Reaching in, reaching out: Mobilising privileged trans visibility on Instagram

This article considers how one British transgender father structures his visibility on Instagram, mobilising the platform’s affordances to both connect with trans communities and advance broader social awareness of trans people’s lives, experiences and bodies. Drawing on data from the #DadLife project, the analysis takes the Instagram posts of one participant, Mikey O’Neill, as a case study. Combining grounded discourse analysis (Author 2025) with a multimodal social semiotic approach (Zappavigna 2013, 2015; Zappavigna & Zhao 2017), the analysis shows how Mikey both cultivates visibility at a local level, reaching in to connect with trans and queer communities, and at a more global level, reaching out to build solidarity across broader parenting publics and social movements. Mikey’s efforts to mobilise his visibility are considered both in light of his privilege as a White, British, able-bodied father, and in relation to global struggles over mediated visibility in diverse sociopolitical contexts. As such, the article contributes to discourse analytical scholarship on queer visibility in context, extending our understanding of how digital infrastructures and sociocultural privilege shape the legibility of queer lives in complex and uneven ways.