Understanding Transfeminine Disposability on Bluesky

Coauthors: Erika Melder and Michael Ann DeVito

Bluesky, a novel social networking platform, offers a space with valuable community ties for transfeminine individuals. At the same time, though, these communities are not free of intracommunity conflict, particularly conflict predicated on a transmisogynistic politics of disposability. We conduct a grounded theory interview study with 13 transfeminine Bluesky users, finding that transfeminine individuals experience attacks predicated on their disposability that are primarily driven by a distributed, consensus-free folklore that turns ordinary users into monsters worthy of all-out attack. We frame this folklore as an emergent phenomenon in a complex system, resulting from extant dynamics on the platform that replicate those seen in society writ large. In order to mitigate the harms done by the circulation of this folklore, we conclude by discussing opportunities for tools that more effectively support bottom-up moderation that affords for nuance and contextualization.