The Trend of Specialized Dating Apps : Transdr
This week, I read the article titled Transdr: The new dating app specifically for trans people by Olivia Petter. This article discusses the new dating app called Transdr, which is specifically intended for the transgendered community recently launched in the United Kingdom. The founder of the app, Sean Kennedy, describes it as a “new place for trans people who are looking for serious relationships”, with the app’s goal being to establish an online dating landscape free of the discrimination transgender people have felt while using other dating apps. While current dating applications like Tinder do provide the user the ability to specify many gender and identity options, including the transgender option, transgendered users still report difficulty overcoming social stigma and identity judgments while using the apps. Transdr joins the ranks of many other specialized dating apps, like JSwipe for Jewish users, which show the increasing trend of creating new apps with the goal establishing specialized dating communities to ease the difficulty and stigma experienced by subgroups of users on larger, more generalized dating apps. I believe the fact that so many of these apps are being released shows that have been successful at this so far and see much potential with this idea. But, some members of the transgendered community have found issue in particular with Trandr’s use of certain terms usually viewed as derogatory towards the transgender community found in the descriptions of the app on mobile stores. While Transdr spokespeople claim the terms were used only to boost “search rankings” of the app and promised to remove said words from the descriptions, it emphasizes that fact that the producers of specialized dating apps must know their audience and user base, and must accommodate establish strong ties to this specific community or else the app may fail to gain transaction within this group and therefore not be used enough to provide a successful dating landscape.
This article relates grealty to the discussion of the framing and filtering of identity found in the assigned class reading titled Grindring Bodies: Racial and Affective Economies of Online Queer Desire by Senthorun Raj. Raj’s article discusses how the gay dating app Grindr filters and governs intimate interactions between users through the lens of various social norms, such as masculinity, race, physical aesthetics, etc, and how in particular “whiteness” is seen as a very desirable quality for users of the app. Users whose bodies “pass” as white are given a privileged status in the landscape of the app. I believe this bares much resemblance to the problems the transgender community faced while using general, heterosexual dominated, dating apps such as Tinder before the creation of specialized apps like Transdr, as within an app like Tinder, heterosexuality is likely viewed with the same privileged status that whiteness holds on Grindr, and the failure to “pass” as a woman, to which they identity, would result in a similar disprivilege as the failure to establish whiteness does on Grindr. Furthermore, both articles provide an interesting perspective on the differences in what is valued between the many dating communities, and seems to show that this creation of more specialized dating apps will allow for more successful experiences through the ability to cater profiles, searching filters, and other features in such a way to benefit the factors stressed by a specific community, and which would not work as well generalized to all groups of people. Overall, I think this shows that it will be interesting to see how these applications will diverge in regards to their features and user experiences over time, as most start out being very similar to Tinder and then develop their uniqueness, and I also would like to see what remains universal within these apps and therefore is potentially universal to dating in general.
