You can make a real argument that trans people popularized the very idea of adopting anonymous identities online in the early 1990s on then-popular Usenet listservs.
The use of online spaces by trans people to create anonymous identities that better match their internal selves is as old as the internet itself. She was out and living her life as a woman, a life she documents with some regularity on Twitter. By the time she talked to me for this story, she’d updated all her accounts to have the name Emily Day. She had public personas on sites like LiveJournal and Myspace in her former name, but she was much more active and made more friends through the accounts she created under a woman’s name and persona. In the years to come, Day would experiment with her own anonymous online profiles as she slowly fumbled toward coming out and beginning her transition in the early 2010s. And they were mostly anonymous, their legal identities hidden so they could better explore the people they actually were. The people on the message board (who were, in Day’s recollection, primarily women) were discussing the struggles both big and small that factor into everyday life as a trans person. Scrolling through that message board, actually getting to see people’s experiences, I got that feeling, like, ‘Holy shit, this is everything I’ve felt my entire childhood,’” Day said. “That was the first time where I was actually seeing other trans people talk.
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In the late 1990s, when she was a teenager living in a highly conservative part of Texas, Emily Day stumbled onto an internet message board full of trans people talking about their lives.