I found something I wrote three years ago on Facebook about my trans experiences on Tumblr for about the first five years of coming out and starting transition things vs. Twitter later. A few bits cut out:
For years and years now everything I read was dominated by vague generalities, generic platitudes, no-context uncaptioned photos, and generic lists passed around.
And now suddenly I'm seeing people describing experiences pretty much exactly the same as mine. People are nervous about the same things I was nervous about, which is sort of reassuring. Excited about the same things.
I'm honestly kind of puzzled by it. Is there somehow some major difference in social norms between the two major social media sites with names that start with t? Like on the one t-something-dot-com everyone just says vague general things and on the other one the thing to write is "today, I tried this thing and this is what happened?"
At the time I assumed people were so vague and general on Tumblr out of a concern for privacy. Looking back it might have been in large part people who were totally closeted and had no actual experiences to talk about. Over time I did see a few people actually state they had no or very few experiences. It did pretty quickly become clear that nearly everyone trans on Tumblr was assigned female at birth, though no one would ever say so, and after a while I came to think they mostly forgot that it's even possible for people assigned male to be trans. It was common practice to write "everybody" when talking about something that pretty clearly half of us were not going to experience. I never got totally used to being excluded from "everybody" and would be puzzled reading about things "everybody" will experience that I sure didn't before realizing that "everybody" specifically means not me on Tumblr.
I found more assigned male people in a few weeks on Twitter than I had in five years on Tumblr, and it was amazing to suddenly see all these people writing things that very much like my experiences. I've already found trans women on cohost, at least that's very different from Tumblr.
Really, I was just starting to do transition things and looking for advice/warnings/information and didn't get any, and further couldn't really tell if people were being very private, were ideologically committed to assigned gender and passing being bullshit concepts they were refusing to mention, or were just used to all their friends also being AFAB and so casually used "everybody" without thinking that trans women also exist. Possibly I was looking for transition advice from totally closeted people. Who can say? I poked back into Tumblr a year ago and actually ran right into one of the rare posts from someone assigned male at birth who was, as I'd seen a few times over the years, complaining about being totally excluded from everything. So I guess it never changed.
