For young transgender people who dont live in cities with active LGBTQIA+ havens or those who face danger for even presenting as queer in any way online spaces such as Discord have been a critical vehicle for socializing. For the uninitiated: The platform, which launched in 2015 but blew up during the pandemic for obvious reasons, is made up of various spaces that allow people to chat in real time while engaging in other activities simultaneously. Some of these spaces, called servers, are public while others are private and invite-only. Theyre all created, however, to gather like-minded individuals think gaming, anime and, thankfully, queer-centered servers.

A recent Google search for transgender Discord servers revealed 865 public servers tagged as LGBTQ, 85 as trans, and 29 as nonbinary. Many of these spaces serve as a support group of sorts a form of therapy where trans users feel comfortable exchanging valuable intel about where they got their hormones, advice on how to come out to a parent, or how to immigrate to a country where its legal to be transgender, for example. There are also compassionate and candid conversations among server members about feminizing or masculinizing beauty and fashion advice about expressing your most authentic physical self that comes from personal experience.

This resource pooling can be helpful, or even lifesaving, for people living in transgender resource deserts. While some might have a mentor they can contact, or an institution (i.e., school, church, or community centers like the YMCA and Planned Parenthood), others really just have the vast, sometimes cold, expanse of the internet.

Ashleigh Hill and Leigho SweetGrass Remster are co-leaders of the Transgender Community Center Discord server to help those who identify as trans connect and pool resources. The Transgender Community Center wanted to create space that was just for us, they said.

By centering transgender users, individuals can spend less time educating cisgender users about the 101s of identity and focus more on meeting trans-specific needs. We wanted to have a space where we just get it, Remster said.

Transpeak , a server currently owned by Luna Youngquist, admits a small number of those who identify as cisgender users (approximately 5% of members), but mostly aims to cater to trans people. Even before [Discord] we started life on Teamspeak, and back in 2014, the world was a very different place, she said. The policy of primarily admitting transgender users, she says, evolved from the sentiment that there is a need to educate and support, and those resources cant be found outside of a concentrated community of transgender people. For cisgender users who may have transition-related questions, the server has a Transition Questions channel.

The reality is that queer havens exist on several social media platforms TikTok users, especially, have been bringing clever and informative content that deserves all the props. But in a political climate particularly hostile to queer people, our collective goal should be about more than information; it should be about protecting trans users from all forms of violence.

The hope, for many Discord community leaders, is to prevent and combat harassment transgender individuals consistently face online. In 2021, ADL reported that 64% of LGBTQ+ survey respondents experienced online harassment, and 36% experienced severe harassment, which includes physical threats, doxing, stalking and swatting where hoax 911 calls are placed en masse in order to draw police to a victims location.