The world according to Abigail Thorn

Abigail Thorn knows she’s about to get a lot of attention. “I’m very aware that I’m about to become the transgender princess of TERF island,” she tells Xtra in the days before she came out as trans to the world. Thorn is the creative force behind Philosophy Tube, a YouTube channel that discusses philosophy through a socio-political framework. She has, to put it mildly, a massive fanbase: Philosophy Tube currently has more than 828,000 subscribers on YouTube, 194,600 followers on Twitter and a dedicated subreddit with 10,800 members. Thorn is one of the most preeminently recognizable online personalities in the U.K.—and she may now be one of Britain’s most well-known trans women. 

That’s no easy position. Without spoiling the content of her coming-out video (which includes a perfect use of David Bowie’s BlackStar), Thorn presents herself as who she used to be (as portrayed by actor Rhys Tees) before revealing herself at long last. Within the context of a public service announcement, Thorn mentions the societal pressure that will be placed upon her shoulders. “I feel an enormous pressure to be good at it,” she proclaims. 

Thorn’s newfound visibility comes at a precipitous time in the U.K.: Anti-trans media is on the rise, trans-exclusionary radical feminists, or TERFs,  and other hate groups are dictating public health care policy and the British lady who wrote a famous series of books about a popular boy wizard continues to make national headlines for her antagonistic relationship to trans people.

“There’s a tension because on the one hand, coming out is amazing and I love it, and I am so happy and I love being trans,” Thorn tells Xtra. “But on the other hand, it feels like everyone else has a problem with it.” 

What does it mean to be a trans person in the public eye? For Thorn, it’s constant vigilance, lest she step out of line, speak too harshly or act on impulse. “If I’m not at my best, then that can become a headline, which can then be translated into God knows what,” she says. “I don’t have equal rights anymore, and that’s quite jarring—to have this incredible [personal] freedom and joy and this very starkly backwards, spiteful political climate in which I have to exist.”

That’s a conundrum Thorn has had to grapple with privately. Like scores of trans people before her, Thorn has known the undeniable truth about herself for a while. It was in part her background in philosophy that helped her come to a deeper understanding of her identity—reading and studying the work of luminary trans writers and philosphers Julia Serano, Juno Roche and Talia Mae Bettcher and feminist writers like Audre Lorde (who specifically influenced the coming-out video). “I’m someone who very much needs to understand things intellectually before I jump in,” she says. Thorn jokes that, in retrospect, her identity was obvious. “I literally made the video ‘Transphobia: an Analysis’ [in 2018] that has over a million views,” she laughs. 

The biggest challenge so far has been Thorn’s difficulty in accessing trans communities while protecting her identity. She couldn’t go out into the world and engage with support groups or community gatherings at the risk of being outed before she was ready. Once, she attended a play in London and had to make a hasty exit when she was clocked as both the host of Philosophy Tube and as trans. 

In online trans communities, Thorn felt seen—but not always in the way she wanted. Sometimes, people would speculate about her identity there. “I accessed a few [spaces] anonymously and there were a few people posting screenshots of my videos saying, ‘Do you think Philosophy Tube’s transitioning or not?’” she says. “I found that quite invasive, and I thought, ‘This is going to put pressure on me that I don’t need.’” 

Last November, Thorn also found herself at the receiving end of the ire of trans Twitter when she quote-tweeted a New York Post article proclaiming Donald Trump’s team had told him to prepare for transition. Thorn joked that Trump was transitioning—and was shamed for it. While she had felt a kinship with trans people online, she was still perceived as a cis man. “It made me feel a little lonely, if I’m honest,” she says. 

Thorn has instead found support more privately, having long ago informed her family and close friends, and having gone through the arduous journey of changing her legal documents to reflect her new name and gender. Now, with mounting and unignorable changes, Thorn feels it’s as good a time as any to make her true voice heard. “To those who know what to look for, it’s now incredibly obvious,” she says. “I waited until I was completely comfortable with it and wasn’t in a vulnerable place where I needed it to be validated by other people. I waited until I had a very good support network around me and until I knew what I wanted to say about it artistically.”

Her latest video is just that: The full artistic expression of her true self, hidden carefully at first and eroded over time until what lay underneath is too obvious to hide. For someone living so brightly in the online spotlight, Thorn’s truth has been cultured in offline spaces, preparing for the moment she will become a commodity of an unsafe media landscape and a culture of scrutinous online posturing. But even with all of the pressure—of being a role model, of giving trans communities visibility through her platform—Thorn feels excited about the future. “Why is having transitioned or being trans something that I should hide or be ashamed of?” she says. “I think that being trans is perfectly normal. It’s like being tall or having freckles. It’s just the way that some people are—and I don’t want to hide that or be ashamed of it.”