Transgender People's Experiences of Digital Technology in Wales

• Supervisors: Dr Troy Kaighin Astarte, Dr Charlotte Jones, and Dr Megan Venn-Wycherley
• Wider supervisory team: Professor Tom Crick and Professor Simon Robinson
• Duration: October 2023 — Present

Project overview

This research project looks to record perceptions and feelings of transgender people around digital technologies in Wales to address a lack of understanding of disadvantage (or perhaps advantage) in relation to technology use. The case studies and derived definitions from this research are expected to be used by public, third-sector, charity, and radical practitioners to support transgender people in using technology in the way they see fit.

For participants

I am currently looking for participants to take part in interviews (about 1 hour long), to take part you should meet the following criteria:

• You are transgender
• You are over the age of 18
• You are currently living in Wales

Interviews will either take place online (over Microsoft Teams) or in person (at Swansea University, or a mutually-agreed location).

All study participants will receive a £20 gift card of their choice and reimbursement for travel.

Interested?

Have a read through this information sheet, and get in touch with me at 2004599@swansea.ac.uk or phone me on +44 (0)1792 604231. Hope to hear from you!

Abstract

For transgender people, technology mediates access to community (Cavalcante 2016; Jenzen 2017; Warner 2002), to healthcare (Dame-Griff 2023; Wagner, Kitzie, and Lookingbill 2022) and can aid in identity development (Freeman and Maloney 2021; Haimson et al. 2021; Reyes and Fisher 2022). Technology is not however universal or considerate in its deployment, and transgender people are exposed to the negative impacts of an increasingly digital world. For example, being uniquely susceptible to silencing through algorithmic means (Haimson et al. 2021; Pilipets and Paasonen 2022) and through the insidious ‘nexus’ (Morrigan 2020) of inter-community discourse and online hate (Colliver 2023; McLean 2021). Those designing technology are often unacknowledging of transgender identities (Hamidi, Scheuerman, and Branham 2018; Keyes 2018). Recent approaches for quantifying digital poverty have focused solely on households with children (Blackwell et al. 2023; Yates et al. 2023), focusing cisheteronormative approaches to political economy, with trans people being included only when their potential for social and biological reproduction is assured (Irving 2008; Irving 2015).

Given this juncture, it feels appropriate to investigate factors (Ruiu and Ragnedda 2024), and mechanisms for support for trans people at risk of, or experiencing digital inequality; specifically I wish to answer the following research questions:

• How are digital poverty and poverty more broadly linked for transgender people?
  • What ‘form’ of poverty does digital poverty refer to in this circumstance?
• How do transgender people define digital inequality,
  • how do they experience it,
  • and how is it unique?
• How can transgender people at risk of, or experiencing digital inequality be supported?
  • At a policy level, are existing mechanisms for supporting digital inequality sufficient for transgender people, or are more targeted mechanisms needed?

References

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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. Warner, Michael. 2002. “Publics and Counterpublics.” Public Culture 14 (1): 49–90. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-14-1-49.
4. Dame-Griff, Avery. 2023. The Two Revolutions: A History of the Transgender Internet. Queer/Trans/Digital. New York University Press.
5. 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.
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14. Hamidi, Foad, Morgan Klaus Scheuerman, and Stacy M. Branham. 2018. “Gender Recognition or Gender Reductionism?: The Social Implications of Embedded Gender Recognition Systems.” In Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 1–13. ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/3173574.3173582.
15. 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.
16. Blackwell, Chloe, Abigail Davis, Katherine Hill, Matt Padley, and Simeon Yates. 2023. “A UK Minimum Digital Living Standard for Households with Children: Interim Report.” Loughborough University. https://mdls.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/MDLS-UK-report_Final-2.pdf.
17. Yates, Simeon, Katherine Hill, Chloe Blackwell, Emma Stone, Gianfranco Polizzi, Rebecca Harris, Jeanette D’Arcy, et al. 2023. “Towards a Welsh Minimum Digital Living Standard: Final Report.” Welsh Government. https://www.gov.wales/sites/default/files/publications/2023-02/towards-a-welsh-minimum-digital-living-standard-final-report_0.pdf.
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19. ———. 2015. “Performance Anxieties: Trans Women’s Un(Der)-Employment Experiences in Post-Fordist Society.” Australian Feminist Studies 30 (83): 50–64. https://doi.org/10.1080/08164649.2014.998455.
20. Ruiu, Maria Laura, and Massimo Ragnedda. 2024. Digital-Environmental Poverty: Digital and Environmental Inequalities in the Post-Covid Era. Palgrave Studies in Digital Inequalities. Palgrave Macmillan.