This doctoral dissertation explores nonbinary gender identities and trans community formation in the context of platformised everyday life. The work illuminates how social media functions as a key site of relational identity work and how trans communities are formed online, and it explores the messy and ambivalent tensions of belonging that arise therein. The dissertation attends to the complexities and nuances of these processes and resists discourses that provide simplifying explanations about the entanglements of identity, community and technology.

The four articles that comprise this dissertation build on rich empirical material: 33 interviews and 18 social media diaries collected from Finnish trans/nonbinary people, consisting of 15 life-story interviews and 18 social media diary interviews. The material is focused on how everyday life is lived on and with social media platforms, and how platforms are a key site where identity and community are formed and negotiated. Building on this material, I trace both mundane practices of social media use and moments where social media comes to hold special significance in the broader context of one’s life.

This dissertation is particularly concerned with questions of identity, community and belonging. Through understanding identity in terms of relational identity work – something formed through active labour, in a particular context and in relation to other people and the norms of the time – I analyse how nonbinary identity is negotiated on both a personal and collective level. The work illustrates how the meanings of nonbinary gender have become more fixed in the context of circulating representations on social media and how individuals negotiate their personal identity in relation to these meanings; the questions ‘Who are we?’ and ‘Who am I?’ are always intertwined and the tensionrelationship between them often ambivalent. This dissertation additionally attends to how online trans communities form around the circulation of texts that create a sense of sameness and through the active labour of creating safer, communal spaces. The analyses show how trans online communities form around a shared sense of vulnerability and how engagement with politics and a sense of belonging are often inseparable.

The analyses that comprise this dissertation attend to the complexities and nuances of platformised everyday life seen from the perspective of trans/nonbinary experiences. I bring into focus the ways that identity work is an ambivalent negotiation of belonging or not, how communities of safety are also inherently ones of friction, how politics and a sense of belonging or comfort coexist in trans online communities and how social media is incredibly impactful in the formation of modern nonbinary identity, while showcasing that the fact that identity work that takes place online does not make it any less of an active process.