Platform trans-inclusive language practices

Trans-affirming community movements have interfaced with tech platforms in past decades, leading to innovations around pronoun-sharing online. Responding to a movement of people writing their pronouns in social media bios, several platforms introduced specific fields for this purpose. This creation of online ‘pronouns fields’ can normalise trans-affirming epistemologies in conceptualising gender. However, unlike in-person pronoun-sharing practices, the material form of shared pronouns as data (stored in energy-demanding data centres, often on US-external Indigenous land) is used by corporations to expand. Further, uneven platform architecture, which limits which countries and languages have pronoun options, constructs and normalises social relations and divisions globally.

This projects asks what role pronoun fields play in furthering corporate goals, supporting trans people, and constructing an idea of trans subjecthood. It draws on Anthropology, Linguistics, and Science and Technology Studies in its mixed methods approach to analyzing the public-facing discourses and practices of adding ‘pronoun field’ features in these platforms, trans people’s online reactions to trans-inclusive features, and trans workers and activists’ perspectives on the interactional construction of these features. 

Conference presentations

Jan. 2024                  Corporate trans inclusion: Discursive strategies of pronoun commodification online. Linguistics Society of America, New York.

Nov. 2023                Commodification of pronouns: Corporations’ discourse on trans-inclusive practices. Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association, Toronto, Canada.

Jul. 2023                   Platform trans-inclusion: on pronoun fields and commodification. Paper in the Workshop: Queer in AI. 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Toronto, Canada.

Project funding

2024 – 2025 Graduate Humanities Research Fellowship (UCSB) – $32,500 stipend + health and tuition

2024             TRILL research grant (UCSB)

2024             GSA Travel Grant (UCSB)

2023 – 2024 Orfalea Center Fellowship (UCSB)

Manuscripts

In preparation  Pronouns and commodification: Platforms’ discourse on digital trans-inclusive practices.