If like me, you grew up before smartphones and social media, you must be familiar with the void created by not having a name for what you were feeling. Without any language, references or examples of others like ourselves, the void was bound to be filled by confusion, guilt, shame and frustration. I don’t know how, but we knew no one else would understand, so we kept quiet and grew up with the kind of shame and alienation that some of us still struggle with, even as out and proud adults. I know I do. Sometimes. The question is, did it need to happen that way? Are things any better today?
What is the one thing that was and still is common across all conversations around sexuality and gender-inclusive curriculum in schools? The self-appointed protectors of children’s innocence. Sure, they might confuse ignorance with innocence, but their intentions are crystal clear. They can’t let kids become aware of any possibilities beyond the sanitised cis-het paradigm. Imagine what it would do to the very foundation of the family unit if reproduction, and the compulsory cis-heterosexuality that forms the base for it, stopped being the default!
But then around 2003/04, as the internet and social media gained ground in India, things began to change for those who had access to it. All of a sudden, it became possible to take on anonymous avatars, go online and try to find people like you – people from different parts of the world, who grew up in cultures completely different from yours, and yet shared some lived realities with you. They were also taught the same shame around expressing their queerness/transness, had struggled with the same insecurities around their sexuality, and were kind enough to answer questions from their experience. Note that it wasn’t without its risks and dangers. In a world that treated all conversations around sex and sexuality as taboo, these online safe havens were forced to exist in dark corners of the internet. There were no protections, and if you got into trouble, there was no recourse. We still went there, because when you are growing up in a world where even you don’t understand what you’re feeling, having access to someone willing to just talk to you, to see you, feels like a relief that can’t be expressed in words.
An incident I remember is from 2003/04. Yahoo! and Rediff chat rooms had just lost their shine, and Orkut used to be the place to be. I had joined and was on some groups for queer women. This was before I had learnt the term trans, and still identified as a lesbian woman, albeit reluctantly. You couldn’t hide your group activity back then and my then boss somehow came across my profile. He made it a point to send me an email telling me how I was a terrible person and that my online actions were despicable. The despicable action of a teenage trans man trying to find friends, love, community! The horror!! Even back then, any conversation about sexuality or desire became a threat to national security within three business days!
Now, before you get too comfortable with the notion of a happy internet story, the story has changed since. We don’t live in an era of Orkut groups and patchy Google searches anymore. We have moved from “Let me search for people like me” to “Why is Instagram showing me queer content when I haven’t talked about it to anyone?”
Today, we have access to more words, stories, communities, legal/medical resources in multiple languages and that’s amazing! At the same time, today, we also have a lot more:
- algorithmic rage-bait
- anti-trans propaganda
- deepfakes
- misinformation
- dangerous oversimplification of complex topics by wannabe influencers
- therapy-speak without context
- surveillance
- harassment
- content that looks factual because it is confidently designed
The problem today is not that we have no information. It’s that affirmation, misinformation, propaganda, desire, commerce, care, and cruelty all arrive in the same visual language: aesthetic appearance, a clean carousel, a confident caption, a blue tick, a forwarded message, or a smooth AI answer with perfect grammar from a chatbot that sounds like it went to a workshop on empathy.
Once TikTok became popular, and short-video formats took over nearly every platform, the social media landscape changed again. The power to choose what we engage with was replaced by the addictive comfort of the non-stop scroll. Now, the algorithm picks what we see. Because these algorithms are built by for-profit tech companies optimising for ad revenue, outrage often beats nuance because anger keeps us scrolling. Consequently, whoever has the most resources gets to flood the zone. We see political factions weaponising disinformation about queer bodies or women’s autonomy to consolidate their voting blocs, while platforms profit off the resulting engagement.
This is not limited to just sexuality content. The same machinery that shapes what we believe about gender, desire, bodies, family and morality also shapes what we believe about nation, war, good citizenship, petrol, womanhood, transness, and whose suffering is allowed to matter. We see it in Israel’s pinkwashing of genocide, in state narratives around E20 petrol, in propaganda around fake trans people, and in the endless respectability politics around sanskari women. These may look like separate issues, but online they are often produced, packaged, and circulated through the same logic: repeat a narrative often enough, make it visually confident enough, attach enough fear or pride to it, and eventually it starts to feel like common sense.
So where does all this leave the teenager searching “Am I gay?”, the trans person trying to understand hormones, the woman trying to understand consent, the disabled person looking for sexual health information, or the young person trying to name desire without shame? Unfortunately, in a vulnerable place. Let me explain.
Broadly, navigating our bodies and desires online requires balancing three needs:
- Privacy: We don’t want the algorithm (or those who buy its data) tracking our desires, sexual health searches, or gender journeys before we are ready to share them.
- Relevance: At the same time, we need the algorithm to know enough about us to connect us to relevant care, community, and representation. Otherwise, what’s the point of being there?
- Safety: We need to explore these intimate parts of ourselves without the looming threat of harassment, targeted propaganda, or malicious outing.
Okay, so what do we do now with all this?
I don’t think the answer is to romanticise the old internet, or pine for the pre-AI, pre-algorithmic era. Algorithms are not magic. They are systems built to predict attention. They learn from what we click, pause on, search, share, save, and return to. AI tools are not neutral wise machines either. They generate answers based on patterns in existing data, and existing data already contains shame, bias, propaganda, and silence. Those old, dark corners of the internet were mostly human, but that didn’t make them safe. Many of us found care there, yes, but we also found risk, shame, predators, outing, and misinformation.
Call me a tech optimist, but I also don’t think that the answer is to treat today’s internet as a lost cause either. For many queer, trans, disabled, young, isolated, or questioning people, the internet is still the first place where they find language for themselves. Maybe the first step is to stop treating sexuality-related information as just “content”. Content is what platforms call it because all they care about is engagement. For the person searching am I gay?, can I say no?, is my body normal?, how do hormones work?, why do I feel this desire?, or is there anyone else like me?, this is not content. It is a lifeline. And lifelines need care.
We need to ask better questions of the information we receive. Who made this? What are they trying to make me feel? Is this giving me knowledge, or just urgency? Is it expanding my ability to make choices, or narrowing it through fear? Does it respect my privacy? Does it treat people like me as human?
We also need to become more responsible makers and sharers of information. Not every half-understood thread needs to become a carousel. Not every personal experience is universal advice. Every legal update does not need panic. Not every medical question can be answered by a confident stranger with a ring light. If we are creating information around sexuality, gender, bodies, desire, health, or rights, we owe people accuracy, context, humility, and care.
And, that, to me, is what good information about sexuality should do. It shouldn’t just warn us, correct us or teach us terminology without context. It needs to reduce shame. And increase agency. And help us recognise danger as well as allies. It should give us language, privacy, context, pleasure, consent, and community.
Most of all, it should help us feel seen without making us feel exposed.
Cover image by VectorElements on Unspalsh
