Can You Borrow Legitimacy? Identity Disclosure Strategies and Boundary Responses in Online Lesbian Communities

How do communities respond when individuals disclose stigmatized identities in boundary-contested settings? Can such reactions be mitigated by "bundling'' a contested identity with one that is normatively recognized within the community? This study examines these questions using data from two large lesbian communities on Reddit, comprising 596,610 posts and 7,778,950 comments from their inception through March 2025. The analysis reveals that transgender/non-binary identity disclosure elicits measurable negative responses at both the level of voting behavior and reply sentiment. Identity bundling, operationalized as simultaneously declaring transgender/non-binary and lesbian identities via user flair, systematically amplifies normative penalties in voting outcomes, while tentatively mitigating them at the reply level. The study further identifies systematic differences between anonymous collective voting and visible individual replying as mechanisms of boundary enforcement. By integrating self-presentation theory with boundary work theory, this study contributes to understanding of how legitimacy claims operate in boundary-contested digital communities by providing large-scale computational evidence on the social dynamics of normative enforcement online.