Project Leads/Principal Investigators: Professor Michael Ann DeVito (Northeastern) & Professor Logan Stapleton (Vassar)
Student Investigator: Julia Husar (PhD Student, Northeastern)
Background
Trans health and wellbeing information is marginalized: many formalized systems for gender affirming care —like WPATH— were created explicitly to gatekeep medical transition (Gill-Peterson, 2024). Medical discrimination against trans people persists widely to this day (Kcomt, 2019). Scientific studies about trans healthcare are limited and lack the specificity to give detailed recommendations on transition-related care for a wide variety of individuals (Safer, 2016), and most healthcare practitioners are not well-versed in or even aware of key elements of trans health (Poteat et al., 2013). As of late, even some governments are working to eliminate research and medical resources for trans people. This leaves trans people to turn to online platforms and online social systems (e.g., social media, chat platforms) for crucial health and wellbeing information that is not available from traditional sources, and gives key members of these platforms (e.g., influencers, moderators) outsized importance and influence over the online trans health and wellbeing ecosystem (Edenfield et al., 2019).
Within this landscape of active abandonment from formalized healthcare systems, trans people have long built epistemic communities amongst for and by ourselves, cf. DIY hormone replacement therapy (August-Rae et al., 2024). Prior work has largely explored online health information through the lens of information seekers (cf. Augustaitis et al., 2021). In this project, we aim to better understand the communication of online trans health and wellbeing information through the perspectives of those who share and curate this information in order to better understand the curation and transmission of trans health and wellbeing information, and provide design and policy guidance that enable better support for communicating reliable, well-vetted and pro-social trans health and wellbeing information via future sociotechnical systems.
Get Involved!
Are you a trans woman or transfem? Have you ever shared health and wellbeing information with other transfeminine people online? Examples might look like posting on Reddit about voice training, talking about surgery experiences on a Discord server, chatting about hormones in a Signal group, sharing about your experiences in a TikTok comment, etc.If you fit into any of these criteria, we would love to hear from you!
Participants must be 18 or older and must be a trans woman or transfeminine person. We will conduct a 60 minute interview via either a private video chat platform (e.g., Zoom), or through a private text-based messaging platform (e.g., Signal, Discord). The interview will be conducted by a project team member, all of whom are trans women. This interview will consist of questions and activities related to your experience sharing information connected to transfeminine discourse online. You’ll be compensated at a rate of $30 for your time. Full participant information can be found on our official Participant Information Sheet.
We will not ask you about your private health information. Everything you say in the interview will be anonymized and saved on Northeastern University servers that are only normally accessible to our research team. Your anonymized comments may be used in publicly-accessible research papers You may only participate in this study once.
A signup form is coming soon, but if you want to know more or get involved now, please reach out to the project leads, Professors DeVito and Stapleton, via email (m.devito@northeastern.edu; lstapleton@vassar.edu).