In the early 1970s, long before social media and more than a decade before the earliest internet forums, a woman named Peggie Ames became a human rolodex for trans women in New York state.
Born in Buffalo, Ames spent years working for gay rights organizations in the rural and suburban areas of Western New York. In the days before the internet, it wasn’t easy to meet other trans folks outside the densely populated boroughs of New York City. But Ames had built an extensive social network of trans women and cis allies through her work with the Erickson Educational Foundation, which funded research on trans medical care, and the Mattachine Society of the Niagara Frontier, a local offshoot of the pre-Stonewall-era gay rights group of the same name.
After she was forcibly outed in 1973, Ames became one of the relatively few openly transsexual women with a public profile at the time. In the pre-internet days, this made her someone that trans women turned to in the hopes of reaching others like them. By the end of the decade, Ames estimated that she knew around 100 other trans people in the Western New York area alone. As a public figure, she saw it as her responsibility to help connect the scattered members of her community.
Ames was one of several trans women who ran underground trans social networks like this in the ’70s and ’80s. It worked like this: A well-connected and more publicly visible trans woman would receive letters from other trans people from around the country. She would then dig through her little black book and write back to the sender, including contact information for other trans people she had previously connected with. At a time when many trans people were still closeted and isolated, these ad hoc pen pal networks were a lifeline.
This model of trans activism seems quaint compared to the Extremely Online communities of today. Even the terms trans people use to refer to themselves have changed — first adopting “transgender,” with some more recently reclaiming “transsexual” to emphasize the material conditions of living in a trans body.
This intentional use of “transsexual” is, in part, a rejection of the utopian, assimilationist identity politics that dominated the latter half of the previous decade. With an explosion of online social media, policy wins, and glossy magazine covers featuring stars like Laverne Cox, the 2010s saw trans identity and visibility become the political spearhead of a supposedly inevitable progressive shift for LGBTQ rights, promising an end to the centuries of discrimination and closeted shame that had preceded it.
Of course, we all know what happened next.
The obsessive campaign to blame trans people for the killing of Charlie Kirk is just the latest and most extreme chapter of the anti-trans backlash that has been intensifying for years — creeping from the fixations of D-list celebrities and doxxing forums like Kiwi Farms to a mainstream fascist movement supported by the highest levels of government. In just a few short decades, trans people went from living in relative obscurity to a scapegoat of the reactionary right, absurdly blamed for gun violence they’re statistically unlikely to commit and subjected to bad-faith media “debates” and discriminatory laws challenging their right to exist in public. For many, it’s an impossible situation: once believing the arc of history to be bending in their favor, countless trans people now live out their lives publicly online at the very moment that an unhinged authoritarian surveillance state has declared them public enemies and targeted them for elimination.
I don’t see this as a moment to despair — it’s merely a sign to change tactics
At the same time, social media — once hailed as the tool of 21st-century revolutionaries — has been transformed into a weapon of surveillance and distraction. Instead of organizing and building political power in our communities, many of us find ourselves doomscrolling through hot takes on algorithmic hamster wheels owned by billionaire reprobates like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg.
AI-powered social media surveillance has been supercharged 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-driven surveillance companies that analyze social media posts and claim the ability to perform “sentiment & emotion analysis” for federal agencies like ICE. Even offline, the rise of facial recognition combined with transphobic policing of public spaces like bathrooms creates new risks for trans people and anyone else whose appearance doesn’t conform to gendered norms. And of course, any trans person posting or merely existing online always risks breaking containment and drawing the attention of the right-wing Griftosphere, resulting in doxxing or worse.
Still, I don’t see this as a moment to despair — it’s merely a sign to change tactics.
The more I read about people like Peggie Ames, the more I think it’s time for us to ask whether the public internet has outlived its usefulness as our primary tool for political activism — trans or otherwise. I don’t mean that we should all throw away our phones and go back into the closet, but rather reconsider the logic that so much of our lives needs to unfold over public networks. If queer and trans folks are going to survive, we’ll need to once again embrace the underground, and learn when to be visible and when to shut the fuck up.
In Going Stealth: Transgender Politics and U.S. Surveillance Practices, Toby Beauchamp outlines the long history of state surveillance as a tool for policing the bodies of trans and gender-nonconforming people. The term “going stealth” is the long-standing practice of trans people selectively obscuring their transsexual status — not as a form of deception but in order to regain some level of control over their lives and safety, knowing that perfect obscurity is usually impossible. Beauchamp illustrates this practice as a response to a society where suspicion and guilt are often preemptively assigned to people whose bodies are perceived as disabled, non-white, or gender-transgressive. (He recalls how in the immediate aftermath of the Virginia Tech shooting, for example, police were called to investigate a “suspicious” person on a school campus near Detroit, Michigan, who was described as a man wearing a blonde wig and makeup.) More recently, the Trump administration ramped up its efforts to nullify gender marker changes on IDs like passports, making it so the information on a person’s documents doesn’t match up with their appearance. The goal of this is crystal clear: to make a person’s transsexual status legible, and thus subject to discrimination by agents of state violence in airports, bathrooms, and anywhere else policing is present.
These are just a few examples of why trans people often construct their entire lives around navigating the state’s gaze. And it shouldn’t be surprising, 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 doesn’t have to be all or nothing. In a recent essay, trans author Margaret Killjoy coins the term “demiground” to describe what a post-internet hybrid activism might look like. The idea of this paradigm is to compartmentalize your online / offline life into multiple discrete boxes, all with varying degrees of visibility and measured risk. Your “A” life includes all your social media with your most “palatable” / non-spicy persona, providing cover for your “B” and “C” lives, which prioritize in-person communication and unfold with different levels of public obscurity (and sometimes legality).
The goal isn’t to retreat from online spaces and give fascists what they want, but to create a more disciplined level of control over your digital footprint. “In order to populate the demiground, we need to make it as inviting as possible,” Killjoy writes. “It needs to be clear that not only is there political value in being obscure to the state, but that it is also a better and more fulfilling way to live.”
Online social networks are just a tool, and tools need to be constantly reevaluated to make sure they’re still serving our needs
This idea is not new, and has been widely practiced by people who live in a precarious relation to state violence, like sex workers. I’ve seen this “hybrid” approach manifesting in my own queer and trans social circles as an insistence on moving more discussions to end-to-end encrypted platforms like Signal (or for less risky chats, 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’re 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 in for time spent organizing face-to-face with neighbors.
In other words, we should be thinking of online tools as a means of facilitating — and not replacing — the kind of connection and local organizing that help queer and trans people survive.
While talking about any specific efforts in detail would violate the aforementioned golden rule (Shut The Fuck Up), suffice it to say that the dicier the political situation gets for trans people and other marginalized folks, the more survival work will need to be carried out in the underground. Localized networks that help trans people access medical care, combat discrimination, and relocate away from states hostile to their lives already exist. By taking an “if you need to know, you know” approach to these activities — especially when they exist in gray areas of the law, like abortion — we can create social buffers that resist the gaze of the state and the insatiable viral hunger of corporate internet platforms.
The essential activism being done in the underground and its various levels of online / offline community is not meant to be glamorous. It’s not “content” to be shared by influencers as a slickly edited TikTok, or an edgy tweet, or an Instagram slide deck. It’s the un-monetizeable and deeply unsexy work done by people like Peggie Ames, who saw it as her responsibility to help people like her connect and organize outside of the spaces that scorned and rejected them. As a trans lesbian, Peggie had struggled to be accepted by many cis feminists, and was expelled from several lesbian groups in the Buffalo area, where her mannerisms and more “traditional” style of feminine dress were ruthlessly scrutinized as “evidence” that she was really a man. At the same time, her personal connections 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 trans community in the days before the internet.
This is not to understate the role that online communities — and social media in particular — played in uniting many trans people. Once isolated and confused, the rise of the internet empowered trans youth and adults to name and explain long-suppressed feelings by talking to others like them. While right-wing reactionaries manufactured moral panics about a “social contagion” turning our kids trans, it wasn’t the number of trans people that had grown — it was the reach of light-speed communication networks that can show them they’re not alone.
Even still, online social networks are just a tool, and tools need to be constantly reevaluated to make sure they’re still serving our needs. The ad hoc networks created by trans women like Peggie 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 the various shades of gray that exist in between.
