Trans streamers are creating the visibility Twitch won’t give them
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Identity shapes what we want to share and what we want to broadcast, [so] it is part of our content," says Yana Calou, PR director of Trans Lifeline. The nonprofit operates a peer support and crisis hotline and offers microgrants to trans and nonbinary recipients. More recently, it launched a streaming discovery tool called Peer2Peer that functions as a searchable directory. Broadcasters can tag themselves in categories like trans," Black," or lesbian," and viewers can search for the tags they want to see.
With Twitch reluctant to allow identity-based tagging, marginalized viewers' ability to find streamers and associated communities of people like them has been limited. But when a group of streamers approached Trans Lifeline about...