In 2018, I finished and defended my dissertation, “The Social Complexities of Transgender Identity Disclosure on Social Media” [link]. At the time, my dissertation work was a new study that I conducted and analyzed mostly in 2017 — a mixed methods analysis of gender transition blogs on Tumblr and interviews…

An abridged version of my journey from musician to researcher When I was younger I was a musician, a guitar player mostly, and I wrote and sang a lot of songs. Most of my friends were also musicians. My bands achieved some success — we released several albums, we had…

I wanted to share about a somewhat odd productivity technique that I employ in many aspects of my life: I use randomness to choose the order in which I complete tasks. We all know the feeling of being overwhelmed by choice. It has been well-documented that as the number of…

Toward Decreasing Transgender Mental Health Disparities — This blog post summarizes a research paper that was published in Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association (JAMIA)’s special issue on “Health informatics and health equity: improving our reach and impact” in 2019. Transgender people (including non-binary people) face substantial mental health disparities, and especially during the transition process…

This year, I’ve been spending quite a bit of time doing advocacy work related to equity and inclusivity for trans and/or non-binary people. Now that most of this work is making its way into the online and published world, I wrote a short blog post to summarize these resources: HCI Guidelines for Gender Equity and Inclusivity [LINK] Along…

Preliminary outcomes from our meeting at CSCW 2018 — Diversity and inclusion efforts have been a part of SIGCHI conferences for many years now, but we may look back on 2018 as a tipping point. CHI 2018 earlier this year involved advances, such as an “Un-Panel” promoting intersectionality, equity, and inclusivity, and mis-steps that were duly challenged by community…

Promoting inclusive environments by giving colleagues and students agency over disclosure of their personal identities — “REMAIN STANDING IF YOU ARE…” The keynote speaker was engaging and inspiring, so when she asked us all to stand up for a privilege-demonstration activity, we stood. “Remain standing,” she said, “if you are viewed as a person of European descent.” I remained standing. The discomfort that I felt as a white person standing was…

How people use social media sites to separate their identities and networks during times of major life transition — This blog post summarizes a research paper about people’s experiences with life transitions and social media that will be presented at the ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing 2018 on November 6. It’s often difficult to know how to present your identity on social media when you’re…