Digitizing Difference: Fraudulence, Gender Non-Conformity, and Data

Abstract

This dissertation explores how fraudulence shapes contemporary trans life. It examines the impacts of software design, law, and policy on trans and gender non-conforming people, arguing that social expectations about the stability of sex, gender, and identity systematically devalue the lives of trans and gender non-conforming people with particularly harmful impacts in the financial and healthcare sectors. Further, it demonstrates that incongruent or gender non-conforming data wields significant and dangerous power in an era of data-driven decision-making and present alternative approaches towards challenging these paradigms.