Strategies for Resisting Tech-Enabled Violence Facing Transgender People

Today’s Supreme Court’s ruling in U.S. v. Skrmetti upholding bans on gender-affirming care for youth makes it clear: trans people are under attack. Threats to trans rights and healthcare are coming from legislatures, anti-trans bigots (both organized and not), apathetic bystanders, and more. Living under the most sophisticated surveillance apparatus in human history only makes things worse. While the dangers are very much tangible and immediate, the risks posed by technology can amplify them in insidious ways. Here is a non-exhaustive overview of concerns, a broad-sweeping threat model, and some recommended strategies that you can take to keep yourself and your loved ones safe.

Dangers for Trans Youth

Trans kids experience an inhumane amount of cruelty and assault. Much of today’s anti-trans legislation is aimed specifically at making life harder for transgender youth, across all aspects of life. For this reason, we have highlighted several of the unique threats facing transgender youth.

School Monitoring Software

Most school-issued devices are root-kitted with surveillance spyware known as student-monitoring software. The purveyors of these technologies have been widely criticized for posing significant risks to marginalized children, particularly LGBTQ+ students. We ran our own investigation on the dangers posed by these technologies with a project called Red Flag Machine. Our findings showed that a significant portion of the times students’ online behavior was flagged as “inappropriate” was when they were researching LGBTQ+ topics such as queer history, sexual education, psychology, and medicine. When a device with this software flags such activity it often leads to students being placed in direct contact with school administrators or This article has been indexed from Deeplinks