The Development of Social Media (and my identity) in the Mid-2000s – Max
My name is Max and I’ve been a sexual health outreach worker at Birmingham LGBT for the past 4 years. I grew up just off the back of Section 28, so my education of and exposure to LGBTQ+ identities was limited to what few nuggets of wisdom I gleaned through conversation with my peers at school. There were very few people that were comfortably out, and fewer still that were in the same social circles as me. There was little representation in the media, and what there was tended to rely on tired tropes and stereotypes.
At that time, social media was in its infancy; we were just starting to migrate from MySpace to Facebook, and I first discovered YouTube when my friend sent me a link to a Slipknot song on MSN messenger. This was an incredibly important time for my development, and suddenly a wealth of information on the internet was accessible and at my fingertips (for two hours a night on the family computer).
I felt disjointed and out of place for a lot of my former years and couldn’t quite put my finger on why. I put it down to puberty and secondary school woes, but still this feeling persisted in the back of my mind. I had an online friend in California that I had met through a music forum a few years previous, and she posted a blog about her new boyfriend. I checked his profile and read his most recent blog post and he talked about being transgender; “FTM”. This was an epiphany for me: I didn’t realise that transitioning to male was a concept that even existed, let alone a real possibility. Suddenly this put my entire identity into question, and I had to start the long and arduous process of confronting and unpacking years of repression, and I felt so incredibly alone.
I would love to go back and see the internet again as it was in the mid-2000s; there were a lot less barriers to information, and social media didn’t seem as insidious as it can be now. At that time there were very few trans people documenting anything to do with transition on YouTube, but I poured over those videos with curiosity and wonder. Finally, I found people like me. I joined an online forum for other trans men and felt relief. I wasn’t afraid of asking questions and talking and putting myself out there because we were still a relatively unknown community; there were no opinions from broader society about us, and I didn’t feel the need to heavily moderate or curate my online presence as I do now.
The internet, and social media, are powerful – then and now. A significant portion of our collective contemporary history is spread out over decades online, for better or worse. I would not have come to terms with my identity when I did had I not had access to the internet, social media and the troves of information; historical, anecdotal and biographical. There are still tight communities of trans people sharing resources, producing zines and mobilising for collective action, and it is as important as ever that our history continues to be documented and preserved.
