In researching his book "Trans Technologies," Oliver Haimson interviewed the creators of more than 100 apps, games, extended reality systems, and other forms of technology specifically designed to address the unique challenges and joys encountered by trans people.
"Digital technologies have always been ambivalent spaces for marginalized groups, as technology can both amplify the inequalities faced by marginalized people and foster connections with others like them," says Haimson, an assistant professor at the University of Michigan School of Information.
"Trans Technologies" examines some of the recent technologies developed by and for trans people, as well as their limitations, possible paths forward, and tech creators' sense of agency and empowerment.
Haimson will give a reading from the book at 6:30 p.m. on April 7 at
Literati Bookstore, 124 E. Washington St. in Ann Arbor.
Haimson recently hopped on the phone with Concentrate to discuss key issues raised in his book. The following conversation has been edited for clarity and length.
Q: What is trans technology? You offer both a practical and a theoretical definition. What’s the difference?
A: I came up with both of these [definitions] through interviews with [tech creators]. I asked all of them what that term meant to them, and I distilled [the definition] down into these two different ways that people are thinking about it. The practical definition is technology that is specific to trans people in addressing needs that they may have. This would include something like a hormone tracker app that helps you keep track of when to take hormone dosages and things like that.
The more theoretical definition – that's drawing from a long history of queer theory and trans studies. It is technology that is embracing change or transition. It has potential to create new worlds and create new possibilities for what technology actually means and actually create new ways of using technology. This second definition is kind of weirder, more conceptual. There are many technologies that fall into one of these [categories] or the other, and then there are a few that I would say meet both definitions.
A lot of the more practical [examples] are really speaking to this current political moment. It's a moment where trans people are under attack politically with all of this anti-trans legislation and [Trump’s] recent executive orders. One important [app] is called Trans Lifeline; it's basically a suicide hotline where you can call in if you are feeling like you really need to speak with someone and having mental health concerns. That is really important. When things in the country you live in are extremely precarious, a lot of people are impacted in their mental health. Having a resource like that is just a basic need.
Erin Reed [is a] very prominent trans activist and journalist, and [created a] map where she does a lot of analysis to show a risk assessment for each state. Every two months she updates it and you can go and see what the current status is. She's able to show that there are actually two states that are considered "do not travel" states now for trans people — that's Florida and Texas. This is incredibly practical and crucial trans technology because people need to know where it's safe for them to go. A [recent] survey showed that of the trans people who are living in states where there's a lot of anti-trans legislation, 5% had actually moved to a different state, and 40% were considering moving to a different state. This map that Erin has created is a really helpful way for people to know where might be a good place to move.
There is one [theoretical example] that I think is quite interesting: a facial prosthetic initially developed in the context of thinking about trans people and gender transition. It's meant to work with Apple Face ID. If you think about unlocking your iPhone, most people unlock their iPhone using their face. What that means is that you can only have one identity on Apple iPhone, because you only have one face. Sometimes during gender transition, people do have periods of time where they need to have multiple identities. A doctoral student named Saúl Baeza Argüello in Barcelona worked with a participatory design approach where some community members came in and basically created these facial prosthetics that you could put on your face and actually have a different identity. The cool part of this is that it goes beyond trans experiences. People started to use these prosthetics to evade surveillance technologies in their workplace if there was a surveillance camera and they didn't want to be detected, or in public spaces where there's cameras on the street. People sometimes just don't want to be recognized in that way. They found that these same facial prosthetics that you could use to have multiple identities on Apple ID could also be used for resisting surveillance.
Q: You write about a certain ambivalence that many trans tech creators are faced with, where on the one hand, there's this desire to create technology that addresses specific problems faced by trans people, but there's also an awareness that these solutions are stopgaps and that larger problems are caused by structural, institutionalized oppression. Could you talk a bit more about that sense of ambivalence?
A: There's so many different types of ambivalence that I came across, but in direct relation to this kind of solutionism versus stopgaps, I always think about these trans technologies as not something that can actually solve the systemic issues that we're facing. If you think about the laws and policies that we're facing, those are not really things that we can build an app to change. That really takes a lot of advocacy and political activism in a lot of different ways.
There's also these systemic issues, things like transphobia and racism, that you can't create an app to address or solve. That's why I don't like to phrase these [technologies] as being solutions. I always am very careful with the language to say that these [technologies] are ways to help address challenges. This is just something that can make people's lives better in a lot of ways, and can help to make progress to some extent. But it's never going to be a solution. That's just not what we can do with technology. That does feel somewhat limiting, but it's important to be careful there, because I don't want people to get the sense that technology is going to come in and save everything.
Q: The concepts of both care and ambivalence seem central to the book. Could you talk a bit about those concepts in the context of your research and why they're so crucial?
A: Those were the two concepts that came up in every single chapter. It was just impossible to avoid them, because all of these technologies — not all of them, but many of them — are just completely constructed with a sense of care for one's community. What's really interesting with technology is that, instead of one person taking care of another person in some sort of tangible way, you can actually care for a large portion of the community who are using that technology. You may never even meet them, and you may never know who those people are or how many people are using that [technology], but you can have these really important, tangible impacts on people's lives. That's one of the really powerful things about trans technology that I kept seeing over and over again.
Emotions, I think, are important here, because there's a lot of anger. There's a lot of rage. But at the same time, people also have hope and joy, and all of those can exist at the same time. It's just that's not how we usually think about emotion — as people simultaneously feeling rage and hope. But that is what I kept seeing.
Q: You differentiate between "technological separatism" and "technological inclusionism." Could you explain that difference for me?
A: Technological inclusionism honestly feels kind of outdated at this point because of the ways that we've seen all of these major tech platforms pivot away from inclusion and the whole DEI thing. Take Meta as an example. For many years, they were really wading into inclusion and trying to make sure that trans and queer people would be included and welcome on their sites. I was, at the time, actually doing a lot of research on social media, so I was also thinking about ways that platforms like that could be inclusive of trans people. After a point, it just seemed like that was not necessarily the best way to impact change, because these are huge companies, and as much as they were acting like they meant well, we weren't really seeing a lot of progress.
I started to think that it might be way more impactful, but also interesting from a research perspective, to study the people who are doing things outside of these mainstream systems. That would be what I'm calling technological separatism. Instead of just trying to fit into a mainstream platform and make it work, despite its limitations, people actually just create their own communities, their own platforms, or communities on a platform like, let's say, Discord or Mastodon. I call it "separatism" even though I know that "separatism" has a negative connotation, but I do think that that's what it is. It's people intentionally going away from these large platforms. When Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, recently pivoted quite strongly away from inclusionism, and basically made a series of comments that implied that they no longer cared about trans people and making sure that trans people [would] be welcome on their platforms and would not be harassed and discriminated against, to me, it felt like what I had thought was true the whole time — which is that they don't maybe actually really care about inclusion.
Q: What were some of the biggest surprises that you encountered over the course of your research?
A: I thought, going into this study, that this was not that big of a research space. I thought that there were not very many trans technologies in the world. But I thought that I could have a complete list, and that turned out to be completely wrong. It was just an area that was expanding so much over the course of the year that I was doing interviews, and then after that. I still keep a list of these technologies, and it gets longer and longer, and I've been documenting these on my
Instagram account, [which is] like a visual archive that goes along with the book. I reached a point where I realized I just couldn't actually interview everyone that I wanted to interview, and I had to just choose a point to stop. But it was really inspiring, because something that I thought was a lot more fringe and rare ended up being something that was actually rapidly expanding.
Q: You write that this is your first time disclosing so much personal information about yourself and your own transition, something you've "shied away from in this dangerous political environment." Given the timing of the book's release, I imagine you did most of the research and writing before President Trump's second inauguration. Have you had any regrets or misgivings since the book's publication, either about how the book will be received or your own safety?
A: It's been very interesting, to say the least, because for a couple years now, I knew that the book was coming out in February 2025, but of course I had no idea what February 2025 would be like. I usually am a pretty optimistic person, so I thought it would be a little bit different than it is. But then I started to realize that the book actually was coinciding with a moment where it's really, really important to talk about this stuff and to think about forms of resistance — and I think a lot of trans technologies are forms of resistance.
It felt to me like it was actually really good timing in that sense, because we need to talk about this, and I want people to be reading about this kind of thing. So I would say intellectually, politically, I think it's a good thing that the book is out now. Personally, it does feel a little scary at times. I've been doing a ton of book events. I've been doing a lot of media. I've been a much more public trans person than I've ever been. And that, of course, puts me in a pretty scary position. But I decided a long time ago that that I was going to do this, and I still feel like it's the right thing to do, especially because I don't think there's a lot of people like me, and I think it's helpful for more junior scholars to see someone like me being more public. I’m pretty privileged. If people were to have some sort of hateful campaign against me, I could deal with it. I’m not an immigrant. I’m not going to be deported. There are a lot of ways that I have privilege that others don't, so I think that I can afford to speak out right now, as much as it is personally terrifying.
More information on Haimson's Literati appearance is available
here.
Natalia Holtzman is a freelance writer based in Ann Arbor. Her work has appeared in publications such as the Minneapolis Star Tribune, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Literary Hub, The Millions, and others.
Photo courtesy of Oliver Haimson.