We’re living in a climate where 46% of transgender and nonbinary young people seriously consider attempting suicide and 90% of LGBTQ+ young people reported that recent politics negatively impacted their wellbeing. (The Trevor Project 2024).
But research also shows that LGBTQ+ young people living in accepting communities attempt suicide at less than half the rate of those living in unaccepting communities. We asked ourselves, could a social media series become one of those accepting spaces? Rather than creating another project about survival, we created one about love and belonging. Our goal was to increase both positive representation and hope.
We created a trans-led social series built specifically for the way audiences consume and share stories online. Instagram became our largest platform and a central part of our strategy as we wanted these intimate stories to appear alongside everything else people encounter in their everyday feeds.
Our goals were to build a large, safe, engaged audience organically; create a space where trans people could see themselves reflected with joy and tenderness; and make that content accessible to as many people as possible. Every reel is openly captioned, with additional audio description, transcripts and visual descriptions provided as part of our broader accessibility commitment.
Most importantly, we wanted to build more than an audience. We wanted to create a community that would participate in and expand the storytelling with us, turning Instagram into an evolving collection of trans love stories.
In The Midst Of... Love Flourishes was social-first from development through execution. We filmed more than 40 hours of intimate documentary footage featuring trans people in loving relationships, shooting with vertical distribution in mind and building our editorial approach around how people actually discover, watch and share stories on social media.
That approach extended to our team. Alongside experienced film producers, we hired trans social-media creators as editors: people who understood the rhythms, hooks and storytelling language of short-form platforms from the inside. Several of our participants were also established creators with their own communities, bringing an existing understanding of how to speak authentically to audiences online.
We launched with no existing audience and no paid promotion. Our strategy depended entirely on the stories connecting strongly enough that people would watch, comment, share and return. We published consistently, promising three new pieces of content a week and delivering on that promise. We used Reels as our primary storytelling format and Stories to promote new releases, continue conversations and maintain an ongoing relationship with our rapidly growing audience.
We used Instagram’s interactive tools to move beyond one-way publishing. Through Stories, we asked our audience questions and used polls, then shared their responses back with the community. Within our Reels and captions, we created simple calls to action, for example, inviting viewers to "comment “🌺” to give Trans people their flowers". For Transgender Day of Visibility, cast and crew came together for an Instagram Live, allowing viewers to engage directly with the people behind the series. As our community grew, we introduced “Meet Cute Mondays,” inviting trans followers to submit their own love stories and featuring them through Instagram Stories. The audience that originally came to watch our participants is increasingly becoming part of the storytelling itself
Accessibility was built into our social strategy as well. Every Reel is open-captioned, and we provide audio description, transcripts and visual descriptions, reflecting GADIM's disability-focused mission and making the series accessible to audiences too often excluded from social content.
One of our greatest challenges was fundamental to the project: how do loving intimate stories about trans love compete for attention in feeds increasingly dominated by outrage, conflict and hostile rhetoric about trans lives? As our reach expanded beyond our core community, we also had to ensure that the space remained safe for the trans people whose lives we were sharing. We actively moderated comments and used Instagram's safety and filtering tools to reduce abusive content, while preserving space for genuine conversation and questions.
Creatively, we chose not to compete by becoming louder or more sensational. We trusted the humor, specificity and humanity of our participants, shaping longer conversations into short moments that could stop someone mid-scroll without sacrificing authenticity.
Instagram has consequently become much more than a distribution channel for In The Midst Of.... It is a growing, accessible community where trans people are seen not only surviving, but loving, laughing and living full, ordinary, extraordinary lives.
We launched In The Midst Of... Love Flourishes with no existing audience and no paid promotion. In just six months, our Instagram community has grown to nearly 100,000 followers, while our Reels have generated more than 32 million views entirely through organic reach.
Across platforms, the series has generated more than 2.5 million engagements, with Instagram serving as our largest and fastest-growing community. Individual Reels have continued to circulate and find new audiences months after publication, demonstrating that viewers are not simply watching the work, but sharing it, responding to it and returning for more.
The results have met our original goals in ways that go beyond scale. Viewers use the comments to share their own relationships, celebrate seeing trans people represented with joy, and connect with our participants and one another. Instagram Live allowed that relationship to become a direct conversation, while our newer “Meet Cute Mondays” feature now invites followers to contribute their own trans love stories.
From our audience:
“Thank you for creating opportunities to be joyful. It is quietly revolutionary and very likely life saving.”
“As a trans girl in Kansas. I'm crying. It feels so hopeless sometimes to be stuck in a rural area where the queer community is yourself and the one other trans person you know. Thank you”
“There’s so much clickbait out there that’s clearly seeking nasty bigoted comments. It is BEAUTIFUL to see a post with nothing but positivity… and comments that are a great reflection of how most people feel!”
