Abstract:  This article examines affective contestations surrounding Germany’s Self-Determination Act on TikTok. Drawing on a mixed-methods design combining hashtag co-occurrence analysis with qualitative multimodal analysis, the study investigates which emotions become publicly visible, legitimized, and contested in struggles over gender recognition, and how they are (re)produced through different affective registers. The analysis is based on a dataset of 1,509 TikTok videos collected between May 2023 and November 2025 using the hashtags #sbgg and #selbstbestimmungsgesetz. The findings show that the debate is organized through competing affective-discursive formations. Trans-affirming creators mobilize care, solidarity, moderated anger, cautious relief, and structurally grounded fear to render visible the everyday burdens of legal misrecognition and the partial relief offered by administrative self-determination. Trans-antagonistic and far-right actors, by contrast, construct the law as a threat to cis women, children, anti-trans speakers, and social order, redistributing vulnerability away from trans people and attaching danger to trans women’s bodily presence and legal recognition, and imagining future harms. Building on these findings, the article argues that platformized gender politics are organized through struggles over whose vulnerability becomes publicly legible, whose emotions appear credible, and whose recognition is made to feel either necessary or dangerous.

Keywords:  affect and emotion; infrastructures of feeling; TikTok; trans-antagonism; trans solidarity

Published:   29 October 2026

Issue:   Vol 14 (2026): Contested Regimes of (In)Visibility in Gendered Public Spheres