t about limiting free speech. It’s about not crying every night, not hating myself, and not feeling safe in public, while still being able to engage with my communities. Debating how to debate online is fine, but it has to engage the potential for harm, and whether that harm is worth the discussion.
Moreover, what about my speech? Constant debate about whether I deserve equal rights, even for the most basic things, like having my name used in academic publications or having the right to use a bathroom safely, chills my speech. My time on the internet has necessarily become one of self-advocacy, which is almost always met with transphobic, dehumanizing refusal. It’s hard to want to log on every day and fight for rights when I know that most conversations are going to end with someone saying something hateful. The result of these interactions isn’t more speech, it’s my fatigue, resignation, and silence.
Too often, people in privileged positions do not see, or refuse to see, that dehumanizing speech does not advance understanding, it only serves to harm and silence marginalized groups. And how could they see it? Is it any coincidence that most people asking for open public discourse without consequences are white, cis men, who rarely suffer such harms? What possible harm could come to them from debate, aside from public censuring? In extremely rare circumstances, they might lose their job and their platform, but that won’t stop them from getting another. And more likely, they’ll keep their job, keep their platform, and just have to suffer a wave of dissent on Twitter. But Black Americans? People of color? Trans people? Immigrants? Women? Anyone that faces some kind of oppression or exclusion in our racial, gender, class, and ability hierarchies who speaks up to defend themselves from unwanted communication faces emotional, existential, sometimes mortal risks. It definitely risks their job, and dismantles whatever miniscule platform they had to begin with. I’m incredibly privileged and resilient compared to most trans women of color, and yet a stranger from Europe last week writing me an invasive email about my deadname and anatomy destroyed me; I was in tears for the rest of the day, unable to productively work. One might find it hard to imagine that having a public email address could open me to such pain; alas, it’s all too common for anyone in an oppressed position.
To some—my republican cousins, my evangelical uncles, the entirety of the conservative United States—I am a snowflake. A weak, emotional mess, too easily triggered by words, and proof that the progressive left are a bunch of sensitive, entitled socialists. What they see, from their balcony above, is someone who refuses to take responsibility for their own suffering and plight, and lazily demands that others change in order to appease their weak constitution. When they ask what would Jesus do, their apparent answer is to spit upon me, pity me, refuse to lend a hand, call me names, and reject my humanity and demand for equal treatment. Of course, what they cannot see, or refuse to see, is that I don’t have the power to stop them. Only they have that power, but they refuse to use it, because doing so would mean taking responsibility for my suffering, and they’re too weak and too selfish to take on that burden.
With the refusal by the right to accept their complicity in my oppression, and the absence of considerations of harm in the boundaries we place on free speech, filter bubbles are a necessary refuge. I will use them to isolate myself from harm when I need to. I will block and report communication from people who share hate speech. That will have the unfortunate effect of excluding me from debate that I actually want to participate in, and sheltering me from opinions that I’d like to hear. It will limit my civic and scholarly participation, and sever me from my communities and their support.
But like any refuge, my filter bubble will not be a permanent home. I will use it to stop crying, to heal, to be reassured by friends and family, and to let my heart stop racing. When I’m ready, I will come out of my filter bubble, ready to self-advocate again, reminding myself that most of the debates that harm me are not motivated by something as mundane as preserving free speech, but rather by my erasure. And I will brace myself, knowing that even those debates that come from good faith will demand that I put my pain on the table for all to see and discuss, before they are ever to be convinced of my humanity.
