Book Review: Trans Technologies,by Oliver L. Haimson

With Trans Technologies, author Oliver Haimson provides an in-depth portrayal of the rich landscape of trans technologies—their diverse range of creators, their societal and historical context, and their relevance to building more just socio-technical futures—at a time where showcasing and celebrating trans creativity and community is more urgent and relevant than ever.

Haimson first proposed the term trans technologies in 2018; the term includes both technologies that address the specific personal and community needs of trans people, and those that are trans through certain affordances or qualities. His eponymous book begins by conceptualizing what a trans technology is—a question not easily answered, given different potential definitions of “technology” along biological, social or engineering lines, different possible approaches toward what specifically makes a technology trans, and the concept of transness itself inherently defying definition. Drawing on more than 200 historical and contemporary trans technologies he has collected and documented in his academic work so far—from voice training apps, prosthetics, and word of mouth healthcare referral sites to games, community action forums and protest organization tools—Haimson creates an overview of the rich tapestry of trans technologies, through which he weaves the voices of the more than 100 trans technology creators he has interviewed. He fluently synthesizes these real-life examples and related practical considerations with theoretical insights and academic perspectives to distil the characteristics of transness in technology, and create working theoretical and practical definitions of trans technologies.

This opens the space for the two themes organizing the book, recurring throughout every chapter: care and ambivalence. Trans technology creators practice mutual care by designing with and for each other, but they must operate within a system that marginalizes trans people and forces them to work with limited resources. Hence, creating and using trans technologies means having agency and acting toward self-empowerment, at both individual and community levels, in the face of marignalization, while simultaneously consituting labor, often unpaid, made necessary by the exclusion of trans people in mainstream technologies and society. Here, Haimson observes that creators tend to focus on small, workaround technologies, typically apps for personal needs, with more pressing issues such as legal attacks or police violence, which necessitate community action and impact multiply marginalized trans people more, often remaining unaddressed.

While this certainly reflects the dearth of both personal and material resources trans people often face, Haimson draws attention to the reproduction of privilege in trans technology design: more than three quarters of the trans technology creators he interviewed where white, and most of them more highly educated than the overall trans population. Despite transness being inextricably linked with race and disability, most creators design technologies for users with identities similar to their own, resulting in the frequent exclusion of multiply marginalized trans people, reflected in examples like the limited skin tone options of packing prosthetics. Nevertheless, as Haimson shows, trans users are involved in trans technology design more often than users are traditionally included in technology design—despite higher barriers to their participation—due to the human-centric and community-oriented values of trans technology creators overall.

Similar difficulties are revealed in the deployment and maintenance of trans technologies, many of which are available free of charge and funded either by finite grants, donations, crowdfunding, or simply self-funded by their creators, with many participating communities circulating limited money, labor, time and other resources among themselves. However, investment-funded and monetized trans technologies are challenging in other ways, as they are subjected to the marginalizing norms of venture capitalism. Haimson shows how capitalism as a system inherently marginalizes trans people, concluding that trans technologies should strive to be anti-capitalist—and, indeed, many are, despite the often existential challenges this entails.

In the final chapter, Haimson centers these economic issues, speculating about possible trans technological futures. He distinguishes between technological inclusionism (the hope the trans technologies will be either mainstream or no longer necessary) and technological separatism (the vision that trans technologies will create their own infrastructures apart from the mainstream). This technological debate reflects the general divide in attitudes toward activism among trans people, who are often split between working to facilitate the inclusion of trans people in society within existing structures, and working to dismantle those structures to make space for worlds in which transness is centered. In terms of practical considerations, Haimson observes that those who understand what trans communities need often lack the expertise or resources to design, deploy or maintain technologies, while people with technological skill, economic power and the desire to build trans technologies often lack insight into community needs. Hence, trans techno-futures necessitate working together as communities, and finding ways to draw from external resources.

Haimson’s knack for letting individuals and communities speak for themselves and through their creations makes this book deeply personal and warmhearted, exemplifying his call for collaborative and community-oriented rather than individualistic approaches to trans technologies. Despite his deep care for the communities he discusses, he nevertheless remains critical, refraining from attempts at definitive conclusions or easy answers where none may be found, and continuously providing nuance (including an appendix and rich footnotes) and contextualization. While he recognizes their value to trans communities and their future-making potential, Haimson argues that trans technologies by themselves are limited in addressing structurally embedded injustice and marginalization, and discusses how trans technologies and their creators, as well as the book itself, amplify existing inequalities and reinforce the status quo. Is training our voices, for instance, truly a trans need, or simply a societal failure? Haimson reflects on the politics of trans visibility, on joy and rage as equally powerful and important motivators, and on how the issues his book explores consistently reveal themselves to not be true binaries or opposites.

Trans Technologies contributes to both social and technological fields and reinforces their connections, speaks to theory with practice, and contributes beyond academia by archiving and providing a chronicle of trans technologies and their creators with relevant critical and theoretical contextualization. Haimson points out that the majority of technologies he discusses in the book did not exist when he was transitioning, and considers how some of them could have made things easier for him. Although many trans technologies are never deployed or fade away, new trans technologies are constantly emerging to address the immediate threats trans people face. Understanding transness as inherently future-oriented, Haimson expresses his hope that “one day we will live in a world where trans tech creators can move beyond these immediate threats and instead channel more of their time and motivation toward the technologies that they desire to create, rather than those that they must create to avoid eradication” (p. 31).