Mick Hartley

Jerry Coyne draws our attention to an extraordinary paper from a couple of activists in the journal Big Data & Society entitled Trans data epistemologies: Transgender ways of knowing with data.

The 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.

As Coyne notes, this clearly shows the “explicit antiscientific aims of some ideologues”. Data doesn’t matter as much as coming to the right ideologically correct conclusions. A Lysenko-inspired scientist under Stalin couldn’t have put it more clearly – though instead of socialist/Marxist dogma we get tearful appeals to community care and the delights of trans-ness. Here, for instance, is the “positionality statement” of the second author, from the University of Washington (the first author works at MIT):

Amelia Lee Doğan: I came to this project after its development as a trans person interested in activism and data. My experience include working part-time for a university LGBTQ+ office for several years and researching other activists communities’ data and technical needs. I had no direct contact with any of the interview participants but their words and work truly made me cry at how other trans people are making this world a little better for us. Especially, as a trans young person of color, it was an honor to get to hear our elders talk about how they have fought and continue to fight and care for us.

Not what you’d normally expect from the author of a scientific paper, perhaps – but this is the new emotionally engaged science, where rationality is replaced by simpering about making the world a better place.

Colin Wright takes it apart at Reality’s Last Stand:

Now, a new peer-reviewed article in Big Data & Society breaks new ground by openly arguing that lying with data is not only acceptable but morally required when it comes to transgender issues.…