Even on social media, Pallas and Williams saw something missing from the way trans folks were being represented. As helpful as they can be, transition diaries on YouTube or how-to websites focused on doctors and legal documents do not reflect a dynamic, exciting culture. "I watch a lot of YouTube vlogs, and you never see a trans person doing anything other than talking about being trans," Williams says. "You'd never hear positive, lighthearted stories. In our social group, in our community, everyone's doing something interesting. It's not just, 'He's at this stage of his transition.'"

A recent Test Shot post by Harri, an androgynous ballet dancer on testosterone, alludes to a more considered, complex transition process than the simplified stories presented in magazines. "My masculinity is a queer, feminist, Femme masculinity, though I actually rarely use the word masculine/ity in describing myself at all," Harri writes. In Williams' photographs, Harri wears sparkly shorts in one picture, and a T-shirt rolled at the biceps in the next. "I'm not striving to destroy gender, just to deconstruct it and have fun with it, rather than being controlled by it."

"A lot of trans stuff [online] is either about before or after, knowledge or concealment," Pallas says — and this leads to policing and erasure of identities that don't fit the rigid story line. The Test Shot, by contrast, wants to be a space for guys to announce themselves, exactly the way they are. It's not about finding the best way to pass, necessarily. Instead of focusing on tips for blending in, it's about making yourself known.

"I think we put the Tumblr out almost as a flag to other people who are similar to come forward and talk to us," Williams says. It's worked: Williams is still exploring gender identity ("People don't always know where I'm coming from — I've got a high-pitched voice") and has had some trouble feeling seen in the past, but that changed after the two did their own test shot. Friends and acquaintances in Williams' community now "got it." "It became much easier to communicate with people, both online and off, after having made that statement — and it was a statement I was very much in control of."

For many trans people, Tumblr sites act as an antidote to an indifferent or hostile world. "You can Google 'bois,' you can search for all types of phrases and names that relate to our identity and sexuality, and you'll come up with porn," Mo Willis says ("boi," according to Willis, encompasses anybody who claims the term, which means masculine-of-center trans and queer folks of color). The 29-year-old is head of communications for the collective bklyn boihood, a group of friends and community organizers that create space, digital and otherwise, for the boi community. To Willis, the dirt of representation online wasn't reflective of everyday reality. In Brooklyn, you saw bois on the street all the time; bois talked shop on one another's couches, bois had an aesthetic and a culture all their own.