Abstract
Recent work on Internet discourse focuses extensively on social network sites, which now serve as the primary organizing location for trans individuals. Yet despite their declining popularity, stand-alone websites—often continuously maintained by a single owner—continue to serve as important resources for online information and discourse. This essay, first, locates the website within the history of transgender online publics and, second, considers their current complex position in the trans media landscape. In part, they serve as an accessible, living archive of English-language trans experience, tracking the evolution of web design aesthetics, community composition, and trans terminology. Yet sites’ temporal contexts—key to their archival status—are obscured when they are called up by search engines. The opacity of search algorithms’ indexing practices and their subsequent filtering of search results, then, point to the importance for new media scholars of accounting for platforms’ affordances and constraints.
