How Distributed, Consensus-Free Folklore Enables 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 form of disinformation we call distributed, consensus-free (DCF) folklore. DCF folklore turns communities against users who have previously provided crucial labor to those same communities; we frame it as an networked phenomenon that results from extant dynamics and affordances on the platform. In order to mitigate the harms done by the circulation of this folklore, we conclude by discussing opportunities for tools to more effectively support bottom-up moderation that affords for nuance and contextualization.