PLEASE NOTE: This is a minimally-edited transcript that originates from a program that uses AI.
Anita Rao
When you step out into the world, people see your body through the lenses. They've been socially trained to use race, size, age, gender, many of these are rigid, not always a full representation of how we actually identify. So what if you could try walking in the world in a different body using technology Take, for instance, V tubing, where creators live stream using virtual avatars instead of their real faces.
Hibby Thach
I sort of use this V tuber to embody and express my gender identity as a trans woman in ways that I wouldn't be able to offline in the physical world.
Anita Rao
That's Hibby Thach, a grad student at the University of Michigan School of Information. For
Hibby Thach
example, my V tuber Is this, like pastel clowny rabbit thing. And like, obviously, I am a human being. I'm not this pastel, cloudy rabbit, but it's nice to be able to express gender in that way through this avatar that moves with me while I stream.
Anita Rao
Hibby uses tech like V tubing, not just for personal expression, but for research. She's part of a lab studying trans technologies, tech that either meets a specific need of the trans community or helps create a world that better embraces change. Trans tech is not new. Since the dawn of the internet, trans creators have responded to needs in their community with innovation. So what does the trans tech landscape look like today, and how does it reflect what it feels like to live in a trans body in this country at this particular moment? This is embodied. I'm Anita Rao to learn more about trans technologies, we're staying inside hippies lab at the University of Michigan School of Information, but we're meeting her advisor, Oliver Haimson. Oliver spent the past few years trying out every piece of trans tech he could get his hands on, and documenting his findings in the new book, trans technologies. While his research started in a different environment, he says that right now is an essential time to be thinking about technology.
Oliver Haimson
This is an incredibly hostile political moment for trans people, and that tends to pretty much every realm of life. So things like rights being taken away in healthcare, ability to exist in public spaces, people's ability to obtain documentation, things like passports. And I don't have any illusions that technology is going to solve these problems. I don't think about it as a solution, but what I do think is that technology can help address some of these problems. So we can think of these larger challenges as more systemic technology. It can also give trans people a lot of agency to do something, to feel like they're helping to address some of what is going on around us. So in that way, I think that trans technologies can be really empowering forms of resistance in the face of all this oppression that we're facing. I want
Anita Rao
to talk about the definition of technology that you have and you use, and kind of orient us to what we mean when we say technology in this conversation. So you mentioned this idea of technology is something that extends and expands someone's sense of agency. And in terms of scope, you're talking about everything from like apps to virtual reality to social media. What distinguishes trans technology? What do you mean when you use that term?
Oliver Haimson
I didn't want it to just be my own interpretation of what that means. So that was actually a question that I asked the people that I interviewed, which was over 100 creators of trans technology. So there's a more practical definition, which is any technology that addresses the unique needs and challenges that trans people communities face. So that would be, perhaps something like a app that helps to track your hormones so that you don't miss a dose, something like that. That's a very practical need. And then the second definition is thinking about a technology that embraces change or transition, so technologies that create new opportunities and actually sometimes change the meaning of what technology can do and what technology even means. So
Anita Rao
we're going to kind of thread out these two definitions throughout the course of our conversation and talk about examples in each of those realms, but maybe to kind of orient us at the beginning, is there an example of trans tech that you've seen deployed in the last few months in response to this particular moment that could help us understand kind of what trans tech means? And what it can do.
Oliver Haimson
This current political moment feels a lot to me like what was happening about three years ago when I was first starting this research. So one really good example that I I really love this, this system, it's called Trans family network, and basically there were a lot of people in Texas at the time who were mostly families where they had a child who was trans, and Texas had decided to ban healthcare for young trans people. And so a lot of these families they you know, they didn't want their children to have to forcibly detransition, so they would be looking for ways to flee to another state, and they needed a lot of support. And then there were a lot of people all over the country who wanted to be able to provide that support, but there wasn't really a good way to connect those two groups of people, and initially they were just organizing on a Google spreadsheet, but that wasn't really very safe. So this trans family network app, this was created in the span of about two weeks by a number of trans women, mostly Silicon Valley software engineer types. They took about two weeks off of work, and they created this app that can not only track who needs support, what kind of support, and connect them with other people who can provide support, but it also had some pretty complex vetting mechanisms so that people would feel more safe. That's
Anita Rao
a really helpful example, and what that really illuminates for me is how this tech kind of increases access to vital information and resources for people who are in a moment of acute need. And I want to kind of take you into your personal story for a second and talk about when you in 2010 were going through your own physical transition. You wanted to get top surgery. Talk to me about what information you needed to go through that part of your
Oliver Haimson
transition. Yeah, this was a unique time period, I think, to be transitioning and to be looking at these resources. Because earlier, you know, back in the 90s, when I was a teenager, there were actually a lot more in person resources for queer teenagers, like I remember going to a physical LGBT center with support groups and that sort of thing. But in 2010 It was a time when the internet was definitely around. There was a lot going on online, but there wasn't yet support systems and the resources that we have now. So it was a desert, in a way, because there were fewer in person resources, but there were not yet enough online resources, and so I was trying to rely on community, but there were really only just a few people in my network who had had the type of surgery that I was looking into. There was one friend who I, you know, got up the nerve to talk with him about this, because I knew that he had had the same surgery that I was wanting to have. And his response was basically like, oh, you really need to do your research. And that was so frustrating at the time, because that was what I felt like I was doing, yeah, like he was your research. He was he was the research I was trying to do. And I had so so few other people to ask about, so that ended up not being helpful at all. So there was then one other person who was quite a bit more helpful, and showed me their chest and the types of scars that they had and those sort of things, which was really, really helpful. But both of those friends had gone to the same surgeon who was in a different state, and I felt like I just didn't have the financial resources to travel and to be away from my job in a different state. So that's why I ended up going to someone local who just ended up being a very bad choice.
Anita Rao
What do you mean when you say bad choice? What do you mean?
Oliver Haimson
I mean that. So I wasn't able to see any photographs of surgeries that this person had done. Nowadays, there's online spaces where you can actually see photographs of what surgery would look like if you went to different providers. And I didn't have any of that information. And so this surgeon that I ended up going to when it was kind of too late, I started to realize that he was actually quite inexperienced, and a few years later, I had to go to a different surgeon who was much more expert in this and get a revision surgery. And some of those. Loans from that time period I'm still paying off.
Anita Rao
So there is a lot more technology now that you've alluded to. Is there something specific that's available today that would have changed your process had it been around then?
Oliver Haimson
Yeah, definitely. So that surgery that I spoke about was my first trans surgery, but I've had a lot of other surgeries since then. And one thing that was so important to me was actually an online community on Facebook that I became very involved in, and I was able to connect with people and ask lots of questions and really actually build meaningful connections with people. So that was really great. There's another technology now called mod Club, which is an online community specifically for trans men and people on the trans masculine spectrum. And it's specifically for people to share resources and talk about surgery and be able to share photos and supplies, and you know, just all of the information that you would need and that I really didn't have access to back in 2010 and 2011 and that would have been such an amazing resource for me
Anita Rao
in the years after his transition, Oliver's reflections on trans technology turned from the personal to the professional. He got his PhD in Information and Computer Science and began a professional research career. At one point, he got curious about the scope of technology exploring transness and supporting trans people, and he started to keep track of what was out there. His list grew from four entries to almost 300 just ahead, we'll hear about some of the tech on that list and what Oliver learned about the creators behind them. You're listening to embodied from North Carolina public radio, a broadcast service of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
This is embodied. I'm Anita Rao. Six years ago, Oliver Haimson started compiling a list of trans technologies, tech that serves the specific needs of trans folks or reflects elements of the trans experience. He has studied more than 100 of these technologies, working to understand how and why they were created and what potential they hold for trans communities. Oliver has done this alongside a team of grad students at the University of Michigan School of Information. One step in the process was categorizing the challenges faced by trans people to help understand what problems tech can and cannot solve. The team identified 14 categories ranging from healthcare and online identity to legal issues and financial struggles. This process helped them identify both strengths and opportunities for trans tech.
Oliver Haimson
I think that we can really make impact if trans technologies are addressing the most salient needs for the community, and that's not always the case. So one example that I came across was related to document related challenges. So as a result of the recent executive order, there are some pretty serious limitations with trans people being able to get passports or renew their passports and have the gender marker align with their current identity, and that obviously has so many ramifications, like people being unable to travel internationally and potentially being detained and things like this. But I didn't come across any trans technology that addressed that. And you can imagine that that's it is both sort of a systemic issue. It's something that we really need policy to change, but I think that there are some things that tech is really great for. So we've talked before about joining people together, helping people find community. And so that relates a lot to the challenge of access to resources. So when people are looking for health care providers or maybe trans affirming or, you know, just access to things like that, there are lots of trans technologies that are doing that. And usually when I when my group does design workshops, that's kind of one of the first things that always comes up is like, we need some sort of they often call it Trans Yelp, right? Like finding, finding resources. I don't think there's a cohesive trans technology that addresses the entire country or the entire world, and that also has a really robust review system built in. So that's something that maybe we still need, but there are a lot that are kind of more regionally specific or focused on particular needs. So one big challenge is finding public restrooms, because you can't really be a person out and. Public if you don't have access to restrooms. And so there have been trans technologies that have mapped out where are the nearest restrooms that are going to be safe for trans people. But unfortunately, actually, the two main ones that I know of are no longer around. So that's another thing that we could potentially talk about later, if you want to, is that a lot of times these trans technologies are not particularly sustainable or long lasting. Unfortunately,
Anita Rao
I do want to talk about that, but I want to thread you through a couple other examples first, so we get a full sense of the lay of the land. And there's one subset of tech that you documented that I thought was really interesting. It was these browser extensions that could change how a website appeared or the language on a website to fit a trans person's needs. So could you maybe tell me a story behind one of these?
Oliver Haimson
Yeah, yeah, I'd love to. So I talked with a creator named Wayne temple, and he is a cis man and the father of a trans son. And so really just a very caring father who had noticed that a lot of times when his son was interacting with systems in a web browser that they would use the son's previous name. And so he was, at the time, trying to learn how to code, because he wanted to switch careers into programming. And so he found an existing browser extension, I think it was called the Trump inator. It was something that turns the word Trump into drum or something. The thing about browser extensions is it's really easy to reuse code. So you can basically just kind of copy and paste something like that, but then make it so that the user can input the name that they want to hide and the name they want to replace it with. So he was able to create this for his son, and that was really helpful for for the kid, and then he ended up publishing it so that other Chrome users could also use it. And these browser extensions are so cool because you can actually create a browser extension. Some people were telling me they did it within an hour, and most people were doing it in one day, like in an afternoon, you can create something like this. It's just very easy to reuse code and just get something working very, very quickly. So I think that's a very inspiring story. What's interesting
Anita Rao
about that story too is it kind of demonstrates this fluidity between technological inventions that weren't explicitly created with trans folks in mind, and those that could have applications that really serve trans folks needs. And there's another one of these I would love to talk to you about, which is in the realm of identity verification. This is like a growing component of a lot of tech. Think about opening your iPhone and how it reads your face to unlock, or you go to the airport and a TSA scanner is letting you in by using your face. But there are some particular points of friction that some trans folks have with this technology. Tell me about those before we talk about some of the adaptations.
Oliver Haimson
Yeah, yeah. So the thing is that a lot of these systems that require using your face are not necessarily designed to work for people whose faces are changing over time. There was a story about, for instance, Uber drivers need to the system. Wanted them to be able to verify who they were by making sure that their current face matches their driver's license. And of course, that's something that is typically not true if you are someone who's going through hormone transitions and your face is actually physically changing. So that can be something that really locks trans people out of in this case, employment, and, you know, being able to earn a living. And another example is Apple face ID. So you're really only allowed to have one identity that you use to lock your iPhone. And for someone who might want to have two different identities, that can be really challenging. And so there was one example in my research where a team of researchers actually led by Sal Beza Arguello, had created a series of facial prosthetics so that you could actually adjust your face so that you could have multiple identities on a apple face idea. And I thought that was just such a unique and cool idea
Anita Rao
that that is really interesting. I remember reading about that example in your book and wondering about the privacy implications of that, like if you're if multiple different iterations of a face could unlock a face ID you. How do you make sure that, like a phone is safe from privacy violations of like someone else trying to get into your phone? Are creators thinking about that piece of it? Oh,
Oliver Haimson
sure, yeah. That's actually not something that came up in that. And I think that, you know, if someone stole your iPhone, yeah, and tried to use their own face, I think that there are security precautions in place where they wouldn't be able to do it. So I imagine that if they were using facial prosthetics, unless they could get their face exactly like yours or exactly like yours, plus prosthetic, I don't think they would be able to get in. But on the flip side of that, these facial prosthetics were actually also used to kind of obfuscate security technologies. So for instance, surveillance technologies in the workplace, or things like that, where people were being surveilled, but they didn't want to be surveilled, and so they were using these facial prosthetics, which were designed in response to this trans challenge, to actually use it in all different types of contexts, for people who were and were not trans, to be able to get around some of these instances where they didn't want to be surveilled. So
Anita Rao
we've been talking about these kind of specific examples of tech that meets real and specific needs, like a bathroom, finding app or connecting you to health services. But early in the conversation, you also mentioned your interest in technology that helps trans folks think about change and transformation more broadly. And I want to talk with you about some examples that fit into this kind of bucket of trans tech, particularly the uses of augmented reality. There is a project that I would love to hear about called through the wardrobe. Tell me about this and the vision behind it.
Oliver Haimson
Yeah, that was one of my favorite trans technologies that I was able to learn about. So this is augmented reality. It's an exhibition. So it's actually an entire room that you would walk through in a physical space where you're also wearing these augmented reality glasses. And this was created by someone named Rob Eagle. And basically, people can go in. It's not only for trans people. It's really just anyone who wants to explore their identity in these digitally augmented ways. So you go in, there's things like clothing and accessories and makeup, and each of those has little digital elements that pop up when you're wearing these augmented reality glasses, and you can also hear about people's experiences and things like that as you're walking through the exhibition. So this is such a cool way for anyone to really try expressing or exploring their identity in new ways, by trying on these different types of clothing or accessories. And so it could be really powerful if you're someone who is exploring your gender pretty accurately, or it could just be a way if you're someone who wants to explore maybe your fashion and you're not sure how you would feel about wearing a particular item. It's a way to do that as well that's really a positive experience and not stigmatized, which I think a lot of times, trying on unique or different styles is somewhat stigmatized, especially, I think for men,
Anita Rao
what would have been like for you to come across this through the wardrobe decades ago As someone newly exploring your trans identity? Yeah,
Oliver Haimson
I think for me personally, I think I was already kind of wearing men's clothing for most of my life. So I don't think I there's less stigma, I think for people who are assigned female at birth to wear men's clothing than the other way around. So for me personally, I think I was already fine with exploring different ways of how I wanted to look and and what I wanted to wear. I think what might have been more impactful is actually something that my research team has been working on right now, which is an augmented reality face filter app that's specifically for gender exploration and for people who are questioning their identity. Because if you think about some of these face filter apps, there's a lot of ones that are like gender swap. And you know, if you were to try it, for instance, it would turn you into a very stereotypical, you know, male figure, probably with a very square jaw and and stubble and things like that. But in a lot of the research we've done, people don't really want always those stereotypical versions. They want a lot more control over you know, what is your hair like? What is your makeup potentially like? What is your. Jaw going to look like, and so we are now designing and developing a trend centered face filter app that I think is going to be really important for people who are trying to explore identity.
Anita Rao
You say this one would have been more significant to you. Why is that?
Oliver Haimson
Well, I think that at the beginning, I didn't really think it was possible for me to look like a man, you know, and so that, I think, kept me from physically transitioning for a kind of long period of time, because I didn't know that that was possible. And even if I knew it was possible, I wouldn't know what it would look like on my own face. And so augmented reality is a way that people can actually view what they would actually look like potentially after being on gender firming hormones for a period of time, yeah, and I think that that would have been really kind of life changing thing for me.
Anita Rao
And the thing about augmented reality and some of those technologies you explore is that it's really a space of joy and play, like we've been talking about, you know, the need for services and things that help you feel safe and secure. But there's also a lot of technologies that are created to kind of give people a sense of play and freedom and exploration in finding out more things about their new identity. And that seems like what augmented reality is really a great use for. Yeah,
Oliver Haimson
yeah, definitely. And that's part of the reason why I really love AR, and we've heard from a lot of people in our research studies that it's very exciting to them. And so the through the wardrobe, for instance, is an example where there is a lot of playfulness there. And in our face filter app that we're creating, it's not only about looking at what you might actually want to look like. It also includes a lot of just fun adornments and things that are just fun to explore. So, like, you can make yourself have elf ears. You can have, you know, a butterfly in your hair, things like this that you know. You might not actually want that, but it's okay to play with it and to have fun with it, and that's, I think, a really important part of identity exploration as well.
Anita Rao
So I want to talk with you about some of the creators that you interviewed. You interviewed 115 creators of trans technologies for your book. What did you learn about who is creating most of this tech and what their motivations are for the products.
Oliver Haimson
Yeah. So there was most of the creators, I think, were coming from a place where they were trans themselves. It was about 80% of the people I talked to were trans or non binary, or both themselves, and they were thinking about, what are the challenges that they're facing in their own life, or what did they want to see in the world? And then they would create that which can be really empowering, I think, if you are someone who has the skills and has the resources to do that. But the problem is that not everyone does have the skills and the resources and the extra time. And so I started to realize that many of the creators were people who are more privileged in the trans community, so more likely to be white, more likely to be highly educated and more likely to have more financial resources or be of higher socioeconomic status, and those things are not true of the trans population. More broadly, in fact, trans people are much more likely to be at the lower end of, you know, socioeconomic status, and are actually more likely to be people of color. So for instance, we know that trans women of color are more likely to face violence in their everyday lives. And so I started to realize there's this gap between the community more broadly, and the people who are creating the trans technologies. And so I'd really love to see us bridge that gap in some ways, and I think the way to do that is by taking a more community based approach. So first connecting some of these people who are really excited about creating technologies and have the skills to do that with the broader community, so they're moving beyond just this more individualistic or solo design process. And so there's things like, what we really, really need is more safety technologies, and I would love to see more people tackling spaces like that, or some of the things I spoke about earlier, around documents. Or, you know, legal issues and issues with police and incarceration, things like that.
Anita Rao
So you you mentioned obviously that these creators are overwhelmingly white and maybe creating from a space of privilege more often. I'm curious about like, who they feel like they're creating for? Like, are they more interested in adapting existing platforms to support trans users or creating platforms exclusively for trans folks?
Oliver Haimson
I think that there was a lot of variation here. So some people were thinking about this more than others. There was definitely one Creator I talked with who was very explicitly, like, I am just creating this for me. This was just a fun project for me. And then there's other people who really understand that there are these limitations there, and are actively trying to make their technology more inclusive and work from a broader set of people. They are making inroads into that by, for instance, inviting people of color to be more involved, and, you know, making sure that they open things up to a larger group of people. But sometimes that's a bit difficult to do after technology's already created, and I think it's a lot better to work on that earlier in the process, to involve a broader set of community members, right from the beginning.
Anita Rao
Coming up next, we're going to talk with Oliver about what exactly it looks like to practice community centered design and trans technology using examples from his own lab. As always, you can hear the podcast version of the show by following embodied on your platform of choice. We'll be right back.
This is embodied. I'm Anita Rao. Today we're talking about trans technologies, tech that meets trans people's specific needs, or tech that challenges us to think about change and transformation in new ways. Oliver Haimson is a researcher who has been deep in the trans tech world for years, interviewing creators, trying out existing tech and designing some of his own he runs a lab at the University of Michigan School of Information, where one driving principle of their work is participatory design. They involve the community from idea inception to deployment, and they're currently using this process to build a safety app
Oliver Haimson
for this. I really want to shout out my PhD student named Denny Starks, who's really been leading this work. And Denny has a lot of personal connections with the community in Detroit, and has been specifically working with mostly trans women and non binary people of color. And they have been prototyping this over the years, but they always take into account, what does the community want to see, what would most helpful? And so the app they've been calling it, you signal, you dash signal, and there's an app element, and then there's a wearable element in terms of some sort of smart watch, where if you do feel like you're in a violent situation and you need help, you can just very easily tap on this watch element so you don't have to pull out your phone and figure out how to ask for help. And then another really important part of that is that the community members were overwhelmingly saying we don't want this to notify police, and the reason for that is because trans people, as well as people of color, have very fraught relationships with police. So sometimes, if you're in a violent or unsafe situation, having police come is not going to help. It's actually going to hurt that situation. So instead, we've been thinking about ways of people having a list of Guardians when they call for help, it will actually go to those people instead, and you can see who's close by, who might be able to help. So that's part of the system. We're still iterating. We're still working on what that's actually going to look like and how we're going to build it, but Denny's been doing some really amazing prototyping work there, and I hope that we move forward with that soon. What are
Anita Rao
some of the takeaways from your research and the learning that you've done about participatory design that you think could apply to tech design more broadly,
Oliver Haimson
yeah, I love participatory design because it's really the best way to just get tons of ideas and do tons of collaborative brainstorming with a diverse group of community members. You're not just you know, especially as an academic researcher, I realize that we are. Not the people who should be deciding what should be built. We definitely want to rely on community for that. And so it's just such a really powerful method of doing that, by getting all these people in a room together. And we usually take an approach that is very kind of blue sky, or it's a futuring approach, so we tend to not impose any limitations. So we want to hear about people's exciting ideas, whether or not it's something that can actually be built right now, it might be something that will be possible to build in the future. It might not be at all, but it gives people a lot of agency to think about things really expansively, and that leads to some really good ideas and really creative approaches. And I can give an example of that if you'd like, Sure go ahead. So one thing that's come up in multiple of our participatory design workshops is something called a body changing Laboratory, or, you know, some variation of something like that. And what this is is basically you walk into a little booth, there's a screen there, you can kind of push buttons and determine what you want your body to be like, and then you press a button and you just magically change. And we know that that is never going to be realistic or possible, but there's elements of it that I think are really important, and I think that what it signals is that trans people are just feeling very constrained in terms of, it's very difficult to get medical care. There's a lot of limitations and constraints in place, and this shows that people just really want more agency over their health care. They don't want all of this red tape and this difficulty, right? And so it signals that, I think it's a way of showing that we really need more opportunities for identity exploration and for using technology to understand what bodies could look like, so eventually I could see something sort of like this. It wouldn't be instantaneous, but it would be a way to view what what you might possibly look like, what you might want to look like, and then connect you with the resources and the providers that might be able to help make that possible.
Anita Rao
So you mentioned the value of having a space where people can brainstorm without feeling the constraints of the marketplace or how viable a particular technology would be. But I am curious about that kind of more zoomed out viability and sustainability piece of all of the technologies that you explored and experimented with, how many of them like came to fruition? How sustainable were the ones that you looked at in terms of being able to be used by folks long term?
Oliver Haimson
This is probably one of the more disappointing parts of my research, is that most of these are not very sustainable. Many of them don't actually get built or deployed at all, and that's especially the case with the ones that are doing these really community driven, participatory approaches. Is that they get to the prototyping stage, but they often don't go further than that. And there's lots of reasons for that. A lot of it comes down to lack of resources. A lot of it is that some of this work is being done in academic spaces, where there's lots of incentives for doing research and for doing prototypes, but there's not very many incentives for actually building, deploying and maintaining technologies. So we run into a lot of constraints there, and it's been very sad actually to me to see, even after I finished this manuscript, a lot of the technologies that I was talking about in the book had decided to sunset their technologies and are no longer available. Even some of the ones that have lots and lots of funding or that really seemed like they were set up for success. So I have some ideas for ways that we might move forward in a way that could be more sustainable. But I think this is a real challenge for trans technologies.
Anita Rao
Do you think that this particular political moment of heightened fear and tension is making folks sunset their projects, or is it more of a financial viability thing? Some of both,
Oliver Haimson
I think that's related for sure. There's not very many trans technologies that were or are venture capital funded, but there are some. There's, I think probably about six of them, and I noticed from a few of them that when they did decide to sunset their technologies, they mentioned this funding environment, that it was very hard to get venture capital or investment funding for advanced technologies or for LGBTQ technologies, even so I. Think that that's part of it. I think also, since I mentioned, a lot of these are created in academic spaces, and we now have so many more constraints on receiving grant funding, receiving federal funding for research, that's definitely going to take a toll on being able to create these types of technologies. I mean, you know, even in my own lab, like my grant is on Ted Cruz list of grants that are woke, you know, and so there's going to be a lot of difficulties there. But at the same time, there are tons of trans technologies that are just one person in their bedroom after work creating something with absolutely no funding attached to it. So there's a lot of people who are doing trans technologies with no funding attached to it at all, and those people are going to be less affected and are still going to be able to create what they want to create, but in terms of actually engaging with community members and doing a longer and more sustainable process that does take money and resources, and we are going to see difficulties with that because of the political climate and the ways that that ties in so directly with finances.
Anita Rao
Yeah, yeah. I mean also what you're bringing up makes me think about this intersection of systemic limitations and the future of trans tech, like an app that helps you locate gender neutral bathrooms. I guess maybe that's that's less in danger than an app that helps you locate, like, gender affirming surgery, but it's, you know, 10 states away. So if you can't get there, how useful is this app like, how does the current systemic climate impact the future of trans tech? How are, how are creators like, intersecting with these systemic barriers? Honestly,
Oliver Haimson
just in general, a lot of trans people are physically moving to locations that are more safe. There was some empirical research from the US Trans Survey, the most recent one, that showed that many trans people who are living in some of these states that are passing anti trans legislation, a high percentage of them are actually moving to different states, and when people's lives are being disrupted to that extent, when you feel that you have to move to a different location because of hostility, that makes it very difficult to do things like creating technology. Yeah, so I think that that will definitely have an impact. There
Anita Rao
is a certain amount of emotional labor that comes with, you know, putting yourself into an app, especially as you mentioned, so many of these are created based on personal need. Did the creators you spoke with feel like it was emotionally sustainable to keep doing this work in the trans tech space? I think
Oliver Haimson
it varies for different people, but there's one example. Her name is Anna Jane Metcalf. She was working on one of the Trans Day of Remembrance websites, where it documents all of the trans people who have been murdered each year. And this is something that she spends time on every day and takes a huge emotional toll. And she said to me, she spoke about how in the morning she gets up and she can decide to do some sort of self care activity, like, you know, doing yoga or reading or something relaxing, or she can choose to look at the news and see who has been murdered and compile that information for her website. And almost every day, she makes the choice to do the latter, where she just thinks it's so important to create this resource and maintain this resource, and it is really important. And I think so many people are grateful that she's doing that work, but it is definitely taking an emotional toll on her over time. So that's the sort of situation where there are huge trade offs, but it's at the same time just such a vital resource. Well,
Anita Rao
that makes me think about your own personal story. I know that you did not talk much publicly about your trans identity before publishing your book this year. What has it been like to be so public for you? For the first time with this book,
Oliver Haimson
I think I'm still getting used to it, because I was very low disclosure for a long period of time. And I made the decision a couple years ago, when I was working on the book, and I knew it would be published in early 2025 I made the decision that at that point I would say. Start to be more public, and I wouldn't be comfortable with publishing a book about this topic and having people assume that I was a cis person. It just, it didn't make sense. And so I decided that I would be more public, but I didn't know what things would be like in February and March of 2025 like, you know, things could have been different, but it turns out that we are in an even more hostile environment to trans people than we were a few years ago, which I thought was pretty bad at the time. And so it does feel kind of scary to be more public at this point in time, but I made the choice, and I'm sticking to it, and I do think it's important, you know, to be able to be visible in a time when a lot of people are feeling very scared and and hopeless. I hope that you know younger trans people or more junior trans academics. Can, you know, see me as a positive influence in some way, and I guess that's sort of what's keeping me going at this point, even though I have times where it is, it does feel very personally risky. Do you
Anita Rao
feel optimistic about the future of trans technology, given this current moment, I
Oliver Haimson
do. I mean, I think in general, I tend to be a very optimistic person, and I tend to see more the utopian side of things than the utopian side. I don't know how realistic that is, but that's kind of just, that's who I am. So I do feel optimistic about the future of trans tech, just seeing the trajectory from some of the earliest trans technologies I documented in the book. I mean, there's some performance art projects going back to the 1970s and things from the 90s and beyond. And then, as we spoke about, there were so few trans technologies, around 2010 when I was first transitioning, and now just seeing all of these young people just creating all of these exciting technologies that I never would have thought of, and learning about all of these new ways of using technology that are just So innovative and exciting, and I can only imagine things are going to continue on that trajectory. So while not everything is going to be sustainable, and we'll see things come and go, I do feel very optimistic about the future.
Anita Rao
I would love to end the conversation by giving you a magic wand and asking you to wave it to make any technology that you came across in this research come to fruition. What would you pick and why? Wow.
Oliver Haimson
I mean, I think I would have to go with, you know, the most dire needs that we see and that, I think, really comes back to the safety element that we've been talking about. And so I would love to see something like the you signal app I was mentioning the safety app, where, if you find yourself in an unsafe situation, you can press this button on a wearable technology and just disappear into a cloud of smoke and be, you know, transferred to some trans Wellness Center where you're going to be taken care of and the violent threat is no longer there.
Anita Rao
You can find out more about Oliver Haimson his book and his work at the University of Michigan. At our website, embodiedwunc.org. You can find all episodes of embodied the radio show there, and make sure to check out our weekly podcast. Also special, thanks to Hibby Thach for contributing to this episode. Today's episode is produced by Kaia Findlay and edited by Wilson Sayre. Nina Scott is our intern, Jenni Lawson, our technical director, and Amanda Magnus, our regular editor. This program is recorded at the American Tobacco Historic District. North Carolina. Public Radio is a broadcast service of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I'm Anita Rao.