Getting Together to Recognize Oneself
Online anonymous communication offers socially stigmatized individuals new ways of getting together and sharing common practices or experiences away from the rest of society and its imposed negative labels. By doing so, forum participants reappropriate their own experiences through careful use of language as they reconfigure the meaning of identities and practices that once were considered deviant or, according to the medical discourse, pathological. Our research shows how an online community of trans people helps its members find new perspective and meaning in their particular experience of their bodies and genders, and examines how they achieve self- and mutual recognition. In their efforts to rethink their own experiences they are confronted with many different, sometimes contradictory conceptions of gender identity and trans experience. Our analysis focuses on how forum moderators and members control online exchanges and regulate discourse and how this affects the emerging consensus among group members.