New book “Trans Technologies” maps 100 radical projects — and why they matter right now
Your TL;DR Briefing on things worth tracking — and talking about over your next power lunch. *Wink.* This time the thing is a year-long study into the design principles behind trans tech, from the researcher who more or less defined the field.
The thing is:
On February 25, MIT Press released “Trans Technologies,” an open-access book mapping what happens when people systematically excluded from mainstream platforms build tools they actually need. Author Oliver Haimson spent a year interviewing more than 100 trans tech creators — many working without venture funding or industry support — who’ve crafted everything from healthcare resource maps to mutual aid networks. The book he’s emerged with reads less like verbose academic theory and more as a practical field guide to imagining alternatives to Big Tech.
For this long-form feature, I sat down with Haimson for an extended conversation about the book’s findings and diving into five examples that highlight the principles in action — why they matter right now to the trans community and what tech more broadly can learn.
The thing about that is:
While Silicon Valley obsesses over “AGI” fantasies and Big Tech leans into its far-right descent, the most vital tech “innovations” are happening at the margins. Haimson, assistant professor at University of Michigan School of Information, first proposed the concept “trans technologies” around 2018. Since then, his research has revealed a technology landscape far more creative than the usual startup hype: browser extensions that automatically replace deadnames; maps tracking which states are actively criminalizing trans people; digital archives embracing the “fuzziness” of identity rather than rigid data structures; and game jams that process political rage into collective art.
What makes these projects remarkable isn’t only their utility for trans users, but how they embody an entirely different approach to technology design — one that centers care, adaptation, and community rather than extraction and growth-at-all-costs.
As Haimson put it during our conversation: “The big question that we need to think about now is how can these technologies help us survive in a world that’s increasingly hostile to trans people just existing?”
Where things get interesting:
“For the first five or so years of my career as a researcher, I was really trying to understand how we can make these mainstream platforms more inclusive,” Haimson told me in the weeks leading up to the book's launch. “Now we know that Meta never really cared. It felt performative the whole time when they were talking about inclusion.”
The alternative approach? “In transing tech, the way I'm conceptualizing it, we're trying to turn technology into something new and different that works for people who have complex identities, people whose identities are changing. And that's not only trans people — that's everybody. Everybody goes through life transitions.”
Transness, it turns out, is an especially powerful lens for reimagining technology broadly because it centers change rather than stasis. From the book, where Haimson writes: “Trans tech creators’ stories make visible the structural ambivalence that permeates trans technologies: around isolation and community, privilege and inclusion, capitalist and anticapitalist approaches... [like] transing the world a little at a time with each piece of trans technology dreamed up and then made real.”
Consider how these technologies approach change as a feature, not a bug. Trans tech creators build systems that assume and embrace transition as fundamental to human experience. They design for the user who exists in complex social contexts.
The thing to talk about over your next power lunch:
The antidote to our current digital malaise clearly isn’t about waiting for more thoughtful billionaires or better content moderation algorithms, but instead exists in the approaches already being practiced by communities who’ve had to build outside mainstream spaces.
Trans tech creators have been busy developing what the book calls “technological trans care” — systems designed to extend rather than limit human agency. This is what happens when design starts with the question “what do we need to survive?” rather than “how can we maximize engagement?”
These approaches reveal how poorly aligned our current platforms are with realities of life across a range of identity groups. Clearly, our communities deserve better than what platform monopolies have conditioned us to accept. “Trans Technologies” shows that kind of innovation the world needs right now is happening less in venture-backed startups or “AI” labs, but in bedrooms and community spaces where people are building the tools they need when existing systems fail them.
“Through the scope of the technologies he explores here and the accessibility of his prose, Haimson blew my mind,” I write. “And he’s sure to expand your imagination about what tech can achieve when we think bigger than the internet oligarchs want us to.”
And one long thing to read:
This TL;DR Briefing cites analysis from this ESC KEY .CO long-read, which includes the full interview with Haimson as well as four promising examples of trans tech in action and one cautionary tale:
JD Shadel
