Defining and Designing Trans Technologies
Lately, my collaborators and I have been thinking about what it means for a technology to be a trans technology, and how such technologies could be designed. This blog post will summarize two of my recent/forthcoming publications related to these topics:
- Oliver L. Haimson, Avery Dame-Griff, Elias Capello, and Zahari Richter. 2019. Tumblr was a trans technology: the meaning, importance, history, and future of trans technologies. Feminist Media Studies: 1–17. [LINK]
- Oliver L. Haimson, Dykee Gorrell, Denny L. Starks, and Zu Weinger. 2020. Designing Trans Technology: Defining Challenges and Envisioning Community-Centered Solutions. In ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. [LINK]
[note: in this work, “trans” explicitly includes non-binary people]
What does it mean for a technology to be a trans technology?
In the first paper, my collaborators (Avery Dame-Griff, Elias Capello, and Zahari Richter) and I analyzed data from Tumblr transition blogs and interviews with bloggers, and we used trans theory and trans technological histories, to understand how and if Tumblr was a trans technology. We identified three primary criteria for trans technologies. They must:
- Enable trans users to change over time, in a space separate from existing networks, and present identity in ways that feel genuine
- Embrace queer aspects of multiplicity, fluidity, ambiguity necessary during gender transition
- Uphold policies and an economic model that embraces adult or erotic content without characterizing and removing it as pornographic
Before Tumblr’s December 2018 policy changes, the site met all three of these criteria. However, as a result of these policy changes, the site began to flag (computationally) as “adult” and remove content that was important for many trans Tumblr users. This is the reason that our article uses the past tense throughout. Without meeting this third criteria, Tumblr can no longer be considered a trans technology. Its trans users recognize this, and many are searching for different online spaces or moving to different platforms (e.g., Discord) that better support their needs.
Yet this leaves an important open question:
How can social technologies be designed with and for trans individuals and communities?
To address this question, my students (Dykee Gorrell, Denny Starks, and Zu Weinger) and I organized a series of participatory design sessions with trans and/or non-binary people to understand how to design technologies to address community challenges. Our first step was to collaboratively generate a list of challenges faced by trans individuals and communities. Categories of challenges include access to society, financial/employment challenges, gatekeeping, healthcare, housing, lack of access to resources, lack of respect for one’s identity, online identity, police, pressure to educate cisgender people about trans identities, racial injustice, and violence. Next, via a series of brainstorming and sketching activities, participants generated ideas for how technology might address some of these challenges. These design ideas fell into four broad categories:
- Technologies for changing bodies
- Technologies for changing appearances / gender expressions
- Technologies for safety
- Technologies for finding resources
As one example of a technology for changing appearances / gender expressions, participants envisioned and sketched augmented glasses that allowed the wearer to view their appearance and the outside world differently than the world they generally experienced on a day-to-day basis.

Another example, in the technologies for finding resources category, involved several different versions of a “Trans Yelp” interface. Such a site/app would offer an online space for trans people to rate and review local businesses, healthcare providers, etc (somewhat similar to the existing site RAD Remedy).

Importantly, many of the designs participants envisioned, whether traditional sites or apps, wearable technology, physical technology, augmented reality, or futuristic form-altering technologies, included community-based aspects in serious ways. This signifies that trans technology design must reach beyond design for individuals to design for communities and consider how community members can use technology to support each other. Additionally, because many participants in our study were Black and/or of other marginalized races/ethnicities, we cannot separate racial inequities from our findings. Race figured prominently in participants’ design ideations. Thus, when we describe trans technologies and how to design them, this means intersectional trans technologies that also center marginalized races, ethnicities, and additional salient identity facets.
Primary takeaways from our study are that technology can help to provide space and support that enable trans people to express and change bodies, appearances, and gender presentations; maintain safety; share resources; and connect with other community members.
The future of trans technologies
While in these two papers we provide preliminary definitions and designs, what trans technology is and how trans technologies are designed will shift over time depending on community needs. It is vital to include trans people in technology design processes to account for the changing nature of trans people’s experiences, the challenges they face, and how they envision technology helping to address these challenges.
