The Trans Content 80-20 Rule - Reissue

On algorithmic media, TERF empathy, and the trans experience.

For Taurus Season, I’m reposting some of my older essays that I think deserve more love. This one from last summer especially pertinent now, as trans rights are being eroded and, as Lily Alexandre outlines in her brand new piece, many trans people are reassessing their visibility. Trans people spent 10 years in the spotlight, and look where it got us! It’s time for cis people to view our experiences more critically.

This was also a paid post when it was originally released, so if you want to read more essays like this in the future, consider becoming a paid member!

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The Pareto Principle, also known as the “80-20 rule”, states that 80% of outputs are caused by 20% of inputs. For example, 80% of a company's revenue might be generated by 20% of its customers (your most loyal customers end up spending the most money, etc.) It’s not necessarily a mathematically “proven” rule, but it’s a valuable idea because it’s worth remembering that not all inputs are weighted equally.

I think about principles like these a lot as a creator (and of course, consumer) of content, particularly one who offers written work in exchange for money. I have tens of thousands of followers on TikTok, but only a few hundred have gone onto also follow me on Substack. I put out dozens of videos per year, but only a couple of them ever “go viral”.

More so than raw numbers though, I think a lot about the types of content that “go viral”, or even get made in the first place, because of the incentive structures of the platforms on which that content is hosted. Which would attract more success in The Algorithm: a 7-minute-long nuanced perspective about gender from an experienced feminist, or a Gender War rage-baiting podcast interview clip?

In fact, I believe we can apply similar principles to content creation and consumption within specific communities. I have this hypothesis that 80% of content made by trans people is made by the top 20th percentile of trans experience. This is incredibly important for cisgender people who watch content from transgender creators to recognize, and here’s why.

It’s old hat to point out how social media isn’t real life. As a direct confirmation of the Pareto Principle, 10% of Twitter users are responsible for 92% of tweets, and only about 20% of Americans use Twitter at all. As a result, online discourse does not reflect the conversations about politics that take place in the real world. And of course, we all know that social media platforms are designed to make us angry by prioritizing “high engagement” (watch time, likes/dislikes, “Angry” reacts, number of comments, number of shares/saves, etc.) over other metrics. But it goes deeper than that: even within the social media bubble, the types of trans people you end up seeing in your social media feeds do not—and will never—represent our community as a whole.

Unlike people from other marginalized groups—e.g., people of color, who are born with their skin color and surrounding sociopolitical context—trans people aren’t necessarily “born into” their marginalized identity. I’m not talking about the more philosophical discussion of whether people are “born trans”, but the factual reality that many of us begin our transition not as babies or toddlers, but as teens, young adults, or even later. The phase in your life in which you transition—in childhood, in your early adulthood, or later in life—heavily dictates your experience of transition and what issues you consider most important. No group is a monolith—we definitely can’t expect every woman to have a thoughtful, feminist take on gender—but the trans community is particularly diverse for this very reason.

A person who transitioned later in life would never have to think about puberty blockers, and may even believe that puberty blockers are unethical; meanwhile, access to these interventions is of upmost importance to a trans teen. Similarly, a trans teen of relative privilege who hasn’t seen the worst this world has to offer might think that correct pronoun usage is a life-or-death matter, while someone more than five years into their transition could pretty easily brush off a casual misgendering (and would probably think of systemic issues like housing insecurity or employment discrimination as more pressing). A trans woman who spent 30+ years living as a cis man with all the associated privileges might have more pre-existing biases about what it means to be a woman compared to a trans woman who transitioned at age nine and has basically experienced misogyny all her life. At the same time, a younger person who came out recently and is now having trouble in the dating market might overstate the harm of “genital preferences”, holding big opinions about how they’re “inherently transphobic”, meanwhile someone who’s been out for a long time and has successfully dated several people may eventually come to the position of “maybe so, but who cares? If someone doesn’t want to date me, it’s not worth my time to try to change that. There’s plenty of fish in the sea.”

Reporting as someone who’s now seven years into her transition and can trace back her old, bad takes in video form, the length of time you’ve been living life as a trans person drastically changes your outlook on life, your political worldview, and even the types of issues that you think are more important to talk about on a public platform.

Even still, there are more factors than raw “time spent as trans”. That may not even be the best metric: there could be huge amounts of time between realizing you need to transition (but still mostly presenting as cis to the world), taking some steps to transition (like coming out to close friends), and going “full time” as a woman; if you understand yourself as trans at age 16, but never actually begin your transition until age 23, and those 7 years in the closet will severely alter your brain chemistry. There’s also a stark difference between someone who lived for years as a feminine gay man before eventually transitioning into a trans woman who primarily dates men, and someone who made the more jarring switch from cishet man to trans lesbian. And of course, the political context in which you transitioned will also have an effect on you: Did you transition in the 70s when the act was unheard of? In the 90s when trans people could only be seen on Jerry Springer? In the window of 2014-2016 (post-“tipping point” but pre-Trump, when a trans-inclusive future seemed the most possible)? Post-Trump? Do you live in a red state or a blue state? Do you live within the imperial core or not? Have you ever been incarcerated? All of these factors might influence your perspective on issues such as passing, going stealth, disclosure, the use of puberty blockers, the pursuit of experimental interventions like microdosing testosterone, the validity of non-binary identities, the value of media representation, and more.

To summarize, the following factors dictate your experience of transness and thus your political positions on trans issues…

• Your current age

• The age at which you realized you needed to transition

• The time you spent in the closet

• The time since living “full time” in your new gender

• The political context during which all of this happened

• Any time spent as an out queer person before your transition

• Your sexuality, past and present

• The types of transphobia you’ve experienced, and from who/what systems

• Whether you ever detransitioned, for what reason you did so, and the length of time you did so

• Probably more things that I haven’t even mentioned (it’s a Saturday afternoon as I write this)

All of that is before considering race, disability, citizenship status, and the myriad of other intersecting factors that leftists and liberals normally consider to be politically relevant. So yeah, the trans community is far from a monolith.

This brings us to some important questions for the consumer of trans content, especially cisgender people who are still learning how to grasp these nuances: When watching a video, how do you know what your presenter’s “experience” of transness is? How can you be sure that your presenter is an authority on trans issues at all? And how can you curate your feeds to account for these myriad of experiences? Our community currently lacks the language to clearly outline all of these contextual factors, other than spelling out our whole life story (sometimes we put the date we started HRT in our social media bios, but this is mostly done by the freshly-out.)

If you’re not careful, The Algorithm will shrink your world into the smallest, most reductive version of itself, with the same two-dimensional heroes and villains fighting the same battles week after week. In my anecdotal experience, it seems like the vast majority of trans people who post on social media are people who are relatively newly-out. Who else would be called to post about the novelty of experiences like starting hormones, shopping for gender-affirming clothes for the first time, or comparing your current (hot) self to your past self in “transition timelines”? To be clear, I’m not saying that people who are newly out shouldn’t be posting; it’s their life, and most of this is good fun. I’m just seeing this phenomenon where the perspectives of more experienced trans people are being diluted by those who are less experienced, since the less-experienced are more likely to produce content that’s preferred by social media algorithms, from the apolitical posts of “hot people looking hot” to the easily digestible “look at what this silly transphobe said about me!” to the reductive and inflammatory Bad Takes™. In the same way that people who watch a few movies per year have less refined taste in film than people who watch dozens of movies per year, and thus are bored to death of tropes, “older” trans people are a lot less likely to discuss the myriad of topics on the Trans Internet that get stale once you’ve seen them for years in a row: the validity of neopronouns, the “cringe trans people who make us look bad”, assimilationism vs being your authentic self in lieu of cis acceptance, and most of all, TERFs (trans exclusionary radical feminists).

Why is so much content made by trans people about TERFs, a shrinking group of terminally-online losers with little political power? I can think of three reasons. The first is, of course, misogyny: society loves any excuse to dunk on women, and women are easier to challenge than conservative men because they have less political power and thus less ability to fight back. If you listen to TERFs, this is the only reason, but there’s more to it than that. Any good piece of media, video essays included, should build and resolve tension, introduce a problem and then solve it, Act I and Act II. You see a video titled “$456,000 Squid Game In Real Life!” and you think “huh, how did Mr Beast pull this one off?”, so you click the video to resolve that tension. Within seconds you have your answer—he has a huge studio spaces—but then comes the tension of who will win the competition (tension), and by the end of the video you have that answer (resolution). TERFs make for similarly good content by building tension (“wait, I thought that men were safe and women were unsafe, you’re telling me there are women who hate on other women??”) and then slowly unraveling that tension via thorough explanation (“ah, I see, the world IS more complicated than I thought, these women have internalized misogyny, I learned something today, yay!”)

The third reason is just as important though: ✨trans trauma✨. If we’re being totally honest with ourselves, a lot of us mock TERFs to cope with our collective hurt. When you’re really early in your transition, and you’re in that highly vulnerable state, you go out seeking support and solidarity from other women. And even if 9 out of 10 women are very supportive of you, that 1 out of 10 who lashes out at you hurts a lot. Early-transition trans women are highly affected by TERFs, even the idea of a TERF if they’ve never actually interacted with one, because they aren’t yet secure in their identity as a woman. I know this because this was my experience: I was highly concerned about what would happen if I met a TERF, I consumed a lot of content about them, and I even produced content about them earlier in my creator career.

Now, 7 years into my transition, I simply can’t be made to feel mad about TERFs. Not only am I secure in my identity, but I have a robust support network of women, including cis women, including cis lesbians. I now see that 96% of lesbians are supportive of trans people, while TERFs are in the slim minority, if they’re even lesbians at all (as it turns out, most TERFs are straight women who claim to be “defending lesbians”). Maybe I’m just lucky, but I live in Lesbianville, USA and to my knowledge I haven’t encountered a TERF once. I’ve emotionally and politically progressed to the point where I even have some empathy for TERFs: they, too, have been hurt by this oppressive gender system, and are simply reacting to that pain in a way I disagree with. While they are still out there causing untold amounts of harm, in my heart, I feel like I can be made to forgive them. We’re all just deeply traumatized creatures throwing our trauma at one another and calling it righteous, calling it politics, pretending that we’re making purely logical arguments and ignoring our own souls.

There’s a reason why this is behind a paywall: I feel like if I posted that last bit on TikTok, I would be eaten alive. How dare I show empathy towards The Enemy? I guess I would finally succeed in The Algorithm for being having the Bad Take™ and thus driving up engagement. Either that or the video would get a few hundreds views, a few comments saying “this!!” only to be left behind by an audience/algorithm that prefers shortform rage bait to longform displays of rich experience.

Combine this with the knowledge that it’s usually the skinniest, whitest, most conventionally-attractive trans people that make it to people’s social media feeds, unless you go out of your way to follow/interact with the posts of other types of trans people. What kinds of topics end up getting discussed, and which don’t? Which issues are given the highest priority? Whose voices and perspectives are not currently being represented in your feed? Who isn’t even “posting” at all, because they’re locked in a prison cell, can’t afford a smart phone, don’t speak English, or don’t feel safe coming out? These are important questions to answer, and currently my only solution for you is #ChangeYourAlgorithm by following not just as many trans people as you can, but as many types of trans people as you can.

Follow trans women of color. Follow trans elders. Follow trans people who’ve been out more than a couple years. Follow disabled trans people. Straight and queer trans people. Fat trans people. Ugly trans people. Better yet, get the heck off social media and follow some trans-led journalism outlets like TransLash and Assigned Media; lots of these places have newsletters full of thoughtful takes that aren’t beholden to an algorithm (which is what makes them so valuable). And importantly, follow trans people who don’t even post about “trans issues” at all, so that you, the cis consumer, can stop seeing us as mere political objects.

Do this for trans people—and every other marginalized group—and watch how big your world gets.

In community,

-Anna

P.S. Your weekly Koko.

Koko enjoying some wet food. That black thing in her water bowl is a piece of charcoal for water purification.