Please Don’t Be Mad At Me But Transition Showed Me How The Incel Pipeline Works

What happens when social media algorithms see you as a man? And how dangerous can it get?

The last time I saw my friend Jay, we had an hour-long conversation at a party about how incels treat trans men. He was telling me about self-identified incels commenting on a YouTube video of trans men talking about how much harder dating was as a man (I don’t know how he ended up on that side of YouTube, but we love an ally.) And to my surprise, he told me the comments weren’t all negative. As Jay explained, a lot of incels were… supporting these trans men, I guess?… by commenting a line from Pirates of the Caribbean that’s become a meme: “part of the ship, part of the crew.”

The conversation came up because, maybe embarrassingly, it was relevant. We were comparing dating woes, and I was complaining about not knowing how to handle my new position as “guy who’s supposed to initiate.” This, apparently, was enough to validate me as a man in certain corners of the internet. Based on what Jay told me, it seemed that one of the most notably vitriolic parts of the internet, one that especially hates all kinds of women and trans people… saw trans men as men if their suffering was the same as lonely cis men. To those people, loneliness— presumably with dating— would make me a man, in some twisted version of masculinity that centers itself around how other people see them.

To be clear, I don’t think dating being harder is anywhere close to the material societal oppression trans people and women face, particularly trans women, especially trans women of color. I can still acknowledge that feeling bad is feeling bad, even if it exists on a different end of the scale. The issue isn’t even really about dating, either, but I’ll get back to that. It can’t be denied that incels are suffering, even if the ways they take it out on others are often racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, and on and on through the list of things that rot your soul.

I’m by no means suggesting anyone take so much pity on incels that they excuse those transgressions. Instead, I’m (nervously) admitting that being a man on the internet for a couple years now has made it abundantly clear how that pipeline starts. And frankly, the trans man sector of the internet isn’t immune to the same problems.

I have seen The Posts and I am changed (negatively).

Incels’ sense of masculinity is obsessed with how other people see them. They seem to post primarily hoping to reach other men for advice on how to attract women: is my jawline sharp enough? Am I too short to ever find love? Does this perfectly normal but slightly stylish jacket make me look gay, and is that why women (or as Reddit post titles often uncomfortably say, “females”) don’t appreciate my advances?

I know what these posts look like because I’m getting them recommended to me all the time. Some of it is cis male incel stuff leaking through my algorithm on Reddit and Instagram, even when I click the appropriate “I’m not interested” buttons. On the mildest end of things, there’s always another not-so-subtly misogynist AITA post waiting to find me somehow.

But I also know what these posts look like because, frankly, a lot of trans male spaces online are the same thing in a different font if you zoom out. It’s barely changed. Is my jawline sharp enough? Am I too short to ever pass? Does this perfectly normal but slightly stylish jacket make me look trans?

It starts there, and you assume that because you’re thinking these things in a trans-specific way, that you’re not in the same pipeline as all these other guys. Then you start getting recommended posts about how, for example, cis men are frustrated that society sees them as less masculine for being under six feet tall. You agree with that, and the moment of solidarity feels nice. All of the comments are men blaming other people for not seeing them how they want to be seen, mostly women. You know you don’t agree with that part, but whatever app you’re on doesn’t care what you think inside your head. It knows you spent time in that comment section, so you’re going to get served more of this. You close a Reel of a dog with a funny haircut and get recommended a car rant video of a cis man complaining that misandry is real.

Clicking “not interested” on everything doesn’t change the fact that you know what a canthal tilt is now, even if it’s against your will. For every whack-a-mole piece of incel-adjacent content you try to smack down, five more will pop up.

That stuff feels obviously bad for your soul, so you go back over to the trans corners of the internet.

But you can’t get away, and instead of it being a separate space, the alpha male shit and the trans shit are combining into a new beast and serving you transmedicalism. For anyone who’s avoided the discourse enough to not know (and I envy you), transmedicalism is believing that only people who experience dysphoria and medically transition are trans. They try to sell it as “being trans is a medical condition that should be treated like any other,” which sounds fine on the surface. But when you dig into it, it invalidates nonbinary identities entirely and demands that passing as cis be the ultimate goal of everybody’s transition. Anyone else is not trans.

I disagree with transmedicalism and any form of policing someone else’s gender experience, but that didn’t keep the subtext of transmedicalism from seeping into my views of myself, especially since passing as cis happens to be the ultimate goal of my transition. I’m putting the same level of mental effort into achieving cis masculinity as transmeds are, and even if I’m not applying the same level of gatekeeping to other people, a) I’m still gatekeeping myself out of a comfortable masculinity with my own thoughts a lot of the time, and b) I can see how easy it would be to fall into the trap of “I agree with the end goals, so maybe I also should agree with the means, and maybe everyone who doesn’t think like me is wrong.”

T-boy transmed thought looks just like incel thought when you point it at the self: I don’t feel like a man enough, and I’m going to spend all my brainpower categorizing what’s wrong with me to fix that, otherwise I don’t deserve to feel like a man. At its core, it’s a lot of misplaced anger and self-hate that I wish was easier to untangle.

Incel anger isn’t about dating. It’s about isolation.

I’m not saying anything new here by suggesting that incels are lonely. Male loneliness epidemic, it may not be their fault but it is their problem to solve, etc. etc. Incels talk repeatedly about feeling alone, but they’re not really alone when they have a whole community of people who they’re bonded with over their shared hatred. They just don’t think they’re allowed to value those relationships since they’re not romantic or sexual. It’s more alpha male to be a lone wolf, except of course for your perfect trad wife who has no personality except loving you. It’s a terrible irony when a community forms over being alone.

A lot of transmed male spaces are, similarly, communities of trans men that feel mostly alone and feel solidarity over who they hate. But instead of the focus being on dating, these target two levels: outwardly hating anyone who doesn’t fit into a binary trans mold, and inwardly hating themselves. There isn’t even a facade of confidence like there can be in alpha male-type spaces. No group is a monolith online or offline, but most transmed male social media that I’ve personally seen seems uplifting of each other (if they fit the mold, of course) yet hopeless about themselves.

There are jacked men with full beards nervously asking if they pass. They are talking about skull shapes. Eventually, I absorb phrenology terms no one is ever supposed to care about just by being trans and online and trying to look more masculine. For someone who was never on 4chan, it sure does feel like it’s come to me.

Basically the entire gist of how I think social media reinforces internalized transphobia is summarized in this comic. My compliments to the chef

I think of my YouTube comment conversation with Jay often.

Jay died last year. There’s no clever turn of phrase to get past the hurtful fact that it happened. I miss him all the time, and increasingly often, I wish I could ask him: what the fuck do you think that YouTube thing was all about??? The “part of the ship, part of the crew” bit seemed like a lighthearted joke to both of us in the moment, but the more I watch my social media algorithms (and my self-perception of masculinity) change, the more I need to talk to someone about the sinister shit underneath. He was one of many of my cis friends that I considered a positive role model for masculinity, but for reasons that may not be helping me, I usually don’t talk to my cis boys about trans stuff. It was nice to feel an exception to that with him. He was someone who didn’t have to change how he treated me after transition since he’d treated me like One Of The Boys the whole time we knew each other. Somehow the lesson never sticks that I should probably try opening up to friends more often.

But that’s the thing. By not talking to cis dudes about real feelings going on in my life more often, I’m participating in the exact “guys don’t have emotional friendship connections” thing that I feel surrounded by. I don’t talk to my cis guy friends about thoughts on masculinity because I feel like talking about transness would be a burden. I don’t talk to my trans friends about it because believe it or not, trans people don’t love hearing how discouraging transition feels and all the kinds of masculine I worry I’ll never get to be. I worry my hopelessness will spread like a virus, so I quarantine myself. The kind of loneliness I feel is one of being alone with my thoughts on masculinity, trans and otherwise.

If so many men feel this isolation, if entire communities are being formed on the hate it lets fester, why don’t they just have a conversation about it to process before it gets to such a vitriolic point?

Because the internet tells them not to every single day.

The vicious cycle continues: men feel isolated so they turn to the internet, which then tells them it’s other people’s fault that they’re isolated, and they can’t fix it so they might as well post about their hate together. The isolation becomes the identity until fewer and fewer men are left to reach out to each other.

You don’t start to poison your thoughts because you think “the internet” thinks something. The poisoning starts when you begin to think, “maybe most people have felt this way all along. Maybe I just didn’t know.”

I alternate between months where I have no idea what I look like and weeks where I can tell you exactly which eyebrow hairs are new because I need them to be groomed as masculinely as possible (whatever the fuck that means). The brain worms are in and I can’t seem to get rid of them. I am comfortable talking about my transness in my creative expressions but hate it in my day to day life.

I analyze and criticize myself just how Boy Internet taught me to. Is my jawline sharp enough? Am I too short to ever pass? Does this perfectly normal but slightly stylish jacket make me look trans? I don’t have to wonder if cis men feel similarly. When I open social media, I am bombarded with it.

I get how the pipeline goes now.

The thing that is stopping me from going down the incel pipeline other than like, love and knowledge and empathy, is the fact that I have community in real life. Incels and transmeds hate whole categories of people that often encompass my closest friends, and I can’t conjure up that hate in my heart for a whole community when individuals have been kind to me. I may be a hater on an individual level, but incels and transmeds are beyond me. Also, my thoughts on an entire identity do not hinge on people being nice to me, since that would essentially be asking people to emotionally earn their way out of oppression. No marginalized person owes incels their time in the interest of acclimating those incels to knowing people outside their bubble, and I can’t in good conscience recommend that anyone try. Simultaneously, I think that incels having real life community outside their bubble would pop a lot of the worst thoughts. I’m not sure how to reconcile these two ideas.

The other thing stopping me from going down the pipeline is I’m trans. No amount of “part of the ship, part of the crew” comments will ever give me the illusion that wanna-be alpha male communities would accept me even if I wanted them to.

What if I wasn’t trans? What if I didn’t have real-life friends and loved ones supporting me? Take those aspects away and honestly, I get how incel-ification happens. I disagree with it entirely, but I used to have no idea how anyone could even come upon those beliefs. It’s scarier to say that I get it now. It’s scarier to say that even if I can’t empathize, I can, to the smallest degree, sympathize. My brain worms are a product of an online force I never wanted to be influenced by, yet knowing I don’t want that isn’t enough to keep the thoughts out.

I go to Trader Joe’s and buy a couple skincare items. I feel anxious to check out since I worry these items are seen as “for girls.” By worrying this, I’m the one seeing them as for girls. I don’t want to think this way. I carry the flimsy grocery bag home in my arms since it feels too feminine to rest it on my hip. I don’t want to think this way. I get home and catch myself in the mirror for a little too long.

Is my jawline sharp enough? Am I too short to ever pass? Will I ever stop thinking this way?