Abstract: Algorithmic technologies are everywhere; yet, neglected is how they persistently fail to recognise trans existence, resulting in grave lived implications for trans people – ranging from denied access to welfare systems, wrong medical diagnoses, targeting of their bodies in security scanners to increased scrutiny and surveillance from facial recognition software algorithms. This issue has popularly been framed as ‘technical flaws’, ‘accidental errors’ or hidden under technosolutionist ‘AI’ innovation narratives. Rather, I argue, that this constitutes a form of algorithmic violence directed at trans bodies from not fitting to the encoded idea of the ‘human’, which reiterates a much darker—not so distant past—of colonial classificatory power now operating through code. In this presentation, I highlight parts of my PhD work on transness/algorithms, sharing some of the defining facets of the relationship between classification, trans lives and algorithms to demonstrate how seemingly ‘new’ algorithmic technologies must be situated within global colonial regimes of binary gender that sought to sort and order humans through classificatory taxonomies as key modalities of control. To understand the contemporary impacts of algorithms, it is vital to consider how they automate the distinction between life chances, and trace under which regimes, structures and logics classification has emerged, developed, and defines trans lives today. This talk explores how colonial regimes of binary gender enable modes of death-production towards trans lives in a digital age and construct the impossibility of transness, programming trans bodies as eligible for intimate surveillance and elimination to advance colonial infrastructures of binary life/death through the predictive and sophisticated automation by algorithmic technologies.

Biography: Christoffer Koch Andersen (MPhil, BSc) is a PhD student in Multi-disciplinary Gender Studies at the Centre for Gender Studies, Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Cambridge, a Student Fellow at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, and a Student Associate at Cambridge Digital Humanities. Drawing on trans studies, feminist science and technology, Human-Computer-Interaction, and critical algorithm studies, their PhD researches the historical and contemporary intersections between trans lives, colonial classification and algorithmic technologies by formulating a critical genealogy that traces the ways in which the coloniality of binary gender is reiterated through algorithmic code –  emerging from the colonial regimes of human classification from the 18^th century, their increasing institutionalisation in nation state administrative systems and statistical calculations, and their contemporary sophisticative automation through algorithmic technologies in the 21^st century.

This event is supported by Centre for Critical Data Practices, Dept. of Digital Design and Information Studies, and CUPRA research program.