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Gender Identity As Job
Reacting to Philosophy Tube’s Identity: A Trans Coming Out Story
Content warning: This essay discusses suicide ideation and eating disorders.
This weekend, prominent leftist Youtuber Philosophy Tube (aka Abigail Thorn) came out as a transgender woman. A few hours after making heartfelt coming-out posts on Twitter and Tumblr, she released a 37-minute Youtube video about her journey, entitled Identity: A Trans Coming Out Story.
As a trans person and Philosophy Tube fan, this was a welcome and eagerly anticipated announcement. I’d noticed, as many fans had, that Abigail had hinting about being trans online for the past several months. Her appearance had been changing, and several times she had to step in and discourage fans from speculating about why. I figured she would come out when she was ready, when she felt secure and ready to take on the deluge of ignorance that would inevitably follow. As it turned out, she happened to schedule her coming-out video for the same day that electronic musician and trans trailblazer Sophie died, providing much-needed good news on an otherwise grief-filled day.
Even if you’re not familiar with Abigail’s content, I recommend checking the video out. You don’t really need any prior context to make sense of it, because in the course of the video, Abigail charts how she progressed from being a beloved leftist “man,” to recognizing that the role she’d been assigned didn’t fit, to finally staking out an identity of her own. It’s a review of seven years of being closeted while in the public eye, presented in a theatrical, yet deeply vulnerable way.
For the first half of the video, a male actor who looks very much the way Abigail used to look reads her words from a script. He stands in the middle of a stage, in an empty theater, discomfort palpable in his defensive body language. In a stilted, performative way, the actor speaks about the pain of being viewed as a man, and the dissonance Abigail felt when fans used to tell her that she offered them a…
