Why I deleted TikTok at 30,000 subscribers

Academia incentivizes its disciples a lot like social media does. We have impact factors, a number derived by metrics like how many papers we’ve published and how often we get cited. How much we influence.

When we apply for grants or awards, academics quantify our productivity in hopes of standing out among peers in a competitive knowledge productive environment that sometimes rewards quantity over quality. In today’s fast-paced knowledge economy marked by fewer book readers, many academics turn to social media to share ideas, theories, and new data. Some amass large followings as public intellectuals and thought leaders.

The habits that I developed as a trans content creator in the early to mid 2010s I eventually applied to my own academic research career. As the lead of my own studies, or a co-investigators on others, I am often the one in meetings to drum up new ideas to promote studies online, to put together a social media recruitment plan to increase study participation, or to encourage some of my older mentors to think about social media beyond Facebook. But like many, I also have a love-hate relationship with social media. And the loving aspects of our relationship have been waning for years.

Some of you may have subscribed to The One Percent substack (or this one) when I announced its launch on TikTok about a year ago.

I joined TikTok right before I started my tenure-track, assistant professor role, smack in the middle of the pandemic lockdowns. I joined to see what the fuss was all about, and I wanted to be the fun and engaging professor and make informative (and sometimes silly) videos as teaching aids. I did do some of that and actually still use some of these videos in my lectures. (One anonymous student on Rate My Professor has kindly noted these are “cringe”- lol).

But as I was making teaching-related TikToks, I also quickly realized that it could be a useful platform to talk about my research and what I was learning from researching detransition. And so I did that. Unexpectedly and unplanned, for four whole years! My university once did a little write-up on this TikTok knowledge mobilization project of mine (more academic incentivization and “likes”!). In this interview I said:

I hope that people can engage with my TikToks in a way that is disarming in some capacity, because some of what I discuss is new and developing knowledge. People don’t always have schemas for some of the ideas and research that I’m attempting to disseminate. Learning new things can be a bit uncomfortable at times, as you confront new ideas that challenge dominant world views.

Although I have since deleted the TikTok app off my phone, my most frequently cited paper (115+ citations and counting) to this day is a “how-to” explaining to other academics and science communicators about how TikTok works, and why I concluded it was a powerful app for sharing new research with transgender and gender-diverse communities. It’s titled “Examining TikTok’s Potential for Community-Engaged Digital Knowledge Mobilization with Equity-Seeking Groups.”

Yet, for the last few years I have also told a couple of my classes that I thought TikTok was the “most addictive” social media app I have ever used.

I have been a slut for social media for my entire adult life, wandering from app to app, leaving breadcrumbs from periods of my life scattered all over the internet since about 2004-2005. Myspace. That was the era I first learned about trans men, stumbling onto the xxboys photography project posted to Myspace. Beautiful FTMs. I was maybe 20 or 21 years old.

A few years later in 2010, at the age of 25, I launched my first FTM YouTube vlog to announce I would be starting testosterone the next day. I made my second YouTube video 10 days later to detail the first physical changes I noticed (IYKYK). In hindsight, this YouTube channel was pretty embarassing and almost all the videos have been long since deleted! It was me, alone in my room, bad lighting, pretty monotone—a lot of unedited ums and ahs—the occasional cat cameo. I mostly talked about working out, trying to gain muscle, transsexual FTM bodybuilding, also being butch/genderqueer and not knowing what pronouns I even preferred, waiting for my voice to drop, etc etc. There were some bodybuilding poses and flexing also, let’s be for real here. Within a couple years about 1100 or so people followed me which seemed like a lot back in 2011-2012. It was nothing like the high production value of trans “influencers” today.

The early days of trans YouTube was not even the first era of trans online communities. Before it there was Live Journal and Susan’s Place. There were also a quite a few big trans YouTubers and trans public figures I was connected with back then - Kat Blaque, Aydien Dowling, Skyler. I even engaged a bit with Buck Angel, even meeting him in person once at the Feminist Porn Awards event in Toronto (we had a mutual friend in Toronto). That was over a decade ago now. The best time to be trans. There were a lot fewer of us then and frankly it felt more comfortable to exist in the real world then, “passing” was much easier. In the early 2010s I was in an FTM bodybuilding community (Beefheads Fitness) made up of about 20-30 members from all over the Western world, there to encourage each other to make gains. The online trans community was also really pretty positive, I rarely saw the kind of “discourse” or toxicity that I was observing on TikTok in the 2020s. But it’s possible I was just not connected to more polarized scenes, I’m not sure.

By 2011-2012, most of my IRL friends had already joined instagram but I held out. I can’t recall why but I was also slow to make the move from MySpace to Facebook. When I finally joined instagram it was when I saw that my new girlfriend was a regular poster. She was a model and a nursing student and a trans woman with a large insta following. She passed away at the beginning of the pandemic, so it’s been over 5 years. I still think about her often. At the time when we were together, we posted a lot of photos together. If you were ever in online trans communities on instagram or Tumblr in 2012-2013 you might remember us. On TikTok I would sometimes get comments from folks who knew of us, kind of sweet! I think we may have been among only 2-3 openly MTF+FTM couples on the internet at the time. This pre-dated the label “T4T” ever hitting the ‘net.

Although I would never claim the label of being an “influencer,” if I ever had a trans influencer era it was around then. (I’ve never made any money from social media, had any brand deals, or deliberately made content to sell a product, which is why I’m hesitant to ever use this label or adopt this identity post-hoc.) But there was a time in my life in the early trans online world that I boasted a pretty large following on instagram, had invitations to modelling gigs (mostly unpaid, but some paid), and I spent way too much time taking selfies. There was even a cardboard cut-out of me at Toronto pride for a few years. I have mixed feelings about those days now at the age of 40, an aging trans academic, watching my bodybuilding phase physique slowly fading away. But instagram was also my connection to many other trans people around the world. Some of these folks I have stayed in touch with for 15+ years, trading messages here and there, though more infrequently as the years pass.

Eventually, though, TikTok became too much of a good thing. In the last TikTok video I ever posted, in January 2025, I didn’t say exactly why I was leaving and starting up a Substack. The truth was, I had developed what I felt were negative social media behaviours. Staying up too late scrolling mindlessly. Spending too much time thinking about the next video I wanted to make; or how to respond to that comment that annoyed me. My child, from the ages of about 3-4 began to say to me “dadda, get off your phone.” That was a clarion call. The fact that I seemed to read fewer books since the pandemic, and I was mostly reading off a screen were other warnings.

I joined Substack because I felt it was the lesser of two evils. At least I’d be reading and writing long-form content. I want to write and share my research. But I’m a bit skeptical Substack is really any better, it’s just a different style and pace. But I have come across some cool people here and have found a bunch of articles to assign to my students!

As an academic, I value sharing research with and chatting with people who are interested in learning, and particularly with those to whom the information affects. I think it’s important for researchers to make an effort to communicate their study findings in accessible ways, especially when their research is funded by taxpayers and is of a pressing social relevance (I am in both these categories). Anyway, academia is also structured to encourage this, so I’ve been trained to think about this critical step of research for about the last 15 years. (You bet I’ve listed both my retired TikTok account and Substack in my tenure file, and on my CV, finding ways to quantify their societal impact. It’s all in the game!)

But I also wonder about the personal trade-offs in the race to market ourselves as public intellectuals, hip to the social media landscape. For the past several years, I’ve been sent many anti-trans comments, write-ups about my research that don’t engage much with my actual research at all, but instead mostly focus on my body or appearance, my name (calling me Aiden McNoah or Man MacMan are personal favourites of mine, pretty funny tbh), or really obsessed with the fact that I am a “biological woman” although I have been living the life of a man for 15 years (and I don’t really talk about being trans outside of the internet world). Some lay/journalistic discussions of my research have blatantly lied or gotten things really quite wrong. These are not frequent happenings but also not unusual, and they do give me pause. In reality, this stuff happens to all trans academics these days, and to many other trans people who are putting their thoughts on paper here on Substack. It does get old. It’s certainly not the 2010s internet anymore.

Maybe I’ll write an academic paper about Substack knowledge mobilization one day and see if it can outperform the TikTok paper. I don’t find myself caring so much about my follower count these days. But I’d like to get my Impact Factor up.