Genevieve Clifford

Genevieve Clifford
Genevieve Clifford

She/Her/Hers/Herself

Website: https://mun-tonsi.net

School of Mathematics and Computer Science,
Swansea University

Lead supervisor:
Prof Simon Robinson

Start date: October 2022 (Full time)

Award: General

Subject Pathway:
Digital Economy and Society

Thematic Cluster:
Economy, Enterprise, and Productivity Cluster

Transgender People’s Experiences of Digital Technology in Wales

For transgender people, technology mediates access to community (Cavalcante 2016; Jenzen 2017; Warner 2002), to healthcare (Dame-Griff 2023; Wagner and Kitzie 2024) and can aid in identity development (Freeman and Maloney 2021; Haimson, Dame-Griff, et al. 2021; Reyes and Fisher 2022). Technology is not however universal or considerate in its deployment, and transgender people are exposed to the negative impacts of an increasingly digital world. For example, being uniquely susceptible to silencing through algorithmic means (Haimson, Delmonaco, et al. 2021; Pilipets and Paasonen 2022) and through the insidious ‘nexus’ (Morrigan 2020, 51) of inter-community discourse and online hate (Colliver 2023; McLean 2021). Those designing technology are often unacknowledging of transgender identities (Hamidi, Scheuerman, and Branham 2018; Keyes 2018). Recent approaches for quantifying digital poverty have focused solely on households with children (Blackwell et al. 2023; Yates et al. 2023), focusing cisheteronormative approaches to political economy, with trans people being included only when their potential for social and biological reproduction is assured (Irving 2008; 2015).

Research questions:

  1. How are digital poverty and poverty more broadly linked for transgender people?

    1. What ‘form’ of poverty does digital poverty refer to in this circumstance?

    2. Is there a clear direction of causality for digital poverty?

  2. How do transgender people define digital inequality,

    1. how do they experience it,

    2. and how is it unique?

  3. How can transgender people at risk of, or experiencing digital inequality be supported?

    1. At a policy level, are existing mechanisms for supporting digital inequality sufficient for transgender people, or are more targeted mechanisms needed?

I wish to collect transgender people’s feelings and experiences of digital poverty using interpretative phenomenological analysis with semi-structured interviews; the third question will be approached with focus groups of practitioners in third-sector and public-sector organisations supporting trans people, or digital poverty specifically. For this, grounded theory or reflexive thematic analysis are proposed. A position paper is planned based on the literature review.

Bibliography

Blackwell, Chloe, Abigail Davis, Katherine Hill, Matt Padley, and Simeon Yates. 2023. ‘A UK Minimum Digital Living Standard for Households with Children: Interim Report’. Loughborough, Leicestershire: Loughborough University. https://mdls.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/MDLS-UK-report_Final-2.pdf.

Cavalcante, Andre. 2016. ‘“I Did It All Online:” Transgender Identity and the Management of Everyday Life’. Critical Studies in Media Communication 33 (1): 109–22. https://doi.org/10.1080/15295036.2015.1129065.

Colliver, Ben. 2023. ‘Responding to Transphobic Violence Online’. In The Routledge Companion to Gender, Media and Violence, edited by Karen Boyle and Suan Berridge, 1st ed., 412–22. London: Routledge.

Dame-Griff, Avery. 2023. The Two Revolutions: A History of the Transgender Internet. Queer/Trans/Digital. New York, New York: New York University Press.

Freeman, Guo, and Divine Maloney. 2021. ‘Body, Avatar, and Me: The Presentation and Perception of Self in Social Virtual Reality’. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 4 (CSCW3): 1–27. https://doi.org/10.1145/3432938.

Haimson, Oliver L., Avery Dame-Griff, Elias Capello, and Zahari Richter. 2021. ‘Tumblr Was a Trans Technology: The Meaning, Importance, History, and Future of Trans Technologies’. Feminist Media Studies 21 (3): 345–61. https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2019.1678505.

Haimson, Oliver L., Daniel Delmonaco, Peipei Nie, and Andrea Wegner. 2021. ‘Disproportionate Removals and Differing Content Moderation Experiences for Conservative, Transgender, and Black Social Media Users: Marginalization and Moderation Gray Areas’. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 5 (CSCW2): 466:1-466:35. https://doi.org/10.1145/3479610.

Hamidi, Foad, Morgan Klaus Scheuerman, and Stacy M. Branham. 2018. ‘Gender Recognition or Gender Reductionism?: The Social Implications of Embedded Gender Recognition Systems’. In Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 1–13. Montreal QC Canada: ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/3173574.3173582.

Irving, Dan. 2008. ‘Normalized Transgressions: Legitimizing the Transsexual Body as Productive’. Radical History Review 2008 (100): 38–59. https://doi.org/10.1215/01636545-2007-021.

———. 2015. ‘Performance Anxieties: Trans Women’s Un(Der)-Employment Experiences in Post-Fordist Society’. Australian Feminist Studies 30 (83): 50–64. https://doi.org/10.1080/08164649.2014.998455.

Jenzen, Olu. 2017. ‘Trans Youth and Social Media: Moving between Counterpublics and the Wider Web’. Gender, Place & Culture 24 (11): 1626–41. https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369X.2017.1396204.

Keyes, Os. 2018. ‘The Misgendering Machines: Trans/HCI Implications of Automatic Gender Recognition’. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 2 (CSCW): 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1145/3274357.

McLean, Craig. 2021. ‘The Growth of the Anti-Transgender Movement in the United Kingdom. The Silent Radicalization of the British Electorate’. International Journal of Sociology 51 (6): 473–82. https://doi.org/10.1080/00207659.2021.1939946.

Morrigan, Clementine. 2020. ‘FUCK THE POLICE MEANS WE DON’T ACT LIKE COPS TO EACHOTHER’. Zine. Montreal QC Canada.

Pilipets, Elena, and Susanna Paasonen. 2022. ‘Nipples, Memes, and Algorithmic Failure: NSFW Critique of Tumblr Censorship’. New Media & Society 24 (6): 1459–80. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820979280.

Reyes, Zoey, and Joshua Fisher. 2022. ‘The Impacts of Virtual Reality Avatar Creation and Embodiment on Transgender and Genderqueer Individuals in Games: A Grounded Theory Analysis of Survey and Interview Data from Transgender and Genderqueer Individuals about Their Experiences with Avatar Creation Interfaces in Virtual Reality’. In FDG ’22: Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games, 1–9. Athens Greece: ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/3555858.3555882.

Ruiu, Maria Laura, and Massimo Ragnedda. 2024. Digital-Environmental Poverty: Digital and Environmental Inequalities in the Post-Covid Era. Palgrave Studies in Digital Inequalities. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan.

Wagner, Travis L., and Vanessa L. Kitzie. 2024. ‘Centering Queer Knowledge Paradigms in Designing and Implementing Health Information and Communication Technologies’. Information Technology for Development 30 (2): 209–28. https://doi.org/10.1080/02681102.2023.2233475.

Warner, Michael. 2002. ‘Publics and Counterpublics’. Public Culture 14 (1): 49–90. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-14-1-49.

Yates, Simeon, Katherine Hill, Chloe Blackwell, Emma Stone, Gianfranco Polizzi, Rebecca Harris, Jeanette D’Arcy, et al. 2023. ‘Towards a Welsh Minimum Digital Living Standard: Final Report’. Cardiff, Wales: Welsh Government. https://www.gov.wales/sites/default/files/publications/2023-02/towards-a-welsh-minimum-digital-living-standard-final-report_0.pdf.