Looking through old Geocities feels like digging through an ancient town buried under volcanic ash. While many websites were obliterated by the magma, the volcanic ash froze many in stone. I rummage through websites to find people doing exactly what they did in a crucial snapshot of time, from giving a speech in the public square to relaxing in the privacy of their digital homes. The ash structures I see make up an online transfeminine community thriving on Geocities. On the "professional listings" section of Transgender Tapestry Issue 87, many local transgender resources invite readers to check out their websites on Geocities, including the U.K. Chapter of the Vanity Club, a trans-only sorority. Speaking on its origins in the decentralized web, the current Vanity Club website writes. "The Vanity Club was founded in 1996 with the advent of the internet--we finally had a way to connect with others like ourselves." It began as an online community, developing to support in-person meetings between trans women. Often, trans women on Geocities would direct one another to advice for living as trans women. The case study of Vickie's Vixens exemplifies this. Thanks to Geocities' accessibility, any transfeminine WestHollywood user could email Vickie, request to join "The Girls," and have her picture put up in Vickie's yearbook, allowing trans women to see other trans women, fighting the isolation that comes with transness. Also, the homepage contains several helpful (now broken) links for new trans women, including a makeup guide, a guide to grooming your own eyebrows, a link to a feminizing exercise routine, and a link to an online makeup storefront that had a section for trans women. Many trans women used Geocities to express themselves, even if they're unable to in real cities. In one Geocity, a trans woman who, having just realized she's trans and not yet picked a name, goes by Mrs. X and struggles with her feelings in an online journal, depicted below. In another Geocity, (which I will e-mail to the professor) a trans woman shared pictures of herself with her family. I am 19 years old. I do not have kids, hamsters, or cats. But seeing her smiling alongside her children, living a happy life while being transgender moved me to tears. So I can only imagine how this affected closeted trans women closer to her situation, who might be hiding in a marriage, staying closeted to keep their children. It's such a potent rejection of the internalized thoughts that many trans women have, telling us our transness will ruin our lives, separate us from our families, and get us ostracized from public life. But look! She's at the aquarium with her kids! And she's glowing in her dress!
It's a story that uplifts transness by separating it from romance and tragedy and grounding it in the normalcy of an aquarium trip. In a decade that deemed their identity taboo, Geocities allowed transfeminine people to meet others like them, get advice for living as a trans person, and express themselves to others, no matter how far they lived from the nearest openly trans woman.
Returning to the metaphor of Geocities existing as the preserved remains of another era, the volcano is the fall of decentralized social media sites like LiveJournal, MySpace, and Geocities. According to Stephen Shankland, Yahoo shut down Geocities in the United States in 2009, citing limited financial resources that weren't worth wasting on "last decade's trend." The company encouraged users to host their websites using professional web-hosting services, which required more technical know-how than many Geocities users had. Thus, every site that wasn't archived or moved was deleted. Shankland writes, "The way people choose to express themselves on the Internet is shifting away from isolated Web pages. Instead, they use social networking sites such as Facebook, with built-in features for creating a profile, staying in touch with contacts, and maintaining at least a little privacy." Yet, the rise of centralized social media hurt trans women. It may seem obvious (if it doesn't, look up "Libs of Tiktok" on Twitter), but WestHollywood isolated trans women from the critical eyes of transphobic society, and centralizing social media brought transphobic eyes to trans bodies. Sabrina Prater posted videos of herself dancing on TikTok, like many cis people do. Unlike most cis people on TikTok, a portion of her followers were convinced she was a serial killer. According to Ej Dickson from Rolling Stone, some TikTok users reported the videos to the local police. Users of centralized social media will get videos they don't actively seek out served to them, making it possible for a violently transphobic culture to run into a video of a trans woman and delude itself into thinking she's hiding bodies in her basement. However, in Neocities, users wouldn't find a trans person's content unless they actively sought it out by searching through WestHollywood for trans women's pages. Why would a cishet transphobe surf WestHollywood? They wouldn't!
Yet, this city isn't covered in ash-gray. Somehow, the volcanic ash managed to preserve the neon colors of the early web, which Neocities users capitalized on to inform their websites' contents. Consider The Kelzone, a popular Neocity that's shown above. Throughout the page, notice all the text can be found in Windows-XP style panels, harkening back to the aughts. On your left, you'll see a fake Adobe Flash ad sponsored by Robert Downey Jr. Even outside of aesthetics, the spirit of trans Geocities lies in trans Neocities. The Kelzone's author uses their site for self-expression: it's a list of things the author likes, perfectly decorated with CSS to convey its author's personality, much like a Geocity.
But, something's different. Right? The Geocities I showed earlier weren't that nicely decorated. Nor were they this irony-based: While the Kelzone has jokes about wild skeleton attacks and mythical beings trapped in HTML stamps, Vickie's Vixens has an extended, earnest humor page with like a dozen shower thoughts and topical mom-jokes. The amateur aesthetics of Geocities died with the decade. Also, notice that in each Geocity, the creator posts a picture of themself, their friends, and maybe even their family. I've been surfing Neocities for months; I've never seen anyone's face. And I cannot blame them. As Sabrina Prater (or anyone with the displeasure of opening Libs of Tiktok's Twitter account) knows, being a trans person who publicly displays their full name or face on the internet has the same effect as having a big paper sign that says "Please Harass Me" taped on your forehead without your knowledge or consent. Your body, on its own, is enough to make you worthy of public humiliation. So, we no longer post our shit for the world to see! And we show less vulnerability overall; fewer shower thoughts, more "Oh My God This Stamp Is On Fire."
I don't mean to turn this into a tragedy. I said as much in the introduction. However, part of the mundane quirks of being a trans person in Gen-Z, having grown up with centralized social media, means seeing a million different instances of online transphobia before you turn 18.