On the Need for a Transfeminist Empiricism to Combat Epistemic Injustice

By Dr. Michael Ann DeVito, Northeastern University

A few years ago, I ran a study with trans women and transfeminine nonbinary people who were acting as community-centric creators and educators on TikTok. At the time, TikTok was primarily seen as the frivolous dancing and thirst trap app for teens, but these creators were using it to try and carve out space for trans women and transfems broadly. Mostly, they did so with the intent to help us see each other, trade crucial information (including health information), and educate well-meaning allies on the realities of our existence. One of the creators said something that resonated with me so much that I still start a lot of my public talks with it today:

“I didn't think that being trans and being happy could go hand in hand before coming out and before starting this transition journey, because I had never seen a happy trans woman. I had seen TV where trans women are miserable or murdered usually, and that sucks… I just was so miserable living as a boy, that I was like, ‘fuck it, I'll take all of the negative to not have to do this anymore,’ and the fact that there was positives kind of blew me away. I wanted other people to be able to see that.”

Hearing that was a bit heartbreaking for me, because it’s my experience too. It’s a lot of our experiences. We live in a culture where patriarchy reigns, and the degendering and third-sexing of transgender women is a key tool of that patriarchy. If we can see each other, if we can see that it’s possible to be happy, to be loved, to be successful, to be cherished, even, as trans women, then we are far less vulnerable to the transmisogyny we face every day - and to those in power, that is simply unacceptable. It is crucial to patriarchy that we internalize the message of hopelessness, that we give up - and therefore, it is essential that we do exactly the opposite. We must know ourselves, and we must then push that knowledge out, so we are known by others through the lens of our own realities instead of through the false constructions and vicious lies of patriarchy. And we must be the ones in charge of this process, because no help is coming - we either build a better understanding of transfemininity and transfeminine lives ourselves, or we perish under the weight of distributed, deliberate epistemic injustice.

Epistemic Injustice as a Mechanism for Oppressing Tranfeminine People 

As one of my favorite junior colleagues explains it, epistemic injustice is “the stripping of one’s rights to be a knower, such as the right to be an authority on one’s personal experience” (Ajmani et. al., in press). Epistemic injustice is a rampant harm that impacts most marginalized peoples, but in my own life, there is nowhere I see epistemic injustice outright define the reality of a group so much as with transfeminine people. To be a transfem is to never be viewed as a credible source again; indeed, if I may be allowed a small measure of bitter realism, to be a transfem is to surrender one’s own authority over one’s own experience for the paltry compensation of some medication (maybe) and an unlimited supply of emotional labor to-do lists (certainly). Of course, in actuality, there are definitionally no better sources on the experience of being transfeminine than transfems themselves, because transfemininity must be experienced to be truly understood. We live these lives, and will always be closer to them than any outside observer, no matter how talented or well-trained, could ever remotely hope to be. However, to listen to us opens up the possibility that we may say something that powerful people disagree with. More importantly for my purposes here, to take our experience as authority opens up the possibility that cisgender doctors and scientists might not just be wrong in the moment, but might have been maliciously, unforgivably wrong for the entirety of modern scientific discourse. Our knowledge threatens the present authority, and so epistemic injustice is not just “how it is”; rather, to the cisgender authorities that define the legal and published “reality” of transness, epistemic injustice is a tool and a barrier that must be maintained at all costs, lest we begin to speak (and, more horrifyingly, think) for ourselves.

Miranda Fricker, arguably the leading theorist on epistemic injustice, breaks the phenomenon down into multiple subtypes, two of which are relevant to the question of knowledge of trans womanhood and transfemininity generally. There is testimonial injustice, which “occurs when prejudice causes a hearer to give a deflated level of credibility to a speaker’s word,” and there is hermeneutical injustice, which “occurs… when a gap in collective interpretive resources puts someone at an unfair disadvantage when it comes to making sense of their social experiences” (Fricker, 2007). Transfems live subject to both forms of epistemic injustice, and very often testimonial injustice for one becomes hermeneutical injustice for many. 

To get our heads around just how severe and distributed the problem of epistemic injustice is for transfems, we can look at two intertwined examples. 

Prosocial Visibility, Content Moderation, and Harassment

Consider the TikTok creator quoted above - her intent is clear and deliberately prosocial, she deliberately avoids adversarial actions and drama, and she runs what we might consider a “clean” shop, avoiding even mild thirst traps and innuendo. In theory, she is an ideal TikTok creator. And yet her attempts to educate and create community are constantly met with organized harassment, abuse, and threats from transphobes and even transmisogynistic actors who are themselves queer and/or trans. She has very little ability to control who is in her audience, making this kind of damaging harassment and abuse potentially ever-present and unpredictable, resulting in an unhealthy amount of stress. 

This creator is subject to what I have called the “Trap of Algorithmic Visibility” in my work, where transfems are invited to create content for visibility, but are then subjected to algorithmic control and distribution mechanisms which prioritize engagement without context, often leading to platform-accelerated and even platform-aided brigading and dogpiling (DeVito, 2022). And when this creator turns to the platform’s reporting mechanisms, she finds them worse than useless - her reports are ignored, and over time she has formed a folk theory that reporting itself simply results in being silenced by the platform, countervening her entire reason for posting in the first place. 

This creator faces both forms of epistemic injustice. She faces testimonial injustice by having her content suppressed and bombarded with bad-faith counterpropaganda by algorithmically-delivered outsiders and by having her reports ignored, as the platform and the bad-faith audience both steadfastly ignore that she is most certainly more expert than either party when it comes to what counts as true vs false, and what counts as harassment vs discourse. She also faces hermeneutical injustice, in that the opaque and ever-changing nature of the platform directly denies her the basic knowledge necessary to make sense of her own experiences, to understand and predict how the platform will next enable harassment and abuse (DeVito 2021, 2022). In turn, the suppression and the drowning torrent of abuse transmute this localized injustice into a broad hermeneutical injustice, as this creator was providing the very information with which younger, less experienced transfems trying to figure themselves out engage in sensemaking. A prosocial trans creator being silenced is one less voice saying “actually, transfemininity can be a gift to yourself, can be the key to finding yourself” over the societal din of “give up, give in, embrace patriarchy,” and losing such voices just denies the next generation of transfems the very information they need in order to find themselves.

GAHT and Trans Cultural Health Knowledge

As a second example, consider the case of transgender health information, especially information about gender-affirming hormone treatment (GAHT). Transgender health information is scarce if one looks at our current medical system and the knowledge contained within, as substantive knowledge of core topics such as GAHT is rare among practitioners (Redcay et. al., 2021). Even with the full sum of official knowledge available, practitioners often default to gatekeeping and what I would call fearmongering to deny, delay, or otherwise discourage transition and other forms of proper and adequate medical care (Drabish & Theeke, 2022), and generally point to a lack of “high-quality medical studies” on the topic as a justification. As a result, the best practical information for trans healthcare is often not found in formal medical knowledge, but in the cultural knowledge sourced from and embedded within trans communities themselves. 

As demonstrated in the extensive work on community-sourced trans health information around GAHT, there is a wealth of high-quality, community-generated and vetted data and health information that can be used to help trans people navigate their medical situations (Edenfield et. al., 2019). However, this wealth of knowledge is often discounted on two fronts. First, platforms and their content moderation systems regularly find and censor or delete key sources of this information, labeling this content “medical misinformation” and treating it as deeply dangerous and inappropriate, simply because it is culturally sourced by, from, and for trans people (Augustaitis et. al., 2021) - an obvious and rank instance of testimonial epistemic injustice. Second, even when this information survives, it is often discounted by doctors when used as evidence to advocate for proper treatment, again entirely on the basis of its provenance - testimonial medical injustice, essentially. When combined, both of these forms of testimonial injustice become hermeneutical injustice for the trans people that need this cultural medical information to fight medical transmisogyny, as the very information that could have helped them make sense of their own medical needs has been moderated away and relegated to “misinformation” by systems and doctors alike. 

In fact, even knowing that there is a problem with one’s GAHT setup or dosage relies on key cultural knowledge. Consider the problem of hundosing, which I would define as the underdosing of estrogen for transfems stemming from malice, medical incompetence, or both. This is a well-known phenomenon within transfeminine spaces, but for the novice transfem who may not yet have access to these spaces, it is a non-obvious situation. Practically, the effects of hondosing range from stalled or stunted physical transition to the early induction of menopause-like symptoms, and the only functional relief is to adjust to an appropriate estrogen dosage. This is something one would only know if they have access to trans cultural medical knowledge, but instead novice transfems often find themselves searching online for information that has been removed or suppressed by content moderation and distribution systems in a rolling act of hermeneutical injustice, as noted earlier. 

Combatting Epistemic Injustice via Empiricism

Clearly, transfems are plagued by epistemic injustice at every turn. And it is important for us to remember and internalize this simple fact: no help is coming. There is no reason for help to come - this is patriarchy functioning exactly as designed. We are the only help we will ever have, so we must dig ourselves out of the informational hole we find ourselves in. And we can.

The sudden uptick in transfeminist theorizing over the last year or so has set the stage for what I hope will be a mass consciousness-raising for transfems and our real allies, especially cis lesbians who are in community with us. We now have the language and the framing we needed to see the problems with how patriarchal society, and it is deeply unsurprising to me that much of the most useful theorizing has involved the reclaiming and recontextualizing of materialist and radical feminist traditions into radical and material transfeminism. Transfems are creatures of and subject to the material world in the most visceral sense, as we are constantly impacted by material conditions in a way that many cis and even some transmasculine people can skirt around. This theorizing is in many ways the best thing that could have happened to us, and I am thankful for each and every one of the transfems that has rapidly developed an entire new body of feminist theory. But my own materialist feminist leanings compel me to say: it is not enough. 

We have found good ways to frame the material world, but we must also substantively explore and change the material world in order to secure the rights and resources we always should have had afforded to us. We have transfeminist theory, and now is exactly the right time to pair it with a robust, forward-thinking, and deeply honest and reflexive transfeminist empiricism. We must take our new body of theory and test it against the world and our lived realities, and we must then adjust and adapt our new theories to match the material conditions we find in the field. Material feminism is a constant practice, and it is best supported by empirical investigation of the world we experience day to day. We must be based in what is, for only then do we know where to start as we grasp for what we all know should be. It is in this way that we will combat epistemic injustice at the very root of the problem: we will fight testimonial injustice by gathering our own data, by doing our own analysis, by disseminating our own work that actually represents and respects our own lived experiences. We will roundly reject the notion that our identities should make us unreliable sources, and advocate for what has always been the truth: we are not just the people with the best claim to knowledge of our own lives, but also the only people that can make that claim in good faith. Moreover, we will demonstrate that we are capable of the task of not just explaining our lives, but rendering useful change of our explanations. And, if done right, that change will be broad and varied but also very simple in effect: we will eradicate hermeneutical injustice for ourselves, and especially for the novice transfem who needs good cultural information to find her way. In our case, hermeneutical injustice can not continue to exist if we defeat testimonial injustice, and the only way to defeat testimonial injustice is to have better evidence, better answers, and better practical solutions than those who benefit from our continued oppression. 

We need to find our own answers, and we need to hold tight to them. We do not need to wait for cisgender medical researchers to catch up - to do so would only be to invite more testimonial injustice. Instead, we need to rally together to do our own medical research and disseminate it broadly. This sounds like a massive undertaking, but it is not out of reach - we have our own experts in crowdsourcing, data collection, analysis, etc., and if we all work to support each other we can supplant the cisgender medical consensus.  We do not need to wait for cisgender technologists to build us better social platforms on which to share information - waiting means more hermeneutical injustice for the novice transfem, and not taking direct control ourselves will almost certainly result in more testimonial injustice. We need to build our own solutions, spec out entirely new content moderation systems, and build on our wealth of internal technical expertise to show that there is a better way, and then we need to ruthlessly advocate for our solutions until they become integrated into the norm of the internet. We need to explore, investigate, and build, and we need to match our theoretical feminism with an empirical feminism that we are just as passionate about - and then we need to stick to it, even as it is inevitably attacked by those whose authority it threatens.

Feminist Empiricism in My Own Discipline

I hope I have convinced you of the need for empiricism among and for transfeminine people, but I have promised more: a specifically transfeminist empiricism that takes direct aim at epistemic injustice. To build a transfeminist empiricism, we should do exactly what the theorists have done: look at feminisms of the past, and build on what works for us while leaving retrograde ideas behind. I feel particularly privileged in approaching this task, because I myself am an empirical, qualitative Computer and Information Science researcher, and my little corner of the field (Human-Centered and Social Computing) already has a robust feminist tradition. That said, it is important to preface the following with an accounting of my own positionality: I am a constructivist, interpretivist qualitative researcher, and I recognize that integrating the approach I advocate into more quantitative research will be a challenge. I am also a tenure-track assistant professor at a highly-ranked, relatively prestigious R1 urban American university, which means I am unusually well-resourced and well-protected compared to most transfems doing research, and most transfems broadly. I speak from privilege compared to most trans women and most academics, and I not only recognize but intend to materially support adaptations of what I advocate for into other contexts. I am also speaking from the context of my own interdisciplinary background, and others will have to adapt their own transfeminist empiricism to their own disciplines. 

HCC is unusual among technical disciplines because a robust, feminist approach has become something of a norm in the subfield, and I am deeply thankful for it. While the approach is not explicitly transfeminist, the core focus of HCC’s feminism is highly compatible with the intersectional and reflective requirements I read as a core mission of transfeminism. HCC’s feminism generally derives from standpoint theory, a perspective which originates from Sandra Harding’s work and holds that all knowledge is formed from and deeply rooted in the standpoint of the knower/investigator (Harding, 2004). As such, accounting for one’s own standpoint, the standpoint of the research participants, and the standpoint of the authorities, funders, and reviewers who have massive influence over the work becomes absolutely crucial in contextualizing not just the knowledge we build, but how we build that knowledge in the first place. Knowledge divorced from context is essentially incomplete knowledge - dangerously incomplete when the missing context often turns out to be “this was deeply bounded and restricted by patriarchal norms.” 

Working from standpoint theory primarily, Shaowen and Jeffrey Bardzell built out what has come to be the standard feminist approach within HCC. Their work charged the field to attend to a few key principles, which I paraphrase here (Bardzell & Bardzell, 2011):

• Balancing traditional scientific objectivity with “moral objectivity” derived from the practical impacts of gender in society

• Drawing from feminist theory directly

• Committing to merging feminist and HCI/HCC methods, instead of choosing one or the other

• Empathy towards participants with a focus on their lived experiences

• Disclosure of researcher positionality

• Co-construction of research with participants

• Diverse methods that do not rely entirely on a single way of knowing

• Constant reflexivity

While all of these principles are important, not all of them have been evenly adopted, and it is my opinion that not all of them are equally crucial to the next, explicitly transfeminist step I hope to help us take. Following the lead of today’s transfeminist theorists, I believe it is crucial to learn from this successful and influential feminist approach, and develop it into our own approach to scientific inquiry - here, HCC-based social science, but in the future (I hope!) many other scientific disciplines.

Towards a Transfeminist HCC Methodology

Working from my own set of operational transfeminist understandings and commitments, and my belief that our central challenge is to combat epistemic injustice, I propose the following principles as a starter set for a transfeminist approach to empirical social science work, especially in HCC. I am quite serious when I say “starter set” - this is one woman’s viewpoint, and to simply take what I say as truth and not further develop these ideas as a collective would be antithetical to the spirit of this work. In that spirit, I offer eight provisional principles for a transfeminist epistemology.

A commitment to favor constructivist epistemologies over all claims to “objectivity”

While a move from purely scientific epistemic commitments to a balance of scientific and moral (or, more accurately, societal) commitments was a major step, to move towards an explicitly transfeminist empiricism we must acknowledge that we are starting not from an even playing field, but from a significant deficit. Yes, we must continue to take the complexities of society and human interaction into account to the fullest extent we can, but we must also recognize that scientific epistemologies themselves are often derived from and function as tools of patriarchy. We must ramp up our interrogation of positivist thinking and push for the widespread acceptance of constructivist epistemologies which directly reflect the fact that all knowledge is socially constructed and situationally contextualized, and that there is no such thing as objective truth (or practical human objectivity, no matter the amount of scientific training or self-discipline). We must actively combat the privileging of quantitative measurement over qualitative inquiry, and recognize that the overwhelming drive to quantify is, in fact, a patriarchal instinct. It does not matter if some experiences only represent a small fraction of the entire world’s experiences - even if they are only a tiny proportion, they still exist, and to ignore or devalue these experiences simply because they do not scale is a massive act of epistemic injustice. Time and time again, the minority status of transfems and trans people overall has been used as a bludgeon against us: as an excuse to exclude us from studies, as an excuse to collapse all trans experience down into one category, as an excuse to not fund and not prioritize the study of trans people. The drive to quantify and the related drive to force all knowledge through the lens of positivism are both engines of the very epistemic injustice we must fight. 

A commitment to center and prioritize transfems

One of the most insidious arguments that cuts against transfeminist priorities is that the “objectivity” we currently value means that we can not explicitly center any one group in our work - which, of course, means that those in power will always wind up functionally centered. We need to stop being afraid to say that yes, in this project, we are centering transfems generally, or Black transfems, or whoever is most relevant to center based on the material reality of who our systems most severely oppress. We must recognize that it is not just “okay” but actually quite productive to design studies that have that prioritization embedded within them. I’ve seen firsthand how well this can work, so long as we are honest about our prioritization and clear about why we decided to work for the margins and not for the center. For example, in one of my latest projects, which took a transfeminist approach to sapphic dating platforms, our own decisionmaking rules re: technical recommendations and in-group conflict was to always go with what transfems require for our own safety, even if cis people find it less than ideal, and to prioritize the needs of Black transfems when conflict arose among or between transfems (DeVito et al, 2024). The result was a set of recommendations for designing a platform that is safer and more functional not just for Black transfems or transfems generally, but also for autistic and aspec sapphics, while also improving the design for sapphics overall. We must recognize that working from the margins is working for everyone, and make decisions based on that principle, as working from the center leaves out the margins and causes harm every single time.

Connection to multiple feminisms and a commitment to citational justice

For all its failings, the most wise and continually relevant part of Koyama’s Transfeminist Manifesto is its positioning of transfeminism as among related feminisms (Koyama, 2003), most importantly Black feminisms and postcolonial feminisms. Building on the Bardzell’s original call to connect to some kind of feminist theory in feminist HCC work, we must now go one step further and deliberately try to connect our work to multiple feminisms. Importantly, this should not just happen as a way to frame a discussion section, or as a way to make theoretical connections post-hoc - ideally, thinking from multiple feminisms must be brought in at the study design level, as sensitizing concepts that help shape the research itself. Alongside this commitment, we must also commit to the principles of citational justice and favor reliance on a broad range of feminist scholars who have demonstrated their own commitment to feminist action and thought over reliance on who has been most cited in the past or is most powerful in a field (Ahmed et. al., 2022). Of course, we must match all of these commitments with a dedication to prioritize lived experiences from the field over prior theory - as with all well-used sensitizing concepts, prior feminist theory must be loosely held and not used as an excuse to commit our own acts of epistemic injustice towards those we study and work with.

A commitment to participatory and interpretivist methodologies

At a base level, there is no better way to combat epistemic injustice than to do everything we can to make people experts in their own experience. In order to have useful scientific results from doing so, we must use compatible methodologies, especially qualitative, interpretivist methodologies that are geared towards faithfully representing the wishes and experiences of those people that are being studied. While there is a place for quantitative and mixed-methods research, a serious commitment to fighting epistemic injustice will necessarily mean a move away from methods that increase the level of abstraction between participant and conclusion. Better still, we should embrace the overall move towards participatory methodologies that actively reduce the gap in authority between researcher and participant, such as action research and my own favorite method, the Asynchronous Remote Community (see DeVito et al., 2021). This will be uncomfortable at times, because it means giving up control of our research on a very deep level, but doing so reflects a truth we should all work to embrace: at the best of times, our research is about what the people being studied want, not what we the researchers would prefer.

A focus on “being with” over “being like” empathy

Another key addition the Bardzells advocated for is an increased focus on having an “empathetic relationship with research participants” (2011). In practice, empathy as a methodological approach has been a mixed bag, as it has sometimes been used as a cover for approaches where we practice a “being like”- focused form of empathy where we attempt to understand other people through simulation and roleplay instead of direct engagement (Bennett & Rosener, 2019). True empathy, as Bennett and Roesner have described in their work from the accessibility subfield, requires a “being with” approach, where researchers attempt to attune their understanding with participants on a regular basis instead of engaging once and trying to simulate from there on out (ibid). To pretend that we understand an experience that we ourselves have not had is to engage in testimonial injustice, because we should instead be focused on the testimony of those with real-life experience, holding ourselves to their experience instead of our internal guesswork. 

A prioritization of member research

One of the most noticeable feminist additions to HCC has been the proliferation of the positionality statement, where researchers and practitioners disclose their own position in the world in terms of identity, belief, etc. as a way to contextualize how all of this might impact the research. In general, we have treated these statements as a totem that somehow removes the biases that may flow from researcher positionality, but it is my opinion that this has been a mistake. People have the right to make sense of their own experiences on their own terms, or else they will experience hermeneutical injustice, and this is just as true within the frame of research as it is for the novice transfem attempting to figure herself out. As such, we might fight hermeneutical injustice by heavily favoring member research, or research that is explicitly led by members of the community or group under study (Adler & Adler, 1987), over research that is led and conducted by outsiders. Ideally, research projects would be led by community/group members themselves (complete-member-research). This may be my most controversial recommendation, as it means a great many scientists would have to stop leading studies in areas they have studied their entire careers, but to that I offer two rebuttals: first, this is an opportunity for those people to move towards mentoring in-community researchers on methods, providing their experience without taking direct control; second, it was always wrong for outsiders to come into communities they do not belong to and extract knowledge, and we must act on what is right and wrong, not what is convenient or conventional. No one’s next promotion, raise, or round of media coverage is so important that it should come at the cost of erasing the people the research is about. This would be a large shift, but it has precedent, as it ultimately boils down to an old adage: nothing about us without us.

A commitment to being other-conscious 

Whether we like it or not, all research will eventually be politicized. There is no “just doing science” - inquiry is always a political act, especially in a climate where certain groups of people, especially transfeminine people, are constantly under attack. Consider recent incidents like the release of the Cass Report, a twisted, biased literature review I would have failed an undergraduate on that is in danger of becoming the entire basis of British trans policy - while the studies it cites may not have had political intent, they have been politicized. We must assume our work will become a political object, and we must approach it that way. As such, I recommend we adopt a principle from critical race theory, being other-conscious. To be other-conscious is “to think through one’s own research and writing as it might be received by groups that are not one’s own” (Ogbonnaya-Ogburu, 2020), and it is a valuable tactical tool. We can not trust that our research, once released to the world, will be used in good faith - in fact, we must anticipate that it will be used against us, in bad faith, and do what we can to make that harder for bad actors. Of course, we can not let strategy override truth - but we can let it lightly guide what we do with the truth, and how we do it. Our research, done the way I am advocating, is our testimony - it is on us, sadly, to make sure our testimony does not become a tool to silence us.

The repositioning of reflexivity as our first and most tightly held commitment

Finally, all of us need to recommit to reflexivity as our first and most important guiding principle. According to the Bardzells, “research should be characterized by ongoing self-questioning about whether the research is delving on its ambitions to be feminist, improve human quality of life, and undermine rather than reinforce oppressive social structures” (2011), and reflexivity is simply this ongoing practice of self-questioning. To this, I would add that we should also engage in constant self-questioning about whether the work is delivering on its ambitions to be with, for, and consistently aligned with the expressed needs of those we are working with and on behalf of, in order to support the earlier commitment to “being with”-style empathy, but other than this addition, I think the current practice of reflexivity in HCC is an excellent model for all researchers. However, we must move reflexivity’s position in our thinking, from a process it is important to engage in to the process that guides all other research engagement. Every action we take should be reflexive - and yes, that means we must go slower, we must question ourselves more once we step into the research role, and we might have to accept that we just can’t do certain things we’d like to do, because they do not meet these commitments. But more than anything, I am certain that moving reflexivity to the center of what we do and making it our first principle, our first commitment, will stop us from engaging in the exact same epistemic injustice that we must combat. The practice of reflexivity is how we keep ourselves honest about everything else I’ve written here, and the importance of this practice can never be overstated.

My Commitment

As I have said, these are provisional principles to work with, and they will require much revision - to assume that I’ve got them right would be my own act of epistemic injustice, as well as an act of foolhardy hubris. That said, they do reflect how I choose to do research, how I train students to do research, and what I push my colleagues towards with what limited influence I can earn. They motivate the projects I choose and who I do them with, and they motivate me to focus on member-research with communities I am a part of. From my own corner of Computer Science, I intend to use these principles to solve problems for transfeminine people as best as I can, in ways ranging from close-in study of how we can best respond to online harassment and abuse, to my group’s large-scale efforts to construct a trans citizen science pipeline for aggregate data collection and analysis on trans health issues. To those that work in areas that interface with mine, I say: come work with us, work with my lab, partner with us to do bigger things and do them the right way. To those that work in fields far from my own, I can only say that I hope you will consider what your own version of transfeminist empiricism looks like, and that I am excited to see what you come up with and the science it motivates.

Works Cited

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• Ajmani, L., Moore, J. C., Taylor, J., Pittman, K., Gilbert, S., & DeVito, M. A. (2024). Whose Knowledge is Valued? A Collaborative Autoethnography on Epistemic Injustice in CSCW Applications. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, in press.

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• Edenfield, A. C., Holmes, S., & Colton, J. S. (2019). Queering tactical technical communication: DIY HRT. Technical Communication Quarterly, 28(3), 177-191. 

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• Harding, S. G. (2004). Introduction: Standpoint theory as a site of political, philosophic, and scientific debate. In S. G. Harding (Ed.), The Feminist Standpoint Theory Reader: Intellectual and Political Controversies(pp. 1-15). Routledge. 

• Koyama, E. (2003). The transfeminist manifesto. In R. Dicker & A. Piepmeier (Eds.), Catching a Wave: Reclaiming Feminism for the 21st Century (pp. 244-259). Northeastern University Press. 

• Ogbonnaya-Ogburu, I. F., Smith, A. D., To, A., & Toyama, K. (2020). Critical race theory for HCI. Proceedings of the 2020 CHI conference on human factors in computing systems. 

• Redcay, A., Bergquist, K., & Luquet, W. (2021). On the basis of gender: A medical-legal review of barriers to healthcare for transgender and gender-expansive patients. Social Work in Public Health, 36(6), 615-627. 

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Dr. Michael Ann DeVito (she/her) is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Communication Studies at Northeastern University, where she directs the Sociotechnical Equity and Agency Lab. She is a qualitative, interpretivist researcher and designer who applies transfeminist and critical approaches to the study of how users and communities understand and adapt to the challenges of AI and machine learning-driven sociotechnical environments via folk theorization and communal sensemaking. Dr. DeVito is particularly interested in how marginalized communities leverage social technologies to address both externally-imposed inequity and intracommunity conflict, and often acts as a member-researcher within queer and transgender communities, employing her own positionality as a key tool in her grounded theory-based approach. Dr. DeVito holds a PhD in Media, Technology, and Society from Northwestern University, and frequently publishes in venues such as CSCW and CHI.

All rights reserved and retained by the author, with limited license granted to TSI.