Processes of Socialization to Sexuality and Discrimination in the Web Society: An Exploratory Research on Transgender People

The diffusion of new media, of online communication, and the increasingly evident overlap between online and offline environments generates a specific question for scientific research on how these contents can represent an opportunity for “emancipation” and at the same time new areas in which can experience processes of exclusion, in particular for the LGBT community. In this sense, social media offers transgender people a wide range of tools and applications to create new knowledge, interact with other people, create new meeting opportunities, or trace new relationships and/or new emotional and sexual experiences. This research work aims to investigate the psychological, relational, and social aspects of transgender people who use social media and dating apps as communication spaces and relational environments in order to outline the peculiar aspects of media consumption, regulatory access and processes of stigmatization, and social discriminations by the web.