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The contemporary understanding of gender continues to highlight the complexity and variety of gender identities beyond a binary dichotomy regarding one’s biological sex assigned at birth. The emergence and popularity of various online social spaces also makes the digital presentation of gender even more sophisticated. In this paper, we use non-cisgender as an umbrella term to describe diverse gender identities that do not match people’s sex assigned at birth, including Transgender, Genderfuid, and Non-binary.We especially explore non-cisgender individuals’ identity practices and their challenges in novel social Virtual Reality (VR) spaces where they can present, express, and experiment their identity in ways that traditional online social spaces cannot provide. We provide one of the first empirical evidence of how social VR platforms may introduce new and novel phenomena and practices of approaching diverse gender identities online. We also contribute to re-conceptualizing technology-supported identity practices by highlighting the role of (re)discovering the physical body online and informing the design of the emerging metaverse for supporting diverse gender identities in the future.

Harassment has long been considered a severe social issue and a culturally contextualized construct. More recently, understanding and mitigating emerging harassment in social Virtual Reality (VR) has become a growing research area in HCI and CSCW. Based on the perspective of harassment in the U.S. culture, in this paper we identify new characteristics of online harassment in social VR using 30 in-depth interviews. We especially attend to how people who are already considered marginalized in the gaming and virtual worlds contexts (e.g., women, LGBTQ, and ethnic minorities) experience such harassment. As social VR is still a novel technology, our proactive approach highlights embodied harassment as an emerging but understudied form of harassment in novel online social spaces. Our critical review of social VR users' experiences of harassment and recommendations to mitigate such harassment also extends the current conceptualization of online harassment in CSCW. We therefore contribute to the active prevention of future harassment in nuanced online environments, platforms, and experiences.