Abstract
With the emergence of short video-sharing platforms, engagement with social media sites devoted to opinion and knowledge dissemination has rapidly increased. Among these platforms, TikTok is one of the most popular globally and has become the platform of choice for transgender and nonbinary individuals, who have formed a large community to mobilize personal experience and exchange information. The knowledge produced in online spaces can influence the ways in which people understand and experience their own gender and transitions, as they hear about others and weigh experiential and medical knowledge against their own. This paper extends current research and past interview methods on gender euphoria and gender dysphoria to analyze what and how online communities on TikTok discuss these two types of gender experiences. Our findings indicate that gender euphoria and gender dysphoria are differently described in online TikTok spaces. These findings indicate similarities in the words used to describe gender dysphoria as well as gender euphoria in both the comments of videos and content creators’ hashtags. Finally, our results show that gender euphoria is described in more similar terms between transfeminine and transmasculine experiences than gender dysphoria, which appears to be more differentiated by gendering experience and transition goals. We hope this paper can provide insights for future research on understanding transgender and nonbinary individuals in online communities.
S. J. Dillon and Y. Liang—Equal contribution.
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Notes
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Transfeminine and transmasculine are terms used to describe transgender experiences. Transmasculine refers to people who are transitioning to a more masculine gender and/or presentation, including trans men, FTM (female-to-male) transsexuals, transmasculine nonbinary people, and so on. Transfeminine refers to people who are transitioning to a more feminine gender and/or presentation, including trans women, MTF (male-to-female) transsexuals, transfeminine nonbinary people, and the like. Our data do not currently get at the experiences of transgender nonbinary people who do not identify as transmasculine or transfeminine.
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This material is based upon work supported by NSF (SaTC-2241068 and IIS-2339198), and a Cisco Research Award.
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Dillon, S.J., Liang, Y., Russell Bernard, H., Shu, K. (2025). Investigating Gender Euphoria and Dysphoria on TikTok: Characterization and Comparison. In: Aiello, L.M., Chakraborty, T., Gaito, S. (eds) Social Networks Analysis and Mining. ASONAM 2024. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 15213. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-78548-1_24
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