Transphobia and The Media

I listened to a podcast episode titled Transphobia Is a Gateway Prejudice from the podcast Gender Journeys.

There was a researcher who created a tik tok account and only followed and interacted with transphobic tik tok content. The purpose of this study was to see how the tik tok algorithm would push future content. It was initially believed that the “For You Page” would just be full of transphobic content. But in reality, the algorithm was pushing more right-wing content, like racism, misogyny, anti-semitism and nazi symbols, etc. and eventually calls to action and violence against these marginialized groups.

This shows how transphobia is connected to other forms of hate and violence against minority groups. As some will say, all forms of hate are intertwined and stem from the same place. This also shows how dangerous social media can be, with the easy ability to spread hate and transphobic ideologies.