The return of the trans underground

In the early 1970s, long before social media and more than a decade before the first Internet forums, a woman named Peggy Ames became a human rolodex for trans women in New York State.

Born in Buffalo, Ames spent years working for gay rights organizations in rural and suburban areas of Western New York. In the days before the Internet, it wasn’t easy to meet other trans people outside of New York City’s densely populated neighborhoods. But Ames has built an extensive social network of trans women and cis allies through her work with the Erickson Education Foundation, which has funded research on transgender medical care, and the Mattachine Society of the Niagara Frontier Region, a local chapter of the pre-Stonewall-era gay rights group of the same name.

After being forcibly outed in 1973, Ames became one of the relatively few openly transgender women of public fame at the time. In the pre-Internet days, this made her someone trans women could turn to in hopes of reaching others like them. By the end of the decade, Ames estimated she knew about 100 more trans people in the Western New York area alone. As a public figure, she saw it as her responsibility to help connect the disparate members of her community.

Ames was one of many trans women who ran underground trans social networks like this in the 1970s and 1980s. It went like this: The best-connected, most visible trans woman would receive messages from other trans people from all over the country. She then digs into her little black book and writes back to the sender, including contact information for other trans people she has communicated with previously. At a time when many trans people were still isolated and alienated, these dedicated networks of pen pals were a lifeline.

This model of transgender activism seems quaint compared to today’s online communities. Even the terms that trans people use to refer to themselves have changed—some initially adopted the term “transgender,” while some have recently reclaimed the term “transgender” to emphasize the physical conditions of living in a trans body.

This deliberate use of the word “transgender” is, in part, a rejection of the utopian and assimilationist identity politics that have dominated the latter half of the last decade. With the explosion of online social media, political victories, and glossy magazine covers featuring stars like Laverne Cox, the 2000s saw transgender identity and visibility become the political spearhead of an inevitable progressive shift in gay rights, promising to end the centuries of discrimination and hidden shame that preceded it.

Of course, we all know what happened next.

The obsessive campaign to blame trans people for Charlie Kirk’s murder is just the latest and most extreme chapter in an anti-trans backlash that has been intensifying for years — creeping from D-list celebrity fixations and investigative forums like Kiwi Farms to a mainstream fascist movement supported by the highest levels of government. In just a few short decades, trans people have gone from living in relative obscurity to being scapegoats for the reactionary right, absurdly blamed for gun violence that they are statistically unlikely to commit, subjected to bad-faith media “debates” and discriminatory laws that challenge their right to exist in public spaces. For many, it’s an impossible situation: Once they believed the arc of history was bending in their favor, countless trans people are now living their lives openly online at the very moment that a destabilizing authoritarian surveillance state has declared them public enemies and targeted them for elimination.

Meanwhile, social media — once hailed as a tool for 21st-century revolutionaries — has turned into a weapon of surveillance and distraction. Instead of organizing and building political power in our communities, many of us find ourselves spiraling toward doom on the algorithmic hamster wheels of outcast billionaires like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg.

AI-powered social media surveillance has been ramped up under Donald Trump, and given his administration’s crusade against trans people, it’s not hard to do the math. According to public records, the Trump administration has contracted with at least four different AI-based surveillance companies that analyze social media posts and claim the ability to perform “sentiment and emotion analysis” for federal agencies like ICE. Even offline, the rise of facial recognition combined with the surveillance of public spaces like bathrooms creates new risks for transgender people and anyone else whose appearance does not conform to gender norms. Of course, any trans person who only posts or exists online always risks breaching containment and attracting the attention of the right-wing griftosphere community, leading to doxxing or worse.

However, I do not see this as a moment to despair, just a signal to change tactics.

The more I read about people like Peggy Ames, the more I think it’s time to ask whether the public internet has outlived its usefulness as a primary tool for political activism — trans or otherwise. I don’t mean that we should all ditch our phones and go back to our closets, but rather that we should reconsider the logic that says so much of our lives need to unfold over public networks. If we want LGBT people to survive, we will need to embrace the underground again, and know when to be visible and when to be silent.

in Going Incognito: Transgender Politics and American Surveillance PracticesToby Beauchamp summarizes the long history of state surveillance as a tool to police the bodies of trans and gender nonconforming people. The term “stealth” is a long-standing practice by transgender people to selectively hide their transgender status – not as a form of deception but in order to regain some level of control over their lives and safety, knowing that complete obscurity is usually impossible. Beauchamp explains this practice as a response to a society where suspicion and guilt are often preemptively assigned to people whose bodies are viewed as disabled, non-white, or trans. (He recalls how police were called in the wake of the Virginia Tech shooting, for example, to investigate a “suspicious” person on a school campus near Detroit, Michigan, who was described as a man wearing a blond wig and makeup.) More recently, the Trump administration has stepped up efforts to reverse gender marker changes on ID cards like passports, which make information on a person’s documents no longer match their appearance. The goal is quite clear: to make a trans person’s status visible, and therefore vulnerable to discrimination by agents of state violence in airports, bathrooms, and anywhere else where police are present.

These are just a few examples of why trans people build their entire lives around navigating the gaze of the state. It should come as no surprise, given this reality, that more trans people are now choosing to take back control and embrace lifestyles that deprioritize online visibility in favor of personal safety.

This approach does not have to be all or nothing. In a recent article, writer Margaret Killjoy coined the term “demiground” to describe what post-Internet hybrid activism might look like. The idea of ​​this model is to divide your online/offline life into multiple separate boxes, all with varying degrees of visibility and measured risk. Your “A” life includes all your social media with your more “acceptable”/unwarm personality, providing cover for your “B” and “C” lives, which prioritize personal connection and unfold with varying levels of public ambiguity (and sometimes legality).

The goal is not to withdraw from online spaces and give the fascists what they want, but to establish a more disciplined level of control over your digital footprint. “In order to fill the area halfway, we need to make it as attractive as possible,” Kiljoy writes. “It should be clear that there is not only political value in being obscure to the state, but that it is also a better and more fulfilling way to live.”

This idea is not new, and has been widely practiced by people living in a precarious relationship with state violence, such as sex workers. I’ve seen this “hybrid” approach manifest in my queer and trans social circles as an insistence on moving more discussions to end-to-end encrypted platforms like Signal (or, for less risky conversations, server-based platforms like Discord, which can be subject to court subpoenas). But more important than the tools themselves is the mindset that determines how and when they are used. It might be a good idea to regularly check in with your people via encrypted group chats, Discord calls, or even Bluesky. But we can’t always let them fill the time they spend organizing face-to-face with neighbors.

In other words, we should think of online tools as a way to facilitate—not replace—the kind of communication and local organizing that helps LGBT people survive.

While to talk about any specific efforts in detail would violate the aforementioned Golden Rule (Shut The Fuck Up), suffice it to say that the more complex the political situation becomes for trans people and other marginalized people, the greater the need to work to stay underground. There are already local networks that help trans people get medical care, fight discrimination, and transition away from countries hostile to their lives. By taking an “if you need to know, you know” approach to these activities – especially when they exist in gray areas of the law, such as abortion – we can create social barriers that resist the gaze of the state and the insatiable viral hunger of corporate internet platforms.

The basic activity done in underground work and its various levels in the online/offline community is not meant to be glamorous. It’s not “content” to be shared by influencers in the form of a slickly edited TikTok, a provocative tweet, or an Instagram slide deck. It’s the non-monetizable, not-so-sexy work of people like Peggy Ames, who saw it as her responsibility to help people like her connect and organize outside of spaces that despised and rejected them. As a trans lesbian, Peggy struggled to be accepted by many cis feminists, and was expelled from several Buffalo-area lesbian groups, where her mannerisms and “traditional” feminine style of dress were mercilessly scrutinized as “proof” that she was truly a man. At the same time, her personal relationships and long history of activism made her a kind of local celebrity in the LGBTQ community, giving her a unique opportunity to help unite the disparate transgender community in the days before the Internet.

This is not to downplay the role that online communities — and social media in particular — have played in uniting many trans people. After isolation and confusion, the advent of the Internet has empowered transgender youth and adults to name and explain long-suppressed feelings by talking to others like them. While right-wing reactionaries created a moral panic about the “social contagion” turning our children into trans people, it was not the number of trans people that increased, it was the extent of ultra-fast communication networks that could show them they were not alone.

However, online social networking is just a tool, and tools must be constantly re-evaluated to ensure they still serve our needs. The dedicated networks created by trans women like Peggy Ames may not be a blueprint for trans liberation in 2025. But they are a reminder that queer and trans people have always found ways to survive in the underground — and in the various shades of gray that exist in between.