@trans_ski_memes: a profile
Cecilia Timberg ‘24 (she/her)
How one memer is shaking up the outdoor online space. Meet @trans_ski_memes.
What do you get when you combine backcountry skiing, internet shit posting, and a strong devotion to social causes? A meme page, of course.
For @trans_ski_memes, this unusual combination has given her an outlet for both laughter and community that has supported her during her gender transition.
@trans_ski_memes, who prefers to remain anonymous, started her Instagram meme account to make herself chuckle. She had drawn parallels between the backcountry skiing experience and being trans. They both were an extremely bodily experience with many “absurdities.” The best way for @trans_ski_memes to reckon with these aspects of her identity was to laugh at them.
What followers can find in her meme page is not only humor but also community. @trans_ski_memes is struck by the amount of people who have reached out to her to thank her for providing visibility for queer folks in the backcountry ski world.
Now, @trans_ski_memes has a faithful following, a tight knit community of trans people who ski, and no shortage of humor.
In the Q&A, @trans_ski_memes speaks about her place in the outdoor meme community, what her account has meant for her identity, and who role online memes can play in large social movements.
This interview has been edited for clarity.
How did you get involved in the outdoor meme community?
I am a trans woman who is very obsessed with skiing and have been doing it since I was a year and a half old. It is always something I have shared with my dad and my brother and has been a natural part of my rhythms. In the past few years I’ve gotten into backcountry skiing to mix it up a bit.
I got into viewing ski memes in early 2021 when I had started transitioning. It was something funny. I had moved back to Colorado after a year and a half away. It was fun to get back into Colorado headspace and back into skiing humor. I had only used Instagram for career purposes as an artist, but this was just for fun.
In January of this year I broke up with my girlfriend and was super sad. I needed a silly diversion. I was in a holding pattern with career related things so I had a little free time on my hands. The week after I broke up with her I was just sad and needed to make myself laugh, so I made a few memes that had to do with being a transgender skiier.
It’s an absurd thing to begin with. Very few people are one of those things. Skiing itself is such an absurd sport: sliding down hill at great speed. It’s ripe for humor. It’s a weird thing to do.
Illustration: Matt Cronin
There are also a lot of absurdities to the trans experience. I was at that point a year into my transition. A lot of the experiences you never really anticipated for yourself happened for a year. It was definitely ripe for humor in that regard.
After a couple days, I realized I had two dozen of these things [memes]. I thought maybe I could make a meme account for these, so I made @Transskimemes and got my first meme up. Very quickly, it blew the fuck up because @queercork posted it on their story. Then @queercork introduced me to other memers. I very quickly became online friends with Len Nescefer and @14er_memer.
@Queerkcork is a mountain meme account focusing on the experience of queer teens. Len Nescefer is the CEO of Nativeoutdoors as well as a past professor of Indian studies and public policy at University of Arizona . He also is a lover of memes. @14er_memer is a Colorado based backcountry ski memer.
It’s such a niche thing that I was expecting 200-300 followers, but I got 250 followers on the first day. I was shocked. At least half of the people who were following me were trans themselves. It was like ‘holy cow there are dozens of us! I didn’t know.”
What do you think the value of the meme page is for the trans community?
I have had 600-700 accounts DM me since I started, most of them some color of trans. I have gotten comments from so many people: ‘Thank you for making this’, ‘it is so cool to know that there is a place for me in skiing’, ‘I didn’t know there were other trans skiiers’. They are always delighted when I tell them that I just keep meeting more.
I’ve got a little crew of about a dozen of us who assembled around this meme page and became close friends. There are also a few dozen of us on the Discord server that we made. It was so cool to get to know each other through this combination of a very important thing in our lives, which is being trans. Being trans affects a lot of what we experience and there is a lot of overlap with what we share. At the same time, there is this shared deep love of a very unique and compelling sport that is very unlike other things.
When skiing, you are convening with very fundamental and awe inspiring natural forces. It really puts you in your body. In that way it is a really good sport for trans people because of how bodily and intimate it is.
Do you think meming makes space for social activism and larger-scale change?
It’s been a starting point, in this case, for there to be a small trans skiing community and for there to be a small subculture around that.
I’ve talked about this question with my trans ski crew, we call ourselves: The Trans and Rowdy Ski Crew. We understand that that group of us in particular is setting the tone for what a trans subculture within skiing looks like.
We have create the humor, but we have also created the language around that. We all share the experience that skiing is a very positive sport for trans people, in particular. Those are values that we are trying to bring forward more publicly in the Discord we created for trans skiers.
The Discord ended up way bigger than we thought it was going to be. As of now, there are over 70 trans skiers in the Discord. That is the fraction of them that follow @trans_ski_memes and also want to be in a Discord. That blew my mind. We are trying to get some meetups going.
I don’t know if it is activism as much as it is casual community organization to provide people with connections so that they feel like they have a space in skiing to have fun. Ski culture is extremely straight, cis, male dominated. We feel that. We all hate that and in this community can say ‘fuck that, we don’t need this “bro domination” of something that has nothing to do with gender’.
If we can establish a well defined trans subculture in the sport, even the presence of that starts to break down this image of skiing as this very cis, masculine sport.
Part one of an ongoing series highlighting the social media mavens of the outdoor industry.
