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The Prosocial Design Network connects research to practice toward a world in which online spaces are healthy, productive, respect human dignity, and improve society.
Here’s their recap of the event, and a video of our Q&A segment (15 minutes).
They shared the questions in advance, which I very much appreciated! Here are my prepared notes - we certainly didn’t cover it all during the call.
First off, hire people with different lived experiences from yours. Hire trans people. Hire Black people. Hire disabled people. Hire disabled Black trans people. Let them cook. Listen to them. Otherwise you are, as my wife says, “Pissing into the wind.”
Prioritize accessibility. Ensure spaces are accessible for users on many devices, using different device settings, in different contexts in the real world including with assistive technologies. Often accessibility is an afterthought. Shift left and allow it go drive your design and architecture decisions from the jump. For social apps, this includes setting smart defaults - i.e. requiring folks to add alt text if they’re uploading images.
Keep your tech stack light and boring. Design for a 4-year-old Android phone on a 3g connection, with bandwidth paid for by the megabyte. Bloatware takes longer to load and harms or disincentivizes participation from folks on slower connections or older tech.
Design for trust, privacy and safety. Design for people to be able to protect their privacy, control what they share and what they see.
Allow people to define themselves. The way you do it ain’t the way everybody else does it.
You may have noticed this isn’t necessarily specific to trans-inclusive design. That’s because this is the kind of work that, by considering folks in marginalized positions, benefits everyone. It’s the curb cut effect for accessibility AND privacy AND safety AND inclusion. By focusing our design on the margins we include everyone between them too.
The biggest fail I continue to see is that folks are asking for gender or sex information at all, because it is usually not needed. It usually means that this data is being brokered into a database somewhere and sold for money.
I don’t need to tell you my gender to book a hotel. Why are you asking for it?
The unnecessary asking for gender gets worse now that we are seeing a rollback of previous progress in inclusive design we had made in the past few years. We’d been doing so well! The US Web Design system had a really thoughtful pattern about asking for gender that was starting to roll out to all these government forms. But now agencies are in the process of removing the pattern for asking for gender in an inclusive way, and replacing it with a binary option for sex.
These design systems changes are in addition to removing all references to being trans from websites, and no longer offering services or information for trans people. It’s a very literal erasure of trans identity. It’s really upsetting, scary, and for trans folks, it’s existential.
I encourage practitioners to plan ahead for the moment when you are asked to do something that you know is wrong. That day will come. What will you say? What will you say no to? What’s your red line?
I have a lot of concerns with AI. I do think there are useful applications for the technology, and 99.99% of the applications out there are either actively predatory, passively harmful, gratuitous and mid, or all of the above. And they are all harming the environment and our health.
“synthetically generated texts from five of the most pervasive LMs …perpetuate harms of omission, subordination, and stereotyping for minoritized individuals with intersectional race, gender, and/or sexual orientation identities.” - Laissez-Faire Harms: Algorithmic Biases in Generative Language Models (2024)
…and this includes code. When AI is trained on design patterns or code that is widely popular, but that also includes a lot of code that’s inaccessible or unusable, the resulting code is also inaccessible or unusable. We should also be extremely wary of any AI tool that claims it can refactor a codebase written in a language that most modern coders are not using.
AI is a tool of capitalism and state violence. Generative AI is being used to consolidate, analyze, and generate information in a way that can be used to surveil, prosecute, incarcerate, and kill people.
AI is seen as a smart humanoid. People tend to believe algorithms more than each other as task complexity increases - but we also tend to view AI as human-like. We anthropomorphize AI tools by giving them human-like names or designing them as chat prompts (rather than command prompts or even search boxes), which leads us to believe that we are in fact talking with another living being rather than a computer. It also leads some folks to think that AI will become sentient. It won’t, actually, but it will if humans believe that it is, which is perhaps worse.
AI is mid. And by that, I mean that what it produces is functionally a middle-of-the-road, average, non-“edge case” output. This flattens our differences and creates a “norm” which actually does not exist. Individual people aren’t “normal”, but AI sure likes to tell us that’s a thing, and that really harms people who are far from that norm. Saying that everyone is the same denies the fact that we are all weird as hell. It’s our differences that make us stronger, more creative, better.
Critique is painted as fear. Proponents of AI say that skeptics are “afraid” of AI or don’t understand it. I, for one, am not afraid of it - I’m frustrated by how folks are positioning it as the solution to all our problems. I do understand it! I know too much. Dismissing AI detractors as “fearful” allows proponents to dismiss valid critique outright rather than engage with it. It’s a strawman argument.
If you are AI-critique curious:
If you don’t need to use AI, don’t. Do something else. Turn off default settings that include AI. Switch your search engine to DuckDuckGo and turn off AI features. Turn off Apple intelligence. Turn off Google Gemini. Take a harm-reduction approach to your tech use. (FWIW, this is my approach to eating animal food products. I’m not vegan or even completely vegetarian, but I don’t build my food habits around animal products, which reduces how many animal products I consume.)
Don’t make AI your main thing. Charles Eames said, “Never delegate understanding.” Don’t rely on AI alone to make decisions about what’s true, certainly not for core parts of your work.
Understand the bias that ships with your LLM. Do everything you can to critically evaluate outputs for inaccessible, biased or otherwise harmful content. Right-size your models and turn down the “creativity” setting.
Advocate for sustainable, safe AI, including regulation and environmental mitigation measures. Individual choices get us down the road a piece, but what we really need is to mitigate the impacts at a high level.
Engage your discomfort. If someone critiques AI and it makes you uncomfortable, listen to understand and be open to changing your mind. Most of the folks who are warning about the harms of AI are minoritized people - Black and brown women, queer and trans people. Believe them!
This is an excellent question. Some of the things I’d ask folks to understand include…
What are ways we can design for trust and safety? How can we create digital spaces where people feel safe? What are some of the ways we can foster trustworthiness?
What would trans-informed design look like? How can we use the very concept of transness - boundary-crossing, liminality, non-binary thinking - to expand our thinking about how technologies can be used, and to what ends?
Oliver Haimson is studying this very thing, and his new book Trans Technologies is available for free, open access, from MIT Press.
How might trans-inclusive digital design change IRL service design? We’re already seeing this as part of our work in Civic Tech, moving from automation to true digital transformation. We all know that real-world constraints map to technological design choices. How then do we transform the tech stack and use that to change our very service delivery model?
]]>I’ve pulled out some of the topics we discussed and heavily edited/rearranged them for clarity.
Let’s think about Facebook’s former Real name policy. Early on Mark Zuckerberg even said that having two names showed a lack of integrity.
The underlying assumption was that there’s one name that everybody always uses, and only people with malicious intend would do anything different. The notion that people are using different identities to “trick” others is also a common, harmful trope used to demonize and discredit trans people.
We now widely acknowledge that people are called different names in different circumstances either because of familial or professional relationships, different eras of their lives, different contexts, or because of a change in their gender identity.
People’s legal names may stay the same, but their names of use vary. That was the thing that got me thinking about trans-affirming systems design.
What would a world look like where trans folks actually see themselves in systems rather than simply accommodated? What if if they truly were affirmed and celebrated?
One way to do that is to allow people to say what their names are. There are very few contexts when we actually need folks’ full legal first names.
Allowing for name flexibility is an example of a technology that helps a lot of different people. For example, of the 140 people on staff at our library, about a third of us are using names that are different from our full legal first name. People are going by middle names or by more familiar versions of first names, like Jimmy instead of James; or are using totally different names. While some people would see an errant name field as a minor annoyance, for other folks it’s a safety issue. It’s one change that’s a big quality of life increase for a lot of folks.
Then there’s the gender binary. Computers run on binaries. As technologists we love the idea of ones and zeros, simplifying things when possible: off/on, yes/no; and frequently we do that with gender too. You’ve got a form asking for gender (typically unnecessarily) and there’s only two options.
We know full well that when we provide gender data it is often used to sell us things based gender stereotypes. When systems are actively reinforcing the gender binary, the result is reductive and uninspiring, and something that doesn’t reflect the lived gender experience of most people, whether they are trans or not.
Another gender-related binary: either you’re trans or you’re cis. That’s a false binary. People’s gender identities change throughout their lives. There’s valid expressions of gender identity that are neither/nor, that are both/and, so to create that wall between trans and cis is really harmful for all, and cashes out as violence against people who don’t conform.
So many trans people I know don’t think they are “trans enough.” And so many cis people spend so much time trying to prove that they are manly or womanly enough. It’s exhausting.
It’s important for folks who identify as cisgender to to think about and question their genders. You have gender(s)!
Ask yourself, How does my gender impact how I move through the world? How does it impact how I interact with people, and how I present myself, how I dress? It’s not just trans people that should be thinking about this. Just reflect on what your gender is, and how you do it. There’s so much richness there, even within within the cisgender and transgender buckets, there’s just so much.
Binaries in themselves can be violent. As humans, we categorize things as a survival mechanism so that we don’t have to spend all our energy processing every single sensory input.
At the same time, when we have categories that pit things against each other with a clear delineating line between, those differentiations create inequality.
One harmful binary at the root of American culture: either you’re white or you’re not, and you’re less than. The foundation of the U.S. is the exploitation and oppression of nonwhite people, Black and brown people. In technology, a binary might be “technical” and “non-technical” people. Those types of less-than/greater-than binaries occur across identities and sectors including gender.
Once you start to perceive all the binaries you can’t unsee them. Understanding how detrimental they are helps us understand how the systems we build can reject them and instead reflect the rich bouquet of lived human experience.
Audit how how names are handled. Do you require a legal name for anything? If not, let people choose their name, let people update it. Does that name cascade to their username? Are they able to change a username? If I signed up 10 years ago and now I need to change my username, I want to bring over my entire history, am I able to do that?
Follow that up with a gender audit. Are you asking for gender anywhere? Why do you actually need it? Are you asking for people to indicate gender or a title? Add the gender-inclusive Mx. to the honorifics field and if possible make it optional because some folks are just not into it.
Images. If you’re using stock photography or other images on your site, do they represent diversity of lived experiences? Do you have folks who are not white, who are not young, who are disabled, who maybe aren’t conventionally gender presenting? Folks dressed in different types of clothing or with different gender presentation? There’s a few different open photo libraries on the web — the broadly gender spectrum collection comes to mind.
Content. Think about the the content of the web and how users are communicated with in the language that we use. Singular “they” instead of “he or she.”
More on my A List Apart article, Trans-inclusive design.
I recently read Design Justice and can’t recommend it highly enough. Constant learning is our life’s work. We can’t stay stagnant. We have to keep pushing ourselves, talking to people, and making sure that what we’re building is something that’s going to serve everybody.
]]>I have read A List Apart for years and have always seen it as The Site for folks who make websites, so it is an honor to be published there.
]]>I didn’t really have a template for a coming-out message, so ended up writing this post out to our staff intranet. I’m sharing it here in hopes that it helps some folks. Mileage certainly varies depending on where you work, but this FAQ may be helpful not only for folks coming out, but for people working alongside them.
My letter is below.
Disclaimer: Many of the answers in this FAQ won’t be true for all nonbinary folks, but it’s a jumping-off point if people want to start their own docs.
Thank you to the out trans and nonbinary librarians before me who helped me along the way, specifically Stephen Krueger, Max Bowman, char booth, María Matienzo, and Wen Nie Ng.
All –
Y’all have made VCU feel like home for me for the past 10 years. I wanted to share with you today that I am nonbinary, and use they/them pronouns. I have been out as nonbinary in my personal life for a while and I’m ready to bring that part of myself to my work life.
Why now?
I have been a member of the VCU community for a long time, I love working here, and I know this is a place where I can bring my whole self to work. I think my work and VCUL community are enriched when employees are authentically present. I think that all you kind folks at VCUL are open to welcoming me. I also think it’s important to be visible to folks in the community, especially students, who are trans or nonbinary.
What does that mean for me, your colleague?
I’m asking you to change how you talk to me and how you refer to me. Instead of using she or her pronouns to refer to me, you can use they and them. “Erin sent that message about their pronouns.” It’s kind of awkward at first but it gets easier with practice.
What can I call you?
– Addressing me: Erin, you, friend, colleague, erwhite, E-dubs, Mx. White (pronounced “mix”)…
– Referring to me: Erin, they, them, theirs, that person, friend, colleague, talented IT professional…
What shouldn’t I call you?
– Addressing me: Ms., Miss, lady, girl, woman, ma’am…
– Referring to me: she, her, he, him, it, Ms., Miss, lady, girl, woman…
What if I get it wrong?
It’s okay! If you catch yourself, correct and move on. What’s important is to try.
Will you correct me if I get it wrong?
It depends on the situation. If I remind you, it’s because I know we respect each other and both care about our relationship.
Can I correct others?
Yes, in the spirit of calling folks in rather than calling them out. We’re all in community with each other, and want to be generous with each other as we learn.
I don’t agree that I should use they/them pronouns for you.
I hope that you can respect me and honor how I am asking to be addressed, recognizing that inclusion is a core value at VCU, so we can work together. Another option is to just use my name instead of my pronouns.
That’s it! There are more resources on how to affirm nonbinary folks online if you are interested. Thank you for reading this far and thank you for your support.
Update April 15, 2019: This letter is included as part of Arley Cruther’s textbook Business Writing For Everyone: An Inclusive Guide to Writing in the Workplace.
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