Extended reality (XR) technologies are becoming increasingly pervasive, and may have capacity to help marginalized groups such as transgender people. Drawing from interviews with n = 18 creators of trans technology, we examined how XR technologies do and can support trans people. We uncovered a number of creative ways that XR technologies support trans experiences. Trans technology creators are designing augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) systems that help people explore trans identity, experience new types of bodies, educate about and display trans stories and curated trans content, manipulate the physical world, and innovate gender-affirming surgical techniques. Additionally, we show how considering XR as an analogy for trans identity helps us to think about the fluidity and fluctuation inherent in trans identity in new ways, which in turn enables envisioning technologies that can better support complex and changing identities. Despite XR’s potential for supporting trans people, current AR and VR systems face limitations that restrict their large-scale use, but as access to XR systems increase, so will their capacity to improve trans lives.
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Technology for transgender healthcare: Access, precarity & community care
While much of the transgender health literature has focused on poor health outcomes, less research has examined how trans people find reliable information on, and actually go about accessing, gender-affirming healthcare. Through qualitative interviews with creators of trans technologies, that is, technologies designed to address problems that trans people face, we found that digital technologies have become important tools for proliferating access to gender-affirming care and related health information. We found that technologists often employed different processes for creating their technologies, but they coalesced around the goal of enabling and increasing access to gender-affirming care. Creators of trans health technologies also encountered precarious conditions for creating and maintaining their technologies, including regional gaps left by national resources focused on the US east and west coasts. Findings demonstrated that trans tech creators were motivated to create and maintain these technologies as a means of caring for one another and forming trans communities in spite of the precarious conditions trans people face living under systemic oppression.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2210841
- PAR ID:
- 10532684
- Publisher / Repository:
- Elsevier
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Social Science & Medicine
- Volume:
- 345
- Issue:
- C
- ISSN:
- 0277-9536
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 116713
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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