CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 4Ethics and Social Impacts of AILGBTQ Health, Identity, and PolicyFeminist Epistemology and Gender Studies

Trans data epistemologies: Transgender ways of knowing with data

Open access
Stevens, Nikko, Doğan, Amelia Lee·2025·Big Data & Society
DOI 10.1177/20539517251381694
Open this paper in CoChat — free account

Abstract

Amidst proliferating threats to trans rights, transgender activists are using data and data activism to advocate for and to protect trans communities. This transgender-led study asks “How do trans activists use data in their activism?” We interviewed 16 activists engaged in trans community care: from community healthcare to media production to policy making, our participants are making and using data about trans people to serve and support trans communities. Our findings reveal that participants use tactical approaches to data and data science that were consistent with existing data activist literature and contemporary approaches to data refusal. However, what emerged were more than sets of tactics — our participants described ways of knowing with and about data that are grounded in their experiences of (racialized, disabled, aging, queer) transness. Taken together, we consider these ways of knowing to be a trans data epistemology . Drawing on literature from trans theory, data activism, critical data studies, philosophy, and critical social theory we offer a narrative of trans people as creators of knowledge, data-based and otherwise, undergirded by four pillars of a trans data epistemology: categories are provisional and productive, data can be a tool of community care, community well-being is more important than “accurate” data, and data makes us visible to institutions.

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1177/20539517251381694

Cites

53 of 53 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Recomputing p-values needs the paper’s full text.

Claims the paper makes

We couldn’t retrieve this paper’s full text, so its claims and self-check weren’t run. The registry and citation checks still apply.

Cites

Flagged first, then by citations

Research works printed but not linked: 15

  1. Benjamin R (2019) Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code, 1st ed. Medford, MA: Polity.
  2. Charmaz K (2014) Constructing Grounded Theory. 2nd edn. London, CA: Sage Publications Ltd.
  3. Enke F (2012) Transfeminist Perspectives in and Beyond Transgender and Gender Studies. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
  4. Fricker M (2009) Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. 1st ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  5. Gilmore RW, Bhandar B, Toscano A (2022) Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation. New York, NY: Verso Books.
  6. Haarman S (2021) The data should not speak for itself: Epistemic injustice and data as rhetoric. Philosophical Studies in Education 52: 26–36.
  7. Harding S (1992) “Rethinking standpoint epistemology: What is “strong objectivity?”. The Centennial Review 36(3): 437–470.
  8. Knutson D, Koch JM, Arthur T, et al. (2016) “Trans broken arm”: Health care stories from transgender people in rural areas. Journal of Research on Women and Gender 7: 30–46.
  9. Langlois G (2015) Data activism. In: Compromised Data: From Social Media to Big Data. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 202–225.
  10. Namaste V (2000) Invisible Lives: The Erasure of Transsexual and Transgendered People. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
  11. Prosser J (1998) Second Skins. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.
  12. Snorton CR, Jin H, Aren A, et al (2013) Trans necropolitics. In: Stryker S and Whittle S (eds) The Transgender Studies Reader. 1st ed. New York: Imprint Routledge, 305–316 (first published 2006).
  13. Stevens N (2022) Modeling Power: Data Models and the Production of Social Inequality. PhD thesis United States – Arizona: Arizona State University.
  14. Tamura-Ho A (2022) Medicine, memoir, and metafiction: Speculative realities in contemporary transgender knowledge production. Intersect: The Stanford Journal of Science, Technology, and Society 15(3): 1–19. https://ojs.stanford.edu/ojs/index.php/intersect/article/view/2233.
  15. Van Streefkerk M (2022) House of Constance will provide housing and services for queer and Trans BIPOC. South Seattle Emerald September. https://southseattleemerald.com/2022/09/30/house-of-constance-will-provide-housing-and-services-for-queer-and-trans-bipoc/.

Cited by

Still being checked.

Related

Authors
Stevens, N., & Doğan, A. L.
Affiliations
University of Washington (US)
ORCID
Venue
Big Data & Society
Publisher
SAGE Publications
Published
2025-10-27
Volume
12
Issue
4
ISSN
2053-9517 (ISSN-L)
DOI
10.1177/20539517251381694
OpenAlex
W4415591402
Cited by
4
References
53
Citations by year
2026: 4
FWCI
4.18
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Licence
Locations
  • Big Data & Society (publishedVersion, cc-by-nc-nd)
  • DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
Funders
  • National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program (DGE-2140004)
  • Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (2213826)
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Safety Research › Ethics and Social Impacts of AI
  • Social Sciences › Psychology › Social Psychology › LGBTQ Health, Identity, and Policy
  • Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Feminist Epistemology and Gender Studies
Keywords
trans activism, data activism, trans theory, data categories, community well-being, trans visibility, transgender rights, critical data studies

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review