In 2021, trans folks on Twitter debated about the ethics and usefulness of a venture-funded app suite called Euphoria, meant to facilitate transitions.
While the trans world moved on, one trans guy didn’t. Oliver Haimson was fascinated. In 2019, he opened a note on his phone titled “Trans Technology” and started a running list. It had four initial entries:
- MyTransHealth, a Kickstarter-funded health resource site.
- Solace, the first of the Euphoria app suite.
- Transdr, an app ostensibly for transgender dating.
- TransTech Social Enterprises, a technology skill-building community for trans folks
It demonstrated an emerging trend the trans academic was interested in: the intersection between trans people and technology. This was a very new concept, termed by Haimson and three others in a paper published that year.
The four entries spanned the breadth of what trans technology could be. Trans people were harnessing technology to their unique struggles like access to jobs and medical information. And, technologists were seeing trans people as a new market for products, which the Euphoria app founder called a $200 billion industry—a number frequently repeated by conservative commentators. Some founders were trans, others were cis. Some entities were profit-oriented, others were not.
The information studies student was “trying to figure out if this could be an acceptable research area in academic computing spaces.” To his delight, it was warmly received so he kept digging.
Six years and several papers later, Hamison’s list has grown to 100 and has turned from a phone note to a unique body of scholarly work. Now an assistant professor at the University of Michigan School of Information, Hamison’s first book, titled Trans Technologies,will be published by MIT Press in February 2025.
The Blade read a copy of Hamison’s manuscript and chatted with him about the state of tech and trans people. The book is drawn from Hamison’s interviews with the creators of all 100 entries on the list.
Hamison emphasizes these 100 are just a sample. “I kind of could have kept going forever,” he says. “I really didn’t intend to talk to that many people, because usually with these interview studies we talked to about 25 people.”
At the end of every interview, Hamison asked participants if there was anyone else who may be a good candidate—a method called snowball sampling—and the project just kept growing.
“I just had to cut myself off at around 100 interviews, because I wanted to actually move forward with the analysis and writing,” he says.
Many of those that Hamison interviewed may be recognizable. He spoke to trans pioneer Lynn Conway before her death this June. He spoke to trans journalist Erin Reed, known for her informed consent clinic and trans risk maps.
If the names are not recognizable, the projects often are. While Kai Jackson may not be a trans household name, TransTape, a technology highlighted in the book, is ubiquitous in most transmasculine communities. The same could be said with the many interviewee names associated with TransLifeline or Plume.
Transness is about change and transition and crossing over boundaries and borders.
Oliver Haimson
The technologies profiled were diverse, bound by a definition given to Hamison by artist and theorist Sandy Stone in an interview—“Technology is anything that extends your agency”—which in turn had been drawn from media scholar Marshall McCluhan’s 1964 definition of technology as “any extension of ourselves.” Hamison likes Stone’s wording better.
But ultimately, it was Hamison’s job to define the bounds of trans technology. Was it a piece of technology created by a transgender person? Was it a piece of tech used primarily by transgender people? Was it a piece of tech only concerned with “trans things,” whatever those are?
Drawn from his hours of interviews, Hamison proposed there were two definitions of trans technology.
“One is a more practical definition,” he says. “Trans technology is a kind of technology that can help address some of the needs and challenges that trans people and trans communities face.” He explains that these technologies address the practical needs of the trans community, ranging from underemployment to lack of access to healthcare to risk of violence.
That can’t encapsulate everything though. “There’s also this more theoretical definition,” Hamison says. “A lot of the technologies that I talk about in the book are creating these new trans worlds, new possibilities that might not have been possible before thinking about technology and transness together.”
“Transness is about change and transition and crossing over boundaries and borders,” says Hamison. “There are ways that that could apply to technology.”
Hamison argues that trans people and transness bring something unique and powerful to the tech space. “Technology can open up these new possibilities for trans people, but at the same time, trans identity opens up new possibilities for technology and what it means and what it can do.”
As “exciting and big and interesting as this world is,” Hamison emphasizes that the trans-tech space does not fully represent the diversity of the trans community
“It was pretty clear early on in the study that the people who were creating trans technologies were most likely white, highly educated, [and of a] higher socioeconomic status,” he says. “Many of the people I interviewed have Ph.D.s or other types of graduate degrees, and that doesn’t line up with the broader trans population.”
Per the 2020 Transgender Survey, only 18% of trans people have completed a bachelor’s degree or higher. This compares to 37.9% of the U.S. population, per the U.S. Census as of 2021.
“A lot of these creators, even people who are creating really amazing things, are creating based on their own experiences,” Hamison explains. “Many trans technologies are more likely to meet the needs of people who are white and highly educated and of higher socioeconomic status.”
He advocates for a community-based design approach that involves the whole of the trans community. “There are some things that are really needed,” he says, citing newer efforts to monitor violence, “They are important because they are coming from what the community needs, not just the more privileged members of the community.”
Though many technologies Hamison researched address with the practical issues of healthcare, employment, and safety, others grapple with the complex, varied emotional experiences of the trans community.
He cites creator Sasha Winter’s “game jams” where videogame developers come together to make and share games under the topics of “trans fucking rage” and “trans joy.” Developers created more than 100 unique video games for the jams, many of which are available for free or cheap download.
“I think this is such a great example of trans technologies more broadly,” Hamison reflects, “All of us hold this rage and joy together at once.”
This story is part of the Digital Equity Local Voices Fellowship lab through News is Out. The lab initiative is made possible with support from Comcast NBCUniversal.