Virtual pronoun sharing in the workplace

This research was conducted over the course of two PhD internships at the Social Media Collective in Microsoft Research New England. I collaborated with Mary L. Gray, Benjamin Ale-Ebrahim, and Rachel Bergmann, as well as the FAST product team in Microsoft Experiences and Devices, primarily Margrete Sævareid and Sonia Perunneparampil. We considered the problem of building software to allow people to share their pronouns as part of their profile cards in Microsoft Outlook. We conducted qualitative interviews with over 75 transgender and cisgender workers in various contexts about their experiences with workplace pronoun disclosure, using trans theory and science and technology studies to inform our analysis of the interviews.

Pronoun sharing is an increasingly common social practice in which people mutually disclose which third-person pronouns they use (e.g. she, he, or they). This can help everyone correctly address each other and promote inclusive spaces for transgender people. However, pronoun sharing can have negative consequences for transgender individuals when they are singled out during or after pronoun disclosure or when they don’t wish to disclose their gender identity. When designing software to enable widespread pronoun disclosure in the workplace, it is necessary to understand the diverse and sometimes conflicting needs of transgender workers in order to maximize the benefits and minimize potential harms of such software.

We find that pronoun use and disclosure in the workplace is a complex social problem that is characterized by inherent tensions between safety and visibility, and that the problem cannot be solved solely through universal deployment of a new technology. Instead, we argue that workplaces should implement a sociotechnical approach in which they use technology to enable pronoun disclosure alongside significant social education about pronoun use. Additionally, software developers should design robust display and privacy options and individual user controls. These approaches promote widespread adoption and allow transgender individuals to make informed decisions to address the tension between safety and visibility.

Gender Markers on Identification Documents

By recognizing gender as a form of infrastructure, I use the analytical frameworks of infrastructure and Science and Technology Studies (STS) more broadly to better understand what gender does and how gender materially works. Government-issued identity documents, which almost always state a person’s gender, are a key example of gender infrastructure and present a useful entry point for closer analysis. In this project, I seek to understand how gender is classified and recorded on identification documents such as drivers’ licenses and birth certificates and to analyze the consequences of gender classification. What is the process for changing one’s gender on documents, and what are the implications and consequences of this process for transgender and intersex people and for government institutions? What is the relationship between changing gender norms and gender classification on identity documents? What is the bureaucracy and knowledge work that maintains and enables gender classification?

In order to answer these questions, I have conducted ethnographic field research in California, Oregon, and Indiana, including participant observation and in-depth interviews with community-based organizations and transgender individuals. Ethnography is a set of methods that allow the researcher to gain deep localized knowledge about a community (or, in this case, an infrastructure) by speaking with local members of the community to uncover their explicit and implicit knowledge about their practices. I have chosen to use ethnography because it helps me uncover deep implicit knowledge about how gender infrastructure works. This is an ideal time to study the institutions of gender classification because the moment of rupture and change makes commonplace practices more visible and accessible, bringing implicit knowledge to the fore. Throughout America, states are considering or implementing new rules about how gender classification should work on identification documents, especially when it comes to transgender people who seek to change their gender designation on their drivers’ licenses and other documents. As new policies are written and implemented, ideas about gender itself become more accessible to the people who interact with it. Since infrastructure is difficult to see except during moments of breakdown, looking for moments of rupture is an established strategy for conducting ethnography of infrastructure (Star 1999; 2010). By closely examining forms and policy documents; speaking with bureaucrats, policymakers, advocates, and transgender people; and observing the process of legal gender transition, I analyze the nature of gender infrastructure in the United States.

Toxicity in Video Games

This project examined the consequences of toxic behavior for marginalized communities within gaming. I collaborated with Iris Bull, Javon Goard, and Lucas Kempe-Cook. The four of us brought a variety of personal and gaming experience to bear on their participant observations across four different field sites: World of Warcraft, Dota 2, co-present competitive Overwatch, and solo competitive Overwatch. Analyzing a variety of field sites allowed us to collaboratively synthesize theory about toxic behavior in online video gaming environments. From critical inquiry into four related spaces, we theorize experiences of toxic behavior as engagements with four boundary making processes; such practices reveal how individuals and groups operate in real-time to concretize culturally held beliefs about professionalization, segregation, self-care, and competition. At each field site, specific actions and practices are not always categorically distinguishable as toxic in and of themselves but operate as ‘toxic behavior’ when in conversation with existing media ideologies about appropriate codes of conduct in each environment (cf. Gershon, 2010). One of our common findings is that the definition of 'marginalized' is not simply produced by older ways of segregating humans into groups (race, class, gender, etc), but that game design contributes to the production of new marginalized classes in competitive game settings. Experiences of marginalization in virtual environments are thus an imbrication of old and novel forms of exclusion, alienation, stratification, and exploitation.

Our investigations demonstrate how toxic behaviors and practices affect those who identify with a marginalized group or community; players may disengage from the environment, experience stress and anxiety, and/or avoid identifying as a member of a minority group. Our ethnographic work allows us to theorize toxicity as a holistic set of experience, rather than a matter of particular languages or extreme behaviors. As gamers who are also members of various marginalized communities, we collectively bring our own standpoints to bear on the ways in which toxicity specifically operates on the weaponization of bodies, language and experiences of people of color, women, and queer and trans gamers. Instead of conceptualizing toxicity in gaming spaces and gaming culture writ large as defined by exceptional, violent, extreme moments in popular culture, we argue that toxicity is a relatively mundane and everyday experience that players constantly manage as part of gaming practice.