At the same time, capturing how vloggers and trans allies respond to (intentional or unintentional) text-based forms of prejudice, can create teachable moments for YouTube spectators. Stance-taking enables us to identify and track reoccurring attitudes steeped in cisgenderism. In this article, I draw on critical discourse analytic studies of new media and stance-taking as I review and analyse discriminatory strategies – principally misgendering and ungendering – that YouTubers used to denigrate the self-identified gender of a given vlogger. Although scholars have discussed different worldmaking and community organising practices that take place as trans vloggers display their gendered subjectivities online, there is sparse scholarship studying the recurrent patterns of behaviour on the comment space below these videos.

As a genre, time-lapse videos comprise creative worldmaking practices where users document their gender transformations using hundreds to thousands of still photos or video segments which show their social, somatic, and biochemical changes. On YouTube, vloggers can present images and videos of their bodies as they document their gender transitions through several practices that rely on temporality and time-space compression. The distribution and consumption of transgender time-lapse videos on YouTube have increased over the last few decades, providing trans communities with a valuable resource for self-making.

Youtube time lapse tool