YouTube:
A Space For Trans Issue-Making
A critical study about the issue-making capabilities of trans content
producers
By: Edo Druiventak Universiteit van Amsterdam—Media studies Word count 20,926 Supervisor: Ms. N. (Natalia) Sánchez Querubín Completion date: 28 June 2019 Second reader: Mr. Dr. J.A. (Jan) Teurlings Course: Research Master's Thesis
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Abstract
The current study explores how trans content producers deal, speak to and negotiate issues surrounding trans life on YouTube. The term issue here refers to unsettled matters of public concern that are discussed, legislated and coming about. Transgender life is a matter of media interpretation where media set the rules for how, by whom and when trans issues matter. However, there is often misrepresentation and under-coverage of transgender people in mainstream media. The latter is not the case on YouTube, where transgender representation is increasing. Although scholarly work provides great insights about transgender engagement with YouTube, they have neglected to answer questions such as: How are trans lives staged as matters of public concern on YouTube? Based on such staging, how may one describe the trans experience? And how is YouTube becoming a medium in which these issues are debated? This research has taken up these questions, by conducting four case studies in which YouTube´s data based on the search ‘transgender´ and the popularity marker view count was repurposed, by means of digital issue mapping and critical analytics. Thereby, this research mapped 22 trans content producers—varying from mainstream media to trans vloggers and others—that do the work of trans issue-making and shape YouTube as an issue space. Although mainstream media is dominant, YouTube empowers transgender vloggers to discuss and influence transgender agenda. Operating on YouTube as a transgender issue-maker is complex, as it involves challenges, such as visibility, agency, competition, group formations, and knowledge of exploiting content categories and formats to turn trans issues into consumable content for audiences. This study encourages further research on trans content producers’ influence on the attitudes and behaviours of audiences and on trans content producers who are marginalised and rendered invisible (e.g. trans people of colour and trans men) on YouTube.
Keywords
Transgender, transgender agenda, issue-makers, YouTube, content producers, digital issue making, critical analytics
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Table of Contents
Abstract ... 1
Table of Contents ... 2
1. The Issuefication of Trans Lives ... 4
2. Being Trans: Mainstream Media, the Internet and YouTube ... 9
2.1 Trans lives as issues in mainstream media ...9
2.2 Misrepresentation of trans lives and under-coverage in mainstream media ...11
2.3 Trans lives and the Internet: Self-representation and social organization ...13
2.4 YouTube: A place for self-education, self-commodification and visibility ...15
2.5 Trans life on YouTube ...18
2.6 Trans issue-making a matter of YouTube ...20
3. Studying Transgender Issue-Making on YouTube ... 22
3.1 Digital issue mapping ...22
3.2 Critical analytics in issue mapping ...23
3.3 Organizing issue mapping on YouTube ...24
4. Trans Content: Mainstream Media vs. Trans Vloggers ... 26
4.1 YouTube a paradise for trans people? ...26
4.2 Tracing trans content producers: searches, video lists and actor-channels ...27
4.3 Mainstream media’s dominant voice in bringing forward transgender issues ...28
5. When Do Trans Lives Matter on YouTube? ... 30
5.1 Trans life as trans content ...30
5.2 Content categories as trans issue spaces ...30
5.3 When trans life becomes newsworthy through human-interest stories ...33
5.4 When trans life becomes sensational, provocative and entertaining ...35
5.4.1 Trans content should distract and entertain ...35
5.4.2 Transgender issues as sensational and provocative ...35
5.4.3 Transgender issues as fun ...38
5.5 When trans life becomes personal ...39
5.6 Six content categories, four formats and three discourses ...41
6. Trans Agenda: The Case of Trans Beauty and Dating ... 43
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6.2 From keywords to mapping trans agenda on YouTube ...43
6.3 Trans beauty is when one looks feminine ...46
6.3.1 YouTube: a space to stage trans beauty issues ...46
6.3.2 Hegemonic trans beauty ...46
6.3.3 How to fix trans beauty problem areas with make-up ...47
6.4 How is dating an issue for transgender YouTube vloggers? ...50
6.4.1 Being transgender makes dating hard ...50
6.4.2 Being clocked: ‘Hey… that is a dude’ ...50
6.4.3 ‘Oohw … (Y)ou are trans?! I am not attracted to trans people’ ...52
6.5 YouTube empowers and emancipates to influence the transgender agenda ...54
7. When Trans Life Creates Alignment and Dispute: The Case of the
Transgender United States Military Ban ... 55
7.1 The issue of being transgender in the United States military ...55
7.2 Anti-transgender military ban stances ...57
7.2.1 Forming an anti-discrimination program ...57
7.2.2 Negligible transgender military costs ...57
7.2.3 Trans unemployment because of the military transgender ban ...58
7.2.4 Trans life in the military should be accepted and celebrated ...59
7.2.5 Backlash regarding President Trump’s contradictory statements ...61
7.3 Pro-transgender military ban stances ...63
7.3.1 Trans people are mentally ill ...63
7.3.2 Safety and efficiency over diversity in the military ...64
7.4 Trans life: A matter of individual and group issue-making capabilities ...66
8. Trans Issue-Making on YouTube Is Dynamic and Complex ... 67
References ... 70
Media List ... 76
List of Tables ... 79
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1. The Issuefication of Trans Lives
In December 2015, controversial and conservative trans vlogger Blaire White uploaded her first vlog ‘Female Privilege | Antifeminism’ to YouTube. White was born as male, but in her early twenties she transitioned into a transgender woman as she started her feminising hormone treatment. In her video, White sits in her room in front of her camera and argues that living as a man and now as a trans woman has enabled her to critique female privileges from a rather unique perspective (see Figure 1). Unlike heterosexual people, as a trans, White had experienced both male and female privileges. In her experience, people treated women more kindly and women had more privileges than men. Therefore, White argued it was better not to align with feminist ideologies that overemphasise female burdens and male privileges. According to White, people smile at women when they walk on the streets and doors are held open. She said women receive lower sentences for committing the same crimes as men, are hired over men in academic faculties and are afforded more physical safety in the public sphere. White stated that these are just a small subset of the privileges women have over men. Therefore, she stated her goal was to alter statements made by feminists that women solely endure burdens, while men only enjoy privileges. Over the years, White has kept posting videos in which she elaborates on her controversial and conservative views on gender politics. For example, on her YouTube channel one can find videos such as ‘There are only two genders’ and ‘Trans-Retarded’. In these videos, White disavows that there are a multitude of genders (e.g., non-binary or bi-gender), calls gender identities other than male or female ‘bullshit and arbitrary’ and argues that a trans individual will never transition fully into a man or a woman, as from a biological perspective this is impossible.
It is videos like this that have contributed to White becoming what some would call a YouTube star. As White caught audience and mainstream media’ attention on YouTube, her base of followers has grown over 500,000 subscribers, her channel generates over 60 million views and she has made guest appearances on political talk shows, such as The Rubin Report. White’s success is very much rooted in her trans conservatism, a position that is rare and therefore has become interesting to many people. Or as put it in an article on The Forward website: ‘Blaire White would be almost indistinguishable from hordes of other far-right YouTube vloggers—if she weren’t transgender’ (Feldman). White’s trans conservative position has created a controversy. While left-wing transgender advocates accuse White of being transphobic, her representation of transgender conservative views is praised and seen as revolutionary by right-wing people. In effect, White is changing the face of traditional
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American conservatism. Or, as stated in an article on the Thought Catalog: ‘White doesn’t fit the stereotype some try to slap onto conservatives. As a transgender woman, she doesn’t fit the mould most are used to seeing. . . . Perhaps Republicanism isn’t as old, male, or heteronormative as some may think’ (Byrnes). Although some might see White as the new spokesperson for traditional conservatism, publicly stating oneself as a trans conservative comes with its own problems. For instance, in an interview White conducted with Newsweek she stated: ‘I really am the only trans woman occupying this space within the conservative movement. I take what comes with that. There are people on the very far right, who, no matter what I say or how I express myself, won’t accept me’ (Solis). White argues that she is in a political limbo between the left and right parties. She is more accepted as trans by leftists, but as a trans woman, she is also controversial for having conservative stances. In contrast, right-wing people are more accepting of White’s conservative views, but her gender identification is problematic and controversial.
White is a YouTube transgender content producer and her vlogs serve as examples of two interconnected situations. First, YouTube has become a key space that gives trans people the means to self-represent, create content and knowledge about their trans experiences, and to engage in gender politics (Horak 572). This allows for trans representations—which may not be covered in other media—to be seen and produced at high speed on YouTube (Raun 101). Some argue trans content on YouTube covers an array of topics, and the most popular are the vlogs in which trans people document their transitioning process (Horak 2014). It is through these videos that trans people reflect on their past selves and imagine future new selves (Horak 2014). YouTube has become a site for educating others about trans life, with videos discussing gender politics, hormone treatment, transgender bodies, reassignment surgery, beauty and more (Miller 2017). Not only trans people create trans content on YouTube. The amount of trans content produced by professionals such as mainstream media has increased over the years as YouTube has become commercialized (101). Therefore, as the attention of (transgender) audiences on YouTube is limited, trans content producers use a multitude of strategies to compete against others for audience attention. For example, to compete on YouTube trans vloggers use strategies of self-commodification by using their ‘trans-ness’ as a brand to promote themselves (Raun 2018). YouTube metrics (e.g., amount of views, subscribers, comments and likes) function as popularity markers that indicate the success of such strategies and symbolises the amount of attention one receives from audiences (Rogers 450).
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Second, White’s vlogs show that the trans experience and politics on YouTube are not a settled matter. Rather, White’s vlogs exemplify that YouTube is a space where what it means to be a trans person is a matter of public discussion. Here, trans or transgender is understood as describing a diverse group of individuals that feels their gender identities to be opposite to that assigned at birth. To be a transgendered person can mean to be someone whose very existence is an issue. The term issue here is used to refer to matters of public concern that are unsettled, discussed, legislated and in coming about.
Scholarly work provides a good oversight of trans self-representation, content, education and self-commodification in the first situation (Horak 2014; Miller 2017; Raun 2018). However, they have failed to demonstrate how in the second situation YouTube has become a space in which trans lives are publicly addressed, interpreted and discussed as an issue. Scholarly work also neglects to explore the issue-making capabilities of trans content producers in making trans issues into consumable content for audiences and thereby how they influence and contribute to the transgender agenda on YouTube. Such research would contribute to the body of literature in Transgender and Media studies, since trans people like White are often misrepresented, under-covered and limited to reach large audiences and influence transgender agenda in most other media (Abbott 2013; Miller 2017; Gamson 1998; Jackson et al. 2018). Therefore, such research would deepen and broaden the understanding of trans engagement with online media—such as YouTube.
The goal in this research is to study how trans content producers on YouTube deal with, speak to and negotiate issues surrounding trans life. Therefore, the research questions of this study are: How are trans lives staged as matters of public concern on YouTube? Based on such staging, how may one describe the trans experience? Also, how has YouTube become a medium in which these issues are debated? To answer these questions, I propose not to look at coordinated activism, but to examine the aspects of the most popular (based on view count) trans content producers regarding their issue-making capabilities. This research is concerned with identifying the strategies used to stage trans issues, analysing the ability of such strategies to influence trans agenda and determining how trans content producers operate, compete, dispute and align within a hierarchy on YouTube to stage trans issues as a matter of public concern. To do so, an online issue mapping was performed, using digital methods and critical analytics (Rogers et al. 2015; Rogers 2018). These methods can help to identify and trace associations between trans content producers involved within a state of affairs by repurposing YouTube’s metrics to examine the dominant voice, concerns,
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This research is constructed in the following way: Chapter 2 presents an overview of transgender experiences as issues and how these issues are staged as a matter of mainstream media and more recently of YouTube. Chapter 3 explains digital issue mapping, critical analytics, and how these methods are applied to the addressed case studies in Chapter 4-7. Chapter 4 maps the different content producers at play, the types of videos they create to engage with trans topics, and visualizes which trans content producer ranks the most high and therefore has the largest audience and dominant voice. Chapter 5 examines how the trans experience—living life as a trans person—is presented in different content by transgender vloggers and mainstream media. This chapter analyses how these differences reflect on the controversies surrounding trans life and how trans people are valued. It also examines those aspects of trans life that are considered worthy of highlighting and whether there are differences or overlaps among content producers in how they produce transgender content— particularly how different transgender content producers use YouTube content categories and formats to stage trans issues. Chapter 6 discusses issues that are more unique to transgender vloggers. Chapter 7 considers how the transgender content producers align with and debate trans issues. Lastly, Chapter 8 elaborates on the findings of this research and reflects on the limitations of the applied methods for examining the work of issue making on YouTube.
The findings suggest that both mainstream media and transgender vloggers shape YouTube as an issue space. Hereby, mainstream media content producers dominate in influencing the transgender agenda and in reaching a large audience. However, to some extent, YouTube empowers transgender vloggers by offering them the means to self-represent and do the work of issue making to influence transgender agenda. YouTube as a space for transgender issue-making is complex and involves and requires a dominancy in visibility and knowledge in exploiting content categories and their affiliated formats to make trans issues into consumable content for audiences. To conclude, YouTube entails processes of (re)assembling, (re)associating, aligning, disputing and discussing trans issues through group formations.
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2. Being Trans: Mainstream Media, the Internet and YouTube
2.1 Trans lives as issues in mainstream media
As previously mentioned, to be a transgendered person means to have one’s existence become an issue of public concern. Typically, these concerns involve the social validity of trans identity, transphobia, violence, access to services and trans rights. Therefore, to be a trans person is also to deal with, speak to and negotiate over these issues. Mainstream media (e.g., theatre, television, radio, news, etc.) have a history of being venues where such trans issues are staged and represented by different actors with diverse stances and interests.
For instance, ‘Boys Don't Cry’ (1999) is a well-known American biographical film that depicts the life of trans man Brandon Teena. In December 1993, at the age of 21, Brandon was gang raped and murdered by a group of male acquaintances. The case made national headlines and media coverage focused on the brutality and sensational part of the act, as people were unfamiliar with the spectacle of a woman passing as a man. Meanwhile, the case intrigued filmmaker Kimberly Peirce, who in an interview with CNN pointed to the issue that people were misinformed (Allen). She argued that media coverage approached the hate crime with little emotional understanding; and that not having the right emotional understanding could cause the public to contribute to a culture of violence in which such hate crimes take place. By highlighting the issues related to Brandon’s trans existence (e.g., passing, transphobia, relationships, violence and hate crimes), Peirce sought to make Brandon’s struggle matter to the public, who would see Brandon as a more deeply human being.
A more recent example of how trans issues are staged in mainstream media is the issues surrounding the Gender Recognition Act 2004 in the United Kingdom. The law says that if trans people want to change their gender, they should apply for a Gender Recognition Certificate (GRC). This document serves as proof that a trans person has met the conditions for legal recognition in the acquired gender. To be allocated a GRC, evidence of gender dysphoria (a mental condition of feeling one’s gender identity to be opposite to that assigned at birth) is required. As a result, gender can be assigned in law in two ways: biologically by birth or legally by acquiring a GRC. The regulation has set in motion issues surrounding trans life such as bureaucracy and long medical/legal procedures. This led the government of the United Kingdom to open up a public conversation about changing the law to streamline and demedicalise changing one’s gender. This generated discussion of whether trans people
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should be regarded as having a mental illness for them to become who they want to be. And if it is fair for trans people to be defined by factors such as financial conditions, waiting lists, bureaucracy and the consent of external parties. The media become places to address and reflect on such issues, such as during an interview conducted by The Guardian with an anonymous trans person who highlighted the issues he/she faced regarding GRC:
(I) n order to be legally recognised for who I am, I have to navigate demeaning and time-consuming bureaucracy. I must submit a portfolio of evidence—to a group of people who don’t know me and whom I will never meet—that I’ve lived in my true gender for the past two years. I have to get medical reports including two diagnoses of gender dysphoria. If I were married, I’d have to ask my spouse for their permission to be myself. When I’ve gone through this exhausting process, the evidence is sent to a gender recognition panel. And I have to pay £140 to hear whether people I’ll never meet decide if I’m a woman. The medical requirements are especially awful. In practice we are still required to have a psychiatrist or a psychologist confirm that we have a psychological condition that causes us to be trans. Given the waiting lists for gender identity services across the UK, this commonly takes a few years. (‘Reforming the Gender Recognition Act’)
This post shows that being trans in the United Kingdom is not a settled matter; instead it invokes questions that aim to change the way trans lives are dealt with. Media such as The
Guardian became a place where such issues are discussed, addressed and brought to the
attention of the public as issues that matter.
Another example is how the media discusses, addresses and stages the issue of trans bathroom discrimination in the United States. The ability of trans people to use toilets that align with their gender identification has been an ongoing and unsettled matter in the United States and is on the trans agenda for many American non-profit organisations (NGOs) such as the National Center for Transgender Equality. Therefore, bathroom discrimination has become a flash point in the fight for trans rights. In 2016, North Carolina passed a law that prohibited trans bathroom discrimination. However, afterwards the state legislators withdrew that right by passing another bill that eliminated those protections in North Carolina. This led to a backlash from the trans community. In an article on the BBC News website, activist Wayne Maines argued that the effects of this bill were far-reaching. He stated: ‘Now, nowhere in North Carolina can a transgender person be sure they will not be forced into a
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toilet where they don't belong and in fact, where they may not be safe’ (‘Viewpoint: Why toilets matter’). When Maines’s daughter transitioned at the age of ten and she wanted to use the girls’ bathroom at school, many parents in the community and state were upset. Concerns were raised that if his daughter would use the girls’ bathroom, other girls might see her male genitalia. Maines argued in the article that the one who was truly at risk was his daughter, as he pointed out to that if his daughter was forced to use the boy’s bathroom it might not be safe for her. When his daughter was told to use the staff toilet—after the school received backlash from media and organisations such as Christian Civic League of Maine—she was devastated by the school’s decision as it made her feel not like a normal student. Maines ended up suing the school for discrimination and the Supreme Judicial Court ruled in his favour; according to their judgement schools are prohibited to deny students their rights to use the toilet that matches their gender identification. Although Maines won the lawsuit, the consequences for going against trans bathroom discrimination were far-reaching; his family needed to hide for a couple of years, his wife changed jobs and they moved to another city to be safe. This article demonstrates that regarding the issue of trans bathroom discrimination, BBC News was concerned with the issue and allowed opponents of trans bathroom discrimination to be heard that highlighted safety issues and the right to use a toilet according to one’s gender identification.
These examples are just a small subset of unsettled trans issues, staged and represented in mainstream media as matters of public concern by different media stakeholders. They demonstrate that mainstream media are venues where such unsettled matters are discussed. Although mainstream media covers trans issues, trans people themselves are not the ones who get to decide who speaks on trans issues and which topics are deserving of attention. In mainstream media there are limited options for trans people to influence the transgender agenda, as mainstream media gatekeepers decide how trans people are represented and which aspects of their lives are discussed. Therefore, in the next section, I elaborate on the role of mainstream media, how transgender people are often misrepresented and how their voices as issue-makers are seldom heard.
2.2 Misrepresentation of trans lives and under-coverage in mainstream media
Before 2014, media depictions of trans people were rare in the United States (GLAAD 2016). From a historical media perspective, people who identified as trans were not heavily featured in mainstream media (Miller 2). In those rare occasions when they were featured, the
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depictions were overtly negative, stereotypical, and particularly transgender women were heavily sexualised and fetishised (Abbott 2013). Moreover, transgender people were regularly portrayed as the keepers of secrets and the obscene aspects of their lives were highlighted to increase ratings and gain the attention of media audiences (Miller 2-3). For instance, in the 1990s, trans women were fascinating topics on daytime talk shows such as
The Jerry Springer Show (Jackson et al. 1870). These daytime talk shows were often
scrutinised by scholars who were interested in how trans representations were related to fear, deception, and freakishness (Gamson 1998). Furthermore, contemporary mainstream media is known for casting heterosexual actors as trans women (Jackson et al. 1871), such as Felicity Huffman in Transamerica (2005), Jared Leto in Dallas Buyers Club (2013) and Jeffrey Tambour in Transparent (2014). The trans communities have criticized mainstream media, as casting heterosexual actors as trans woman, further marginalising trans actors. Due to negative misrepresentation and under-coverage of trans people in mainstream media, trans individuals are in need of positive media depictions and mediated role models (Sausa 2005).
Although there has been under-coverage of trans representation in mainstream media, in 2014 the United States reached a trans tipping point, according to Time Magazine. At the time, the visibility of trans people in media was at an all-time high, as a certain amount of television shows portrayed the life of a main transgender character (GLAAD 2016). This media visibility could potentially alter negative attitudes and behaviours towards transgender people, as media visibility in mainstream media has a positive effect on the attitudes and behaviours of viewers (Cohen 2001; Fisher 1985).
Although mainstream media has the potential to influence the attitude of the public towards trans issues, transgender people are still often misrepresented, marginalized and under-covered. In this sense, trans people have limited options for their voices to be heard and to influence trans agenda in mainstream media. The rise of the Internet and its specific characteristics has brought a significant change to this situation. In mainstream media, trans people do not get to decide how or who is going to represent them or which issues are introduced nor can they form communities. However, the rise of the Internet allows transgender people to self-represent and socially organise, leading to an increase in transgender representations, communities and discussion of issues. In the coming section, I discuss the Internet’s effect on trans people’s self-representation and social organisation.
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2.3 Trans lives and the Internet: Self-representation and social organization
In the early stages of the Internet, many scholars came to the consensus that the Internet provided great opportunities for self-representation (e.g., Katz and Rice 2002; Rheingold 1993; Smith and Kollock 1999; Turkle 1995; Wallace 1999). Self-representation is understood here as individuals impressing on their environment, by leaving impressions that correlate to their standards (Schlenker and Scott 1981). Self-representation is crucial, especially in mediated environments, as people learn to write themselves into being (boyd 120). In mediated environments, people need different skills than the skills they use in real life to interpret and manage impressions, since our bodies are not usually visible on the Internet. The early Internet facilitated these opportunities for self-representation by allowing a person to experiment with one’s identity and gender in anonymity. For example, users could change or hide aspects of themselves due to the reduced auditory and visual possibilities (Igartua et al. 2009). Scholarly work has also shown that Internet users did not feel compelled to disclose aspects of themselves (in chats, blogs and fora), due to the anonymity with little repercussion (McKenna and Bargh 2000). Moreover, the Internet stimulated the forming of social online communities that were distant from real-life communities. These online social communities involved limited commitment that facilitated identity experiments (Turkle 1995; Igartua et al. 2009). Nicknames were an easy way for people to experiment with their identities and remove cues about their gender (Reid 1993). Nicknames could be gendered, gender neutral or even gender plural. As nicknames were manipulatable, users could easily and frequently change their nicknames and therefore could be constantly diverse as to which gender they wished to self-represent.
In a sense, the Internet set individuals free to self-represent in a gender identity they conform to in manners that the offline world does not provide (Stone 1995). Therefore, it is not surprising to see that although ‘mainstream media has been slow to warm to trans representation; the Internet has long been a safe haven for the trans community’ (Miller 3). It is the under-coverage and misrepresentations in public culture and mainstream media concerning trans existence that have led trans people to the Internet. In comparison with mainstream media and offline environments, the Internet allowed trans people to facilitate information exchanges, self-exploration and gender experimentation (Fink and Miller 614). The latter is a right that is often not afforded in the offline world to those who identify with a
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gender other than assigned at birth and who wish to experiment with their gender (Miller 3). Or, as Whittle puts it: ‘cyberspace has presented a safe area where body figure and presentation are not among the initial aspects of personal judgement and social hierarchy within the transgender community’ (400). Therefore, in the early stages of the Internet individuals were free to self-present in the gender identity they desired in a way that the offline world did not always accept (Stone 1995). The Internet makes it possible for trans self-representations to be seen by a large and geographical dispersed audience who are distant from offline trans communities (Shapiro 2004). Therefore, Internet communication contributes to feeling a sense of community, and it also provides the opportunity for trans people and others to learn about trans identities in a safe and private way.
The use of the Internet by trans people has changed how social organising happens. According to Shapiro this process entails the empowerment of trans subjects, new tactics for protest, the reduction of costs and the fading of geographical boundaries (172). Prior to the Internet, information about transgender people was hard to find. Trans individuals were depended on the medical profession and few support groups for transgender information (170). As a consequence, the forces of pathologisation and medicalisation dominated the framing of trans identities (170). The dominant mode of trans existence was stealth prompted by the medical community, who encouraged trans people to remain closeted about their status and disassociate from the trans community after transitioning (170). This did not foster the proliferation of trans communities. However, the rise of the Internet allowed trans people and activists to find each other and to devise their own framing of transgender identities, challenging the medical and social understanding of gender nonconformity and moving toward social acceptance and political rights. The Internet has fostered the reduction of social organisation costs, because of its low costs for communicating, organising and protesting online (171). This leads transgender activists and organisations to use the Internet as a way to minimise start-up and maintenance costs and to provide quick and efficient information distribution (171). The Internet facilitates networking and collective identity development, as trans organisations and individuals can distribute information, advertise, answer questions, and handle administrative and planning issues online. One of the more profound contributions of the Internet is that it has expanded where trans social movements and activism take place (172). Trans organisations and activists are not tied to their location, but can organise a movement or a protest from anywhere by accessing the Internet (e.g., through listservs, fora, email and websites) (172). This is significant for trans communities, as the Internet’s relative anonymity and safety contributes to recruiting people for transgender
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activism and reduces the social stigma and related risks that have long inhibited trans mobilisation.
To conclude, the Internet has allowed trans people to self-represent and organise movements and protests in ways that were—up till the moment of its birth—not seen before. However, as the Internet has evolved over the years, so have its characteristics; it has proliferated not only in websites but also in social media platforms. YouTube is a social media platform where trans people and organisations can address transgender issues and topics. In the next section, I discuss YouTube's specific characteristics to understand why it is an important platform for trans people and organisations and how they might use it to stage trans issues.
2.4 YouTube: A place for self-education, self-commodification and visibility
Before diving into how transgender people and organisations use YouTube as a place to address transgender topics and issues, it is worthwhile to look at the characteristics of YouTube itself. This sets the background for how, as discussed in the next sections (2.5 and 2.6) and in Chapter (3), we can understand how trans issue-making becomes a matter of deploying the mechanisms of YouTube, YouTube’s role in making videos visible and how transgender issue-making on the platform can be studied.
YouTube was launched in May 2005 and is an online platform to create, share, watch and find videos. It has more than a billion users around the world and YouTube hosts hundreds of millions of hours of videos on its platform (Miller 3). In contrast to traditional media, YouTube makes it possible to ‘share user-generated content, including tutorials, reviews, reactions, pranks, confessionals, and much more’ (Miller 3). Because of YouTube’s commercialization in recent years, the distinction between user-generated content and commercial professionally generated content has slowly faded (Raun 101). Not only has the culture of the so-called ‘Pro-Ams’ (professional–amateurs) grown, but content created by other professionals such as mainstream media has grown as well. On YouTube, content producers regard making videos on YouTube as their main profession because of ad revenues and sponsored content (101).
Furthermore, scholars have argued that YouTube is a platform for self-education and informal learning, and those digital technologies—such as YouTube—enable people to cultivate new selves (Ashman, Brown and Patterson 476). This argument is very much rooted in neoliberalism, as they point to these digital technologies as ‘technologies of the self’. The
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latter refers to how individuals use production technologies to shape their identity corporeally and cognitively to both their own and society's liking. These are operations performed (e.g., on their body, thoughts, conduct and so forth) either by themselves, or with help of others to transform themselves to reach a ‘state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality’ (Foucault 18). To do so, the individual needs to regard himself as an entrepreneur, subjected to neoliberal ideals such as self-reliance, personal responsibility, boldness and a willingness to take risks in the pursuit of goals (du Gay and Holt 56). The neoliberal individual is ‘an entrepreneur of himself . . . being for himself his producer, being for himself his own capital, being for himself the source of [his] earnings’ (Smith 52).
It is through this concept of neoliberalism that we can understand the practices of YouTube vloggers. As Raun suggested, YouTube encourages their vloggers to compete for attention and status to attract large followings and views (100). Attention, here, is an important term, as it relates to YouTube as an attention economy. It describes the relationship between the amount of information and the lack of audience attention (Goldhaber 1). In this sense, attention is rare, valuable and a driving force for an intense economy that is connected to money flows (Goldhaber 1). Visibility on YouTube relates to the degree of attention a YouTuber gets. Here, a small group of YouTubers receives a significant amount of attention, while the majority receives far less attention (Adamic and Huberman 2001). Therefore, many YouTubers question how they can promote themselves to gain the attention of audiences. To gain followers is important for YouTubers since metrics such as followers (on a symbolic level) are called ‘popularity makers’. Being a follower indicates the longevity of a user’s relationship with a creator and their intent to keep watching, which contributes to how YouTubers are positioned and legitimised as successful (García-Rapp 233). Raun argues that self-commodification on YouTube is used as a strategy to promote oneself and to gain followers. By self-commodification he refers to ‘a specific way of performing in front of the camera and addressing the audience to attract attention and publicity’ (100). He argues that self-commodification entails the practice of exploiting one’s online identity as if it were a branded good (100). This is very much tied to the aforementioned neoliberal technology of subjectivity—the entrepreneurial or ‘enterprising self’. The ones who successfully know how to strategize by means of self-commodification can reach a large following and achieve the status of micro-celebrity. Micro-celebrity is an online identity that is characterized by how people are articulating, creating and sharing their identities online (Marwick 115; Senft 350). Micro-celebrities are famous to a niche group of people and they have a large following base. It also reflects on a specific behaviour—presenting oneself as a celebrity (Marwick 114).
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People can reach the status of a micro-celebrity by carefully constructing their selves online—in such manners that others regard them as famous (Marwick 114). The latter is not done easily; of micro-celebrities is expected that they are transparent, open, authentic, and they need to be able to interact with their audiences, so they can keep their status (Marwick 118-119). Therefore, of many micro-celebrities is expected that their followers get detailed information about their personal lives (Marwick 117).
Although the success of micro-celebrities and others who do well on YouTube could be attributed to their competing strategies to gain audience attention, their visibility is also dependent on what YouTube intends its audiences to see. Platforms such as YouTube market themselves as flat, open and neutral spaces (Gillespie 358). However, their role is complex and fragile, as they (as intermediaries) must strategically present themselves and set expectations to end users, advertisers, and professional content producers, while also serving their own financial interest (353). Some argue YouTube invites users to take part and create content, while YouTube controls the conditions under which such creative content is produced (Gillespie 358). Gillespie has pointed out that these conditions are informed by practical, technical, economic and legal factors (358). Conditions are unavoidable; however, in setting these conditions, choices need to be made that end up shaping the contours of public discourse online. Hence, some argue that YouTube is not as neutral as they claim to be (358). For example, YouTube argued in a recent blogpost to rigorously enforce their policies with regard to harassment and hate speech (Dale 2019). In doing so, YouTube examines whether videos incite harassment, threaten or humiliate an individual or if personal information is revealed. For hate speech, they look at videos that might contain content that incites violence and hatred towards or promote supremacy over a protected group. In the first quarter of 2019, YouTube removed hundreds of millions of videos, comments and accounts that had been flagged or violated YouTube’s policies with regard to hate speech and harassment. In this way, YouTube has been able to reduce the visibility of borderline harmful content, which they do not want their users to see. Furthermore, YouTube argues on their Creator Academy page that they try to match videos with each viewer. However, this is challenging because every minute users upload 400 hours of video. Therefore, for users to see content that meets their desires, YouTube analyses what videos users watch, what they do not watch, the time viewers spend watching videos, which videos viewers like and dislike, and the ‘not interested’ feedback. According to YouTube, based on these considerations, only a select portion of YouTube’s total content becomes visible for users. In this way, what users see and the visibility of videos depends on matches made by YouTube.
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So how does this relate to the question of how YouTube is becoming a medium in which transgender issues are debated? As the above-mentioned research shows, in contrast to the early stages of the Internet, operating on YouTube now requires strategies to gain audience attention, deal with competition, attract popularity markers (such as followings and views) and to address complex processes of visibility. If YouTube is becoming a medium for trans issue-making, this study must situate and frame the practice of issue-making within YouTube’s tendencies. Why? Because the success of YouTube videos in which transgender issues are staged as matters of public concern becomes, then, very much dependent on those complex tendencies. YouTube is not just a platform solely offering its services to broadcast and ‘give everyone a voice’ as it mission states. No, this study aligns with the aforementioned research by stating that YouTube is an active (non-human) actor that has a dominant voice, in which videos become popular, visible and successful. To examine how YouTube has become a place where transgender issues are discussed, the next section examines how other scholars have analysed transgender life on YouTube.
2.5 Trans life on YouTube
Media that has been created by and about trans people is increasingly being shared and watched on a mass scale (Horak 572). By comparing the search results for the word ‘transgender’ on YouTube, Raun found that there is an exceptional increase in trans content: growing from 134,000 search results in October 2012, 458,000 in June 2015 to 1,480,000 in February 2017 (101). Therefore, it is not surprising to see that this change in trans representation has caught the eye of scholars who are examining this new trans phenomenon.
For example, Miller has examined how YouTube functions as a place for trans education, not only for transgender people but also for heterosexual people (2017). He argues that it is through this understanding—of YouTube as an informal environment for education—that we can understand how trans people and others could gain from informative and autobiographical online content (Miller 4). Miller stated that YouTube’s educational character allows for trans people and others to gather, exchange ideas and address issues (4). This is important as (earlier mentioned) offline and before the Internet; trans people could have little trans knowledge and relied on a few (medical) professionals for information (3-4). This changed with the rise of YouTube. For instance, on YouTube trans people could find others who have documented their transitioning experiences. This could encourage, inspire and educate viewers who might be in the process of deciding whether they would like to
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transition themselves (Miller 4). It is argued that some issues trans individuals face (e.g., violence, transphobia and prejudice), could result from the lack of education by heterosexual people and under-exposure of transgender individuals in media (5). Therefore, according to Miller, YouTube videos containing trans themes could be of significant value, as they might help to increase understanding issues that affect trans individuals and communities (Miller 2). Horak has identified YouTube as a platform that has almost single-handedly transformed the trans mediascape (572). She questioned how the parameters of YouTube affect the form and content of trans vlogs, the strategies trans vloggers undertake, and why videos that document transgender vloggers’ transitioning process has become so popular on YouTube. Horak found that trans videos are structured by YouTube’s penchant for the personal and the spectacular (572). Transgender vlogs, or as Horak called it, ‘talking-head’ videos, create an intimate relationship between trans YouTube vloggers and their viewers (572). In this relationship the trans vloggers is seen as an expert on certain matters (572). Moreover, Horak states that vlogs become spectacular when used to exhibit vloggers bodies in the gender they identify with. She pointed out that these talking-head videos operate according to a temporality she called ‘hormone time’ (572). According to Horak, hormone time refers to moment a trans starts to transition—to the moment their bodies fully align with the gender they affirm with. This process is not linear, as vloggers ‘insert and comment on older videos of themselves, imagine future selves, and sometimes question, pause, or stop hormone treatment’ (580).
Raun examined how trans YouTube vloggers used their trans identity to brand themselves and therefore self-commodify (2018). He examined YouTube vlogger Julie van Vu, who he framed as a micro-celebrity because of her success and her many appearances in mainstream media. He argued that Vu’s YouTube videos represent a new genre of trans vlogs, which tries ‘to combine and bridge self-reflexive documentations of transition, offering support and advice from others in a similar situation, and sponsored/commercially driven tips and tricks on make-up, beauty and body modification’ (103). He argued that Vu broke with the narrative that trans vloggers had been reluctant to monetise their content (103). Often trans vlogging was understood to be sceptical or critical towards capitalist logic and structures, as those structures hinder access to transitioning technologies and products for some trans people (103-104). According to Raun, this new genre demonstrates how trans vloggers could be imbued within the aforementioned neo-liberal notions of an entrepreneurial self, and how they could embrace capitalist logic and structures to support their own transition (103). According to Raun, Vu demonstrated this by using her trans status as a brand
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and by building a community through the concept of intimacy (105). This intimacy can be achieved in different ways and is expected by audiences (105). He stated that intimacy becomes a genre when thoughts, feelings and situations that seem deeply private are documented in the form of a video diary. As stated by Raun, intimacy in trans vlogs works as an important currency, as it can be capitalised in different and overlapping ways (e.g., monetary purposes, social recognition and as a tool in advocacy work) (99).
To conclude, in this section, I have examined how other scholars view trans life on YouTube. According to these scholars, trans life on YouTube entails employing its educational potential, strategies of intimacy and self-commodification, videos documenting one’s transitioning process, reflecting on a past self and imagining a future self. Although these scholarly works are very helpful and give insight about how transgender people operate and engage with YouTube, they neglect to discuss how YouTube has become as a space in which transgender issues have become matters of public concern. Scholars have failed to examine not only the issue-making capabilities of transgender vloggers but also the network of (non-human and human) actors that are tied to specific issues. Therefore, the next section elaborates on transgender issue-making as an aspect of YouTube.
2.6 Trans issue-making a matter of YouTube
This chapter demonstrated how trans issues are dealt with in different media and presented the limitations of mainstream and exciting new possibilities for online trans issue-making. This research suggests that trans issue-making is a matter of media, as media set the rules for how, by whom and when trans issues matter. In mainstream media, trans issue-making is done by media actors, and trans people are often misrepresented, marginalized, under-covered and limited in self-representing. In contrast, the early Internet has brought new options for trans people to self-represent and experiment with their gender in anonymity and has set them free from the limitations of geographical boundaries. As the early Internet seems to have been a more open (anonymous) space with fewer rules for transgender representation and organising, this chapter has demonstrated that operating and engaging with YouTube seems to involve rather complex processes of self-commodification, the personal, intimacy, competition, popularity markers and visibility strategies. To understand how trans issues are staged as public concerns on YouTube, I suggest that we must situate trans issue-making within these complex factors. As discussed in Section 2.4, YouTube is an attention economy with popularity markers that consist of metrics such as views and followings that indicate the
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success and visibility of YouTube content producers. This visibility is the result of strategies that trans content producers undertake and of the output of YouTube matching capabilities.
Therefore, to understand how trans issue work takes place on YouTube, strategies of trans content producers should be studied and YouTube should be regarded as a (non-human) actor that has an active say in which issues become visible. The latter is not easily accomplished, as much of YouTube’s processes are complex and obscure. Hence, I propose repurposing YouTube's popularity markers for social research by critical analytic and digital
issue-mapping (see Chapter 3). Why? Through critical analytics and digital issue mapping,
we can determine trans content that has become successful and visible on YouTube. These methods serve to trace the issue-making capabilities of trans content producers and of YouTube’s video-matching capabilities. This approach will allow for examining when and which issues are pushed forward by trans content producers and YouTube. This study aims to contribute to the field of Transgender and Media studies by not only giving insight about when and which transgender issues are put forward, but also by looking at the state of affairs surrounding these issues. As previously mentioned, scholars have neglected exploring how trans content producers operate within a network of actors that are tied to those specific issues. Posing the question of how trans issues are staged as public concerns on YouTube involves not only examining the individual trans issue-maker but also a wider network involved that besides transgender vloggers might consist of mainstream media organisations and others. This sets the background to understand the dynamic relations among trans content producers. Understanding the dynamic relationship in networks of trans issue-makers relates to the challenges of hierarchies, dominant voices, alignment, dispute through group formations, and competition between transgender issue-makers. Therefore, the next chapter discusses digital issue mapping and critical analytics by answering the question of how these methods can help to study trans content producers and their capability to make trans issues into public concerns within the addressed case studies.
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3. Studying Transgender Issue-Making on YouTube
3.1 Digital issue mapping
The coming sections explore how digital issue mapping and critical analytics can help to study trans issue-making on YouTube by repurposing YouTube’s data for social research. Therefore, this section elaborates on digital issue mapping, Section 3.2 on critical analytics and lastly Section 3.3 how digital issue mapping and critical analytics can be applied to the case studies in this research.
Issue mapping is a method that provides ways for describing, deploying and visualising the actors, objects and substances of social issues (Rogers et al. 9-10). This methodology identifies and traces associations and connections (both in narrative and visual form) among actors involved in an issue (9-10). Issue mapping, is based on Latorian’s (2005) premise that society is not a pre-given substance or structure that serves as a framework through which issues can be explained and understood (Rogers et al. 14-15). Instead, society should be understood ‘as the movement of actors constantly in the process of (re)assembling, (re)associating and (dis)agreeing’ (15). Therefore, to comprehend the state of affairs for social issues, one needs to examine the movement of the actors involved. How? When the social interaction gets triggered, for example in disputes, struggles, controversies, issues and movements, the actors leave traces behind that become visible (15-16). By following these traces, we can examine social issues to identify the actions, connections and associations that bring diverse actors together into this performative state of affairs (15).
From a Latourian perspective, there are five factors for the researcher to consider when following the traces of social interactions. The first factor, there are only group formations that are in constant development (16). Therefore, group formations require a continuous stream of input of actions with which they can indicate their boundaries, limitations, and meanings. To examine such group formations means to follow the actors and make their group formations become visible (16). The second factor refers to the researcher’s task to map out agency. This raises the question of how issues become matters of concern and collective calls for action. The third factor entails the recognition that non-humans (objects) also have agency (17). The fourth factor entails how a matter of fact differs from a matter of concern. Facts may contribute, but do not per se result into an issue being settled. Therefore, one needs to trace how facts come about and analyse how they shape matters of concern (17). The fifth factor requires of the researcher to ask when and to whom issues are matters of
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concern and how they are articulated and structured (17). Ultimately, the researcher traces the network and describes what actors within the state of affairs do to move others toward their designated objective (17).
According to Rogers et al., the Web plays a crucial role in how we study issues, as it has created new channels to act, communicate, and to participate in debates regarding an issue (29-30). The authors state that digital methods are useful for issue mapping and developing a research framework that contains a set of techniques and software tools for performing social research within the Web (30-31). Digital methods make use of digital devices and objects (e.g., search engines and hyperlinks) and the characteristics of media. This means that such research uses the (technological) logic of media devices to make their techniques useful for social research. Following the medium prevents being surprised by, for example, the disappearance of an API or the removal of a website. Lastly, Rogers et al. suggest that by combining digital methods with issues mapping, researchers can benefit from how digital mediation makes ‘social traceability’ possible. Social traceability refers to how a researcher can follow, aggregate and document a string of hyperlinks or a set of keywords that are used within and across online media to depict associations and substantive alignments between actors (30-31).
3.2 Critical analytics in issue mapping
Vanity metrics measure and show how well one is doing on social media based on popularity markers (e.g., likes, page views, subscribers, and so forth) (Rogers 450). The term also reflects on how social media are spaces for people to present themselves in ways they which to be perceived (Rogers 452). Vanity metrics breed micro-celebrities, as social media metrics propagate a loop of recognisable fame based on measurements and popularity markers. The accompanying critique is how micro-celebrities have become who they are based on factors of fame, instead of by greatness (455).
Rogers formed a critique on these vanity metrics; he developed a different kind of metrics that he calls critical analytics (450). Critical analytics mark ‘a shift from social media as a productive social networking site for self-presentation’ to a space where metrics can be used to study social issue work (i.e., the mobilisation of publics around social issues and causes) (455). Critical analytics assumes professional work that is productive for issue engagement analysis to be organised and distributed through social media (467-468).
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Rogers proposes that when researchers want to apply digital methods—which repurposes online devices and methods for social research—to use altmetric scores and other engagement measurements (467). Critical analytics offers those other types of measurements to study issues that are introduced, taken up, (re) articulated, and distributed on social media (455). These measurements entail: the dominant voice, concern, commitment, positioning, and alignment (456).
The dominant voice measures which sources are considered most impactful within an issue space (456). Concern relates to the actors who are convinced an issue is a matter of concern and the actors that are present or absent within an issue space (456). Commitment refers to how long an issue is a matter of concern to the actors. It relates to questions of longevity or perseverance, despite lessening attention by others (459). Positioning is based on the choice of words, which are used to indicate and discuss the matter of concern. These words might reveal whether they are part of a local, national or international agenda and stance-taking, or if they are deployed to step outside the current debate (461-462). Lastly, researchers could use positioning to examine the alignment of group formations. This means that one identifies which actors use identical issue language and could therefore share a similar position. These actors might not belong to the same area, field, coalition, or partnership, but how they articulate themselves aligns them with others who use the same words (466-467).
3.3 Organizing issue mapping on YouTube
Digital issue mapping has already shown its potential to map controversies and issues in different scholarly work: from mapping controversies in the content collaboration on Wikipedia (Borra et al. 2014), to the issues of the ageing of Europe (Rogers et al., 2015) and issues of privacy and surveillance concerning the National Security Agency (NSA) data leak in June 2013 (Marres and Moats 2015). However, digital methods has yet to show its potential in broadening the understanding of how YouTube has become a space in which trans lives are publicly addressed, interpreted and discussed as an issue.
Aforementioned, this research addresses the questions: How are trans lives staged as matters of public concern on YouTube? Based on such staging, how may one describe the trans experience? Also, how has YouTube become a medium in which these issues are debated? Digital issue mapping with aid of critical analytics can help answer these questions,
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since it allows identifying and tracing associations between actors involved in transgender issues on YouTube. YouTube is a platform in which popularity makers (or as Rogers would put it, vanity metrics) symbolise success and visibility, and indicate what YouTube intends its audiences to see. Digital issue mapping with aid of critical analytics could offer the tools to repurpose these metrics by retracing and examining the most viewed trans content videos on YouTube, to examine the engaged actors and the associations and connections between them.
To help repurposing YouTube’s data this research makes use of the YouTube Data Tool. The YouTube’s Data Tool is developed by Digital Methods Initiative (DMI) and media scholar Bernhard Rieder, to build up datasets that can be analysed in social research. DMI is one of the main Internet new media study groups focused primarily on developing methods and tools for repurposing online devices and platforms (such as Twitter, Facebook, Google and YouTube) for research on social and political issues. The tool can extract data from the YouTube API v3 and has several modules. The video list module includes the ability to create lists with video information and statistics that can be generated based on a query tied to a specific channel, a playlist, ID or by a specific search query. One can select metrics such as view counts and ratings to further refine the search.
Based on such lists, digital issue mapping with aid of critical analytics allow repurposing YouTube data by asking sub questions that inform the case studies in this research such as: What type of videos and content producers engage with trans topics? Which actors are most successful, visible and committed to stage trans issues as public concerns on YouTube (Chapter 4)? And how do they make trans issues into consumable content to maintain their dominancy in visibility and influence transgender agenda (Chapter 5)? To what extent are transgender people themselves empowered and free to make trans issues matter and influence transgender agenda (Chapter 6)? And how do how trans content producers align, dispute and create group formations (Chapter 7)? Hence, digital issue mapping with help of critical analytics are useful to reach the goal of this research that is to study how trans content producers on YouTube deal with, speak to and negotiate issues surrounding trans life.
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4. Trans Content: Mainstream Media vs. Trans Vloggers
4.1 YouTube a paradise for trans people?
On YouTube’s ‘About’ page, the site states that their mission is to give everyone a voice and to let them know what is happening in the world. Their mission is based on four principles: freedom of speech, freedom of information, freedom to exploit opportunities and freedom to feel at home. YouTube argues that everyone should be able to speak freely and should have the creative means to express themselves. They believe that in doing so, people should also have easy and unhindered access to information and video content created by the site’s users. As a result, according to YouTube, its platform has become a site where everyone is given the opportunity to be discovered, build a business and succeed in their own way. They argue that it is the public that determines what is popular and that other parties are not gatekeepers that determine content.
For trans people these promises may seem to agree with what many scholars have already argued: that the Internet is a safe haven for the production of transgender information, knowledge and representations (Miller 3). However, although YouTube offers its users the means to create and upload content, the visibility of videos and therefore of users depends on strategies that gain the attention of audiences and ultimately YouTube’s video matching mechanism. Therefore, this case study uses the most watched videos according to the search term ‘transgender’ as a reflection of those factors that determine visibility. This method resulted in identifying not only the type of trans content videos that are visible and pushed forward by YouTube, but also in the ability to examine which content producers engaged with trans topics as well as which trans content producers ranked the highest and therefore had the largest audience to influence.
Although this case study largely confirms that YouTube is a ‘paradise for trans voices’, the findings demonstrate that although both mainstream media and transgender vloggers shape YouTube as an issue space, mainstream media is still the most dominant in influencing the transgender agenda as they are most popular and therefore have the largest audience.
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4.2 Tracing trans content producers: searches, video lists and actor-channels
To trace which trans content producers are most successful in becoming popular and gaining the attention of audiences, I used the video list module of the YouTube Data Tool to extract a video list and view count based on the search ‘transgender’. The search for ‘transgender’ was to examine to what extent the search results reflected the most popular and visible issues regarding being transgender. To limit the search results, I restricted the video list module to generate only the 50 most watched videos. For every search result, information was provided about the position, channelId, channelTitle, videoId, videoTitle, videoDescription, videoCategoryLabel, viewCount and LikeCount.
For each of the returned videos, I queried the ChannelId using the Channel Info Module of the YouTube Data Tool. This allowed me to trace back 35 channels and retrieve information such as account name, statistics, personal description, content details and status. I eliminated channels that did not contain any English or Dutch content and determined whether the actors had any commitment regarding transgender issues. To do so, I queried the account name of each of the remaining channels in combination with ‘transgender’ in the video list module based on relevance. I determined that if content producers had not uploaded more than two trans related videos, they had no commitment toward transgender issues. This eliminated 13 channels from the video list, resulting in 22 remaining actors. Their channels information was used to determine what type of actors these trans content producers were.
Among the 22 actors, the findings suggested three types of trans content producers: 1)
mainstream media that referred to those who identified as television programme makers,
news outlets or radio; 2) transgender YouTube vloggers that referred to members who had a personal account and who identified themselves as transgender; 3) and others who had a personal account but did not identify as transgender (see Table 1).
28 Mainstream media Video view count (in millions) Transgender vloggers Video view count (in millions) Others Video view count (in millions)
ABC News 69.6 Gigi Gorgeous 11.1 Wickydkewl 3.6
Barcroft TV 45.5 Arielle Scarcella 7.9
TheTalko 31.3 Nikita Dragun 6.5
Dr.Phil 13.2 Maya 5.4
Channel 4 9.6 Emma Ellingsen 5.0
LastWeekTonight 9.3 PRINCESSJOUL
ES
4.4
RT 9.2 Kailani Loren 3.7
What Would You Do?
6.4 Eden The Doll 3.7
BBC Three 4.9 HLN 4.5 TheEllenShow 4.0 National Geographic 4.0 The Rebel Media 3.6
Total 215.1 47.7 3.6
Table 1: Overview of the 22 most visible actors on the video list, based on the search ‘transgender’ and view count on YouTube.
4.3 Mainstream media’s dominant voice in bringing forward transgender issues
The findings of this case study demonstrate that the most popular transgender content on YouTube that appeared on the video list generated over 266 million views, while content from mainstream media generated over 215 million views and transgender vloggers generated almost 48 million views. Therefore, both mainstream media and transgender vloggers were shaping YouTube as an issue space. However, this case study suggests that mainstream media, and in particular ABC News with over 69 million views, had the most
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dominant voice in staging transgender issues, as they had the largest reach and therefore were most impactful.
Based on these findings, to some extent, YouTube is a free haven for trans people, as YouTube allows trans people to self-represent. However, this should be taken into perspective, as content created by trans people themselves subjects to the dominance of mainstream media content. Although YouTube’s mission might be to give everyone the chance to be discovered, this case study shows that for trans people, this is not (fully) the case. Hence, regarding issue-making this case study suggests that issues staged by transgender people are less likely to become matters of public concern. When taking into consideration that view count reflects on strategies to gain the attention of audiences, what viewers like to see and what YouTube intends audiences to see, the findings show that transgender issues staged by mainstream media are more likely to become public concerns as the media have a larger reach.
To conclude, YouTube as an issue space resembles mainstream media, as mainstream trans content makers are still dominant in gatekeeping what becomes a trans issue. In the next chapter, I elaborate on these 22 actors by examining how they make ‘being trans’ into different content and determine which aspects of trans life are worthy of highlighting by content categories and formats.
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5. When Do Trans Lives Matter on YouTube?
5.1 Trans life as trans content
In mainstream media trans people are often marginalised, misrepresented and under-covered. Now that trans content is increasing on YouTube, and both mainstream media and trans vloggers are actively shaping issues, the question arises as to how trans life is being made into content on YouTube. Which aspects of trans life do these trans content producers deem important enough to highlight? How do the ways in which trans content is produced contribute to strategies for gaining the attention of audiences?
This case study discusses these questions and proposes that YouTube’s content categories and formats serve as frameworks through which aspects of trans life are highlighted and made into content. Content categories have a significant value, as they help to organise the millions of channels and billions of videos on YouTube, and provide a common vocabulary for advertisers, creators and viewers. Additionally, content categories assist advertisers and viewers in being able to target and better understand their audiences. More importantly, YouTube argues on its ‘Creators Academy’ page that viewers are often used to viewing videos in specific formats and lengths and with certain production values. Hence, these formats are of significant value, as the use of the right format contributes to being successful within a content category.
The findings suggest that mainstream trans content producers use content categories and formats to highlight transgender life as newsworthy, sensational, provocative and fun. Transgender vloggers use the vlog format to highlight personal aspects of trans life. By highlighting these aspects of trans life, YouTube trans content producers can reach large audiences.
5.2 Content categories as trans issue spaces
Every channel on YouTube is associated with a content category (see Figure 2 for an overview of content categories). Each of the videos appearing on the video list is accompanied by information about its content category, this allows to trace the different content categories used by the 22 actors who were most successful and visible on YouTube.
The findings show that videos containing transgender issues are most watched in six content categories: ‘news and politics’, ‘entertainment’, ‘people and blogs’, ‘how to and
