The intersection of transgender rights and technology. Image courtesy of Global Voices.
This editorial was written by Sheena Magenya and Smita V. of the Association for Progressive Communications-Women’s Rights Programme (APC WRP). It is part of Global Voices’ June 2026 Spotlight series, “Gender Diversity.” This series offers insight into gender diversity and how it is being threatened, protected, and preserved around the world. You can support this coverage by donating here.
When NASA was preparing for the launch of Space Shuttle Challenger in 1983, the engineers asked Sally Ride, the first American woman in space, if 100 tampons were enough for a six-day flight. In November 2025, the US Transportation Department unveiled THOR-05F, the first crash test dummy specifically based on a woman’s body, and not just a scaled-down version of the crash test dummy based on men’s bodies. Several new model cars today, by default, unlock all doors as soon as the car is put into “park’ or when the ignition is turned off, which can be particularly unsafe for women and LGBTQ+ people. This setting has to be manually changed. Closer to home, in various social justice spaces and conferences, there are often panels and conversations taking place that only have men speaking and moderating. Colloquially called “manels,” they are a visible indicator and reminder of how the lack of gender diversity in a conversation is not seen as a problem or even as something unusual. The literal absence of women and gender diverse people across all levels of design and decision-making can be, and is often, dangerous and life-threatening to over half the global population.
Inversely, in many contexts where non-heteronormative sexuality and gender expression are legally and socially criminalized, LGBTQ+ people and women are often scapegoats for moral social decay and are positioned as the reason for failed governance or even natural disasters. Through digital misinformation and disinformation, and with widespread platform apathy and inaction, narratives around women and gender-diverse people and communities have been manipulated to promote language that results in violence experienced both online and offline by these communities.
A recent poll by Gallup in the United States, a country previously considered progressive for its inclusion and legislative advancements for women and LGBTIQA+ people, found that, for the first time in nearly two decades, positive public sentiments for same-sex marriage and trans identities (the entire range of diverse trans identities beyond the man–woman binary) and rights are on the downturn. Intolerance for and active exclusion of women and gender diverse people is on the increase, and these shifts do and will continue to have a negative effect on advancements that have helped create a more equitable world.
Gender diversity broadly refers to the equitable representation and inclusion of people of different gender identities and expressions. Improving gender diversity is commonly understood as the intentional inclusion of women in various spaces and fields. It should be understood to also include non-binary, transgender, genderfluid, agender, and other gender-diverse individuals. True gender diversity needs to move beyond traditional binary understandings of gender and look at gender as a galaxy, rather than fixed categories and boxes.
Why does gender diversity matter anyway?
The experiences and lived realities of women and LGBTIQA+ people from all walks of life differ fundamentally from those of people whose lives conform to dominant socially and legally accepted power structures, often presented as normative, such as heterosexuality and patriarchy. This exclusion of women, genders, and sexualities seen as “not normal” to a certain society adversely affects the whole society, as well as the targeted groups and individuals. This exclusion has wide-reaching consequences, including but not limited to the formulation of policies and laws that limit access to life-saving healthcare, foundational education, and identity and travel documents.
Rolling back advancements on gender diversity and inclusion creates unequal societies. Studies have shown that societies that exclude on the basis of gender and sexuality, as well as race, class, caste, disability, and religion, advance much more slowly than societies that create more equal opportunities for the whole community, regardless of differences. The current trend of rejecting and reversing existing initiatives that have sought to right various inequalities (including gender diversity), puts our collective potential for change at risk, and threatens to undo centuries of progress towards a world with better lived experiences for all.
Gender diversity and technology
There is a widespread opinion, or maybe even an aspiration, that technology is perceived as neutral. This is not true or possible because the biases and lack of inclusion from the offline physical worlds get translated into online spaces and are built into technologies, which are then marketed as unbiased. In today’s world, where technology is integral to and enmeshed in our lives and bodies, attention to gender diversity in technology is urgent.
Technologies and their applications need to be supplemented with digital rights and safety conversations that take into specific account how they further widen existing gaps. Facial recognition technology, generative artificial intelligence, and other surveillance technologies are being increasingly used to influence democratic and governance processes and by local authorities in policing, welfare systems and more. The prejudices and biases that exist in the physical world and societies are also reflected in the data used to train these technologies, which replicates the biases against women and gender diverse people, Black people and people of colour, and other structurally marginalised communities.
Large Language Models (LLMs), which power generative AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, etc., are more likely to give users of African American English lower-prestige jobs, more likely to convict them of a crime, and more likely to sentence them to death rather than life imprisonment for committing murder. A UN Women study found that nearly one in four women human rights defenders surveyed have been subjected to AI-assisted online violence with severe repercussions in the offline world. Without pushing for gender diversity in technology, women and gender diverse persons will continue to be pushed through the gaps in the systems.
Technology-facilitated gender-based violence disproportionately impacts the safety, access, and rights of women, LGBTQ+ persons, and other structurally silenced communities, especially those who are vocal and visible on social media platforms. Because our lives now exist in the continuum of online and offline, this impact is felt in both digital and physical spaces and lives, as well as in the mental health of the survivors.
Dr. Joy Buolawini and Dr. Timnit Gebru’s 2018 landmark study, “Gender Shades,” revealed that facial recognition technology by Microsoft, IBM, and Face++ had the lowest error rates of 0.8 percent with lighter-skinned male faces, and the highest error rates of 34.7 percent when it came to identifying darker female faces. This study and several others that followed led to bans on the use of facial recognition by police departments in several states in the US because of its inbuilt racial bias and capacity to exacerbate structural racial inequalities.
In India, a 50-year-old welfare program denies food rations to pregnant women and new mothers, as the AI facial recognition technology now used to verify identities fails to match the changing faces compared to photos taken years ago as part of identity systems. A recent study showed that popular artificial intelligence models reproduce harmful caste-based stereotypes and bias, and discriminate against people from oppressed castes who are comparatively underrepresented in the media and online. This highlights that, while gender diversity is an essential lens in how we approach digital rights and technologies, this will be incomplete without factoring in the intersectionality of race, caste, location and ability.
The time is now
The current rightward spin of the world and the constant attacks on gender diversity and other social justice interventions by governments, Big Tech, and other powers make it hard for us to push for rights and liberties at this moment. Which is why now is the time to hold the line by continuing to tell our stories and demand presence at the tables where decisions are made in all our intersectional glory. Because we understand that all our oppressions are interconnected, and that the role technology plays in our lives is impossible to escape, we all need to gather our resources, ideas and skills towards more collectivist actions and less siloed approaches to problem solving.
In the face of interconnected systems of heteropatriarchy, racism, settler colonialism, caste oppression, rampant capitalism, militarisation, technoauthoritarianism and commodification of the planet and the global south, our hope rests on the strength of our diversity as we move together imperfectly towards our collective liberations.
