From community care to corporate category: Platforms' discourse on digital trans‐affirming practices

Trans‐affirming community movements have interfaced with tech platforms in recent decades, leading to innovations in pronoun‐sharing online. As (mostly US‐based) platforms created online “pronouns fields,” they released supportive statements and help pages about the feature. However, with the recent roll‐back of LGBTQ+ support, such support is revealed as contingent. Thus, analyzing these platforms' statements provides insight into the capitalist impulse for corporations to appropriate movements when strategic. This article analyses the positioning of trans‐affirming language practices for corporations' benefit by examining discursive strategies in three platforms' pronoun feature statements, posted 2014–2025. Platforms utilize stance, reference, and figurative language to position themselves as human‐like subjects, knowledgeable about trans‐inclusion and able to perform affective labor to support marginalized people. Through this, corporations entangle trans‐affirming language with corporate harm and entextualize a sanitized version of it that is most aligned with their neoliberal positioning of identity. Further, corporations spatiotemporally construct pronoun sharing through indicating their uneven linguistic and geographic roll‐out of the feature. I thus utilize linguistic analysis in challenging a view of digital trans‐affirming language practices as socially progressive abstractions, exploring how trans‐affirming practices can be incorporated into neoliberal institutions—and the implications of this for how transness is discursively constructed.