Knopp, LawrenceDavenport, Theodore2025-10-022025-10-022025Davenport_washington_0250E_28842.pdfhttps://hdl.handle.net/1773/54035Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 2025Over the past three decades, the popularization of the Internet has reshaped the spatialities of transgender intracommunity care practices. As the personal computer became a commonplace fixture in the home, gender-diverse people were increasingly able to access trans communities, information about trans life, and spaces encouraging gender play. In recent years, however, anti-trans actors have instigated a moral panic by claiming that online trans spaces are "turning" people (especially children) transgender, ignoring histories of both offline and online trans placemaking and caring practices. This qualitative, mixed-methods dissertation explores how trans people in the US have engaged in online community care practices since the Internet became publicly available in the mid-1990s. Drawing from archival materials and interviews, I evaluate how trans people have enacted care practices in digital spaces throughout the history of the Internet and how such digital care practices might provide political potential for trans justice. Using a feminist methodological approach and drawing from literature on digital geographies, care ethics, and critical trans politics, I ask, how are transgender digital worlds and the material conditions of everyday trans life are intertwined? My findings challenge the popular understanding of online trans spaces as uniform spaces with similar politics and care practices. I explore what makes a space—particularly an online space—trans and discuss the spatial characteristics that were most prominent in my interviews and archival materials. In the archives, I find that early Internet users—who tended to be white, middle-upper class, and in governmental or academic jobs—played a large role in popularizing "transgender" as an umbrella term that, contradictorily, had both the potential for new cross-gender political coalitions and imbuing respectability politics into trans narratives. Although the "trans Internet" is often conceptualized as a monolith, my interviews uncover that trans people of color and disabled trans people often seek out online spaces that explicitly center antiracism and disability justice after experiencing microaggressions on mainstream online trans spaces. Many online trans spaces are suffering under the current era of platform capitalism-driven Internet, the extractive nature of which excludes trans spaces except as cultural commodities. Across interviews and archives, I find that trans-centered storytelling—both fictional and nonfictional—is a major way trans people explore their gender identities and build communities. Finally, I evaluate the role of algorithms in reinscribing transmisogynistic narratives around sexuality; positioning trans and gender diverse people as predators; and automating the censorship of online trans voices. This work emphasizes the necessity of trans care while resisting characterizing the Internet as a panacea for trans injustice, situating findings within the Internet's origins as a military technology and its continued usage in perpetuating colonialism, racism, ableism, transphobia, and other forms of injustice.application/pdfen-USCC BY-NC-SAcare geographydigital geographyfeminist geographyInternet studiestrans studiestransgenderGeographyGender studiesLGBTQ studiesGeographyThesis