Digital inequality from transgender perspectives

Overview

For trans people, technology mediates access to community (Cavalcante 2016; Jenzen 2017), to healthcare (Dame-Griff 2023; Wagner, Kitzie, and Lookingbill 2022), and can aid in identity development (Haimson et al. 2021; Freeman and Maloney 2021; Reyes and Fisher 2022). However, technology in itself is not an unalloyed good. Despite technology providing opportunity for community development, trans(feminine) folks are often uniquely impervious to silencing through algorithmic means (especially sex workers, see Haimson, Delmonaco, et al. (2021) and Pilipets and Paasonen (2022)) and through the insidious ‘nexus’ (Morrigan 2020); a “synthesis of identitarianism, social media, and cancel culture” (p. 51)1. Access to technology is too mediated by access to material wealth, and with trans folks tending to be less economically stable than their cisgender counterparts (McKechnie et al. 2023), there is risk of creating a vicious cycle where material means limits access to technology, which then in turn limits access to material means (Clifford 2023). Given the relative dearth of literature addressing the intersection of digital inequality, poverty and economic (in)stability, and transgender identity, I wish to construct an understanding of experiences at this intersection.

Such an understanding will come from a critical Luddite ‘unmaking’ (Sabie et al. 2023) and intersectional (Crenshaw 1989; Rauchberg 2022) lens, as to not perpetuate further technological harms against transgender communities and identities at intersections within (see Keyes (2018), Keyes et al. (2019), Keyes and Austin (2022), and Ymous et al. (2020)). The ultimate aim of this project is the aim of countering disposability (from within and outside of community), and building livable trans futures.

In my first year, I am building an advisory network2 of community organisations that support trans people across Wales to establish current gaps in knowledge around trans digital poverty, and identify research priorities. As well as a scoping literature review, I am also going to undertake a critical review of relevant devolved and national policy to understand what support is available for community organisations, and what the current strategy is for the Senedd / Westminster3.

I have a mailing / discussion list with updates about my PhD research; instructions on how to subscribe can be found in this blog post. I also maintain my blog, which contains the same updates (but lacks the discussion list functionality). Finally, if you’d like to contact me individually, please do so using my contact details page.

Footnotes

  1. Morrigan’s criticism of the nexus / cancel culture comes from a left-leaning perspective (as does mine); and follows other authors’ perspectives, like Florence Ashley’s “Trans Rules of Engagement” and Porpentine Charity Heartscape’s “Hot Allostatic Load” ↩

  2. I have a blog post with more information about this ↩

  3. Using approaches similar to those taken in Knight and Crick (2022) and Knight et al. (2023) ↩

References

  1. Cavalcante, Andre. 2016. “‘I Did It All Online:’ Transgender Identity and the Management of Everyday Life.” Critical Studies in Media Communication 33 (1): 109–22. https://doi.org/10.1080/15295036.2015.1129065.
  2. Jenzen, Olu. 2017. “Trans Youth and Social Media: Moving between Counterpublics and the Wider Web.” Gender, Place & Culture 24 (11): 1626–41. https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369X.2017.1396204.
  3. Dame-Griff, Avery. 2023. The Two Revolutions: A History of the Transgender Internet. Queer/Trans/Digital. New York University Press.
  4. Wagner, Travis L, Vanessa L Kitzie, and Valerie Lookingbill. 2022. “Transgender and Nonbinary Individuals and ICT-Driven Information Practices in Response to Transexclusionary Healthcare Systems: A Qualitative Study.” Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association 29 (2): 239–48. https://doi.org/10.1093/jamia/ocab234.
  5. Haimson, Oliver L., Avery Dame-Griff, Elias Capello, and Zahari Richter. 2021. “Tumblr Was a Trans Technology: The Meaning, Importance, History, and Future of Trans Technologies.” Feminist Media Studies 21 (3): 345–61. https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2019.1678505.
  6. Freeman, Guo, and Divine Maloney. 2021. “Body, Avatar, and Me: The Presentation and Perception of Self in Social Virtual Reality.” Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 4 (CSCW3): 1–27. https://doi.org/10.1145/3432938.
  7. Reyes, Zoey, and Joshua Fisher. 2022. “The Impacts of Virtual Reality Avatar Creation and Embodiment on Transgender and Genderqueer Individuals in Games: A Grounded Theory Analysis of Survey and Interview Data from Transgender and Genderqueer Individuals about Their Experiences with Avatar Creation Interfaces in Virtual Reality.” In FDG ’22: Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games, 1–9. ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/3555858.3555882.
  8. Haimson, Oliver L., Daniel Delmonaco, Peipei Nie, and Andrea Wegner. 2021. “Disproportionate Removals and Differing Content Moderation Experiences for Conservative, Transgender, and Black Social Media Users: Marginalization and Moderation Gray Areas.” Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 5 (CSCW2): 466:1–466:35. https://doi.org/10.1145/3479610.
  9. Pilipets, Elena, and Susanna Paasonen. 2022. “Nipples, Memes, and Algorithmic Failure: NSFW Critique of Tumblr Censorship.” New Media & Society 24 (6): 1459–80. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820979280.
  10. Morrigan, Clementine. 2020. “FUCK THE POLICE MEANS WE DON’T ACT LIKE COPS TO EACHOTHER.” Zine.
  11. McKechnie, Douglas Gordon John, Elizabeth O’Nions, Julia Bailey, Lorna Hobbs, Frank Gillespie, and Irene Petersen. 2023. “Transgender Identity in Young People and Adults Recorded in UK Primary Care Electronic Patient Records: Retrospective, Dynamic, Cohort Study.” BMJ Medicine 2 (1). https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjmed-2023-000499.
  12. Clifford, Genevieve. 2023. “Trans-Forming Technology: Exploring Transgender Technologies in South Wales.” Master’s Dissertation (Social Research Methods), Swansea University.
  13. Sabie, Samar, Robert Soden, Steven Jackson, and Tapan Parikh. 2023. “Unmaking as Emancipation: Lessons and Reflections from Luddism.” In Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 1–15. CHI ’23. Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3581412.
  14. Crenshaw, Kimberle. 1989. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics.” University of Chicago Legal Forum 1989 (1). https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/uclf/vol1989/iss1/8.
  15. Rauchberg, Jessica Sage. 2022. “Imagining a Neuroqueer Technoscience.” Studies in Social Justice 16 (2): 370–88. https://doi.org/10.26522/ssj.v16i2.3415.
  16. Keyes, Os. 2018. “The Misgendering Machines: Trans/HCI Implications of Automatic Gender Recognition.” Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 2 (CSCW): 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1145/3274357.
  17. Keyes, Os, Josephine Hoy, and Margaret Drouhard. 2019. “Human-Computer Insurrection: Notes on an Anarchist HCI.” In Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 1–13. ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/3290605.3300569.
  18. Keyes, Os, and Jeanie Austin. 2022. “Feeling Fixes: Mess and Emotion in Algorithmic Audits.” Big Data & Society 9 (2): 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517221113772.
  19. Ymous, Anon, Katta Spiel, Os Keyes, Rua M. Williams, Judith Good, Eva Hornecker, and Cynthia L. Bennett. 2020. “‘I Am Just Terrified of My Future’ — Epistemic Violence in Disability Related Technology Research.” In Extended Abstracts of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 1–16. CHI EA ’20. Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/3334480.3381828.
  20. Knight, Cathryn, and Tom Crick. 2022. “Inclusive Education in Wales: Interpreting Discourses of Values and Practice Using Critical Policy Analysis.” ECNU Review of Education 5 (2): 258–83. https://doi.org/10.1177/20965311211039858.
  21. Knight, Cathryn, Carmel Conn, Tom Crick, and Sian Brooks. 2023. “Divergences in the Framing of Inclusive Education across the UK: A Four Nations Critical Policy Analysis.” Educational Review 0 (0): 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131911.2023.2222235.