I’ve been a student of human behavior for the past fifteen years. If you ask me, life is about listening, studying, and trying to create maps of where we hide our thoughts. Language is one of them; data is another. For most of my career, I’ve worked in the spaces where they intersect: social listening, behavioral analysis, public relations. And now I’m 42. I’m gay. I’m trans. And I’m more worldly. I’ve been an activist long enough to know that it’s not just loud hate that gets people killed. It’s the kind of hate that can be decoded in silence and policy and “neutrality” and obliviousness. The kind that burrows under your skin and eats you from the inside out. It’s the disease of indifference. I call it the invisible epidemic of apathy. And lately, all I see in social media is a microscope and a mirror for it.
Unconscious bias does not live exclusively in the minds of straight people. It lives in all of us. It’s the person who slips up on pronouns and then tries to recover by overcorrecting. It’s the human resources manager who insists they’re “fair to everyone,” even as they actively protect the promotion pipeline for those that look like them. It’s the parent who tells their transgender child, “I love you, but I just don’t understand.” Bias lives in every room we walk into, whether that’s our family occasions, hospital rooms, group chats, classrooms, or conference rooms. The thing about bias is this: most people do not wake up with a mission to cause harm.
I see this in the social listening data all the time. Language is transparent. And when people really intend to be transphobic, there’s no hiding it. The problem is, there’s no such thing as good intentions. If you think about it, the words we use in the real world act like breadcrumbs. They show up in data reports. They reveal where our actual concerns lie. Long story short: the harm is real. It’s measurable. And it’s relentless.
Unconscious bias is not hatred; it’s ignorance in automation. It’s the junk our society has programmed us to believe without questioning. The intense weight of social conditioning that has taught us how to judge another person’s worth.
In many ways, social media gives us a toolkit to be better. To do better. In theory, of course. But theory doesn’t pay rent, and algorithms do not prioritize empathy. When transgender stories trend, they don’t stay in that lane. Our stories often get hijacked. They get litigated. They get weaponized. And before long, the overwhelming digital noise creates an environment for everyone to become numb. When bias goes unchecked in the virtual world, it grows. Transphobia online will always normalize apathy offline.
Confronting bias in yourself is asking people to feel uncomfortable. Guilty. Ashamed. And those aren’t fun emotions for anyone. That’s especially true for people who believe that allyship is an identity that they’ve already earned. But cisgender people being “good allies” is not a finish line; it’s a continuous set of proactive actions, an active position of learning and listening. And the reality is that many prefer the idea of solidarity to the actual work of it. The problem is in the ease of using a supportive hashtag versus the amount of actual labor it takes to examine your own behaviors every day and hold yourself accountable, most people slump into convenience packaged as compassion and think that because they repost somethings that makes it out of the realm of possibility that the couldn’t suffer from unconscious bias, when in fact that is not the case.
In health care, when a doctor misgenders a transgender patient and doesn’t correct themselves because “that’s what’s in the system.” In housing, when a landlord feels “safer” renting to a single white woman over a transgender man of color. In workplaces, transgender people are expected to constantly educate their cisgender co-workers and navigate microaggressions. In schools, lawmakers treat transgender children as if they’re thought experiments instead of human beings. In families, asking questions gets replaced by silence. Bias doesn’t just live in these spaces. It creates these spaces. And until we examine it, transgender people will be left to live in a world that conditions them out of their humanity every single day.
Testing unconscious bias through social media doesn’t mean passing judgment on people. It means looking at the patterns. In my work, I’ve used behavioral analytics for years to track sentiment, word association, and emotional language around how people talk in public. What I’ve found is that language is the bleeding edge of how we actually feel. Language gets us long before behavior does. Look at any transphobic encounter online, and here are some things you’ll see:
- Gendered assumptions baked into job descriptions.
- The negative emotional responses around transgender news headlines.
- The ratio of empathy for cisgender versus transgender stories.
If we can track this stuff, then we can begin to zoom in on where that lack of empathy lives. And zooming in is the only way to start zooming out. But this is all useless if people aren’t willing to look at what they learn. Bias is invisible until you choose to make it visible. The Toll. Before we go any further, I want to be clear: unconscious bias kills. And not just transgender people, not always, but all of us. It eats away at safety. It isolates. It outcasts people out of jobs, homes, families, and communities. It creates environments where transgender people are forced to not only explain our existence but to prove it and justify it.
The cumulative exhaustion of that, day after day after day, leaves scars you can’t see, data points you can’t capture. When cisgender people choose to remain willfully ignorant or indifferent to the violence of unconscious bias, it’s this simple: “Your struggle is optional for me to care about.” That is the core of the epidemic.
What You Can Do Now:
- Audit your feed. Who is the most represented in your media diet? Whose voices are you not hearing?
- Audit yourself. How do you react when a transgender person is sharing our stories? Empathy or intellectualization?
- Redefine what allyship is. It’s not perfection; its persistence in the face of adversity on behalf of others.
- Educate yourself. Stop expecting marginalized people to do your emotional work for you, we are tired!
There’s a way to talk about all of this. It’s holding each other accountable. And if we can study people online with such surgical precision, then we can bring that same precision to helping dismantling bias. Not to weaponize guilt, but to call in empathy.
###
About Rev. Dylan Thomas Cotter: With over fifteen years of expertise in PR and strategy, Rev. Dylan Thomas Cotter stands out as a strategic advisor for elite clients across entertainment, technology, fitness, fashion and beauty. His dynamic life experience enhances his ability to elevate brand messages and drive impactful engagement.
A former adult entertainer, Dylan Thomas is proud gay transgender activist and author that has appeared in Vice, Rolling Stone, Out Magazine, Yahoo! News, Pride.com, Mashable, Inked Magazine, Well Beings News and Newsweekthat happily resides in the Hollywood Hills with his partner.
His memoir Transgender & Triggering The Life of Dylan Thomas Cotter is available now at Barnes & Noble, Harvard Book Store, Book Soup and Skylight Books amongst other fine retailers and is distributed worldwide through Ingramspark.