Wrapped Up in the Cis-Tem: Trans Liveability in the Age of Algorithmic Violence

Algorithms pervade our reality—promising to universally enhance our lives—but what happens when this promise is reserved for cisgender people while subjecting trans individuals to legacies of anti-trans violence implicating trans liveability? Despite this key consideration, existing critiques engage only sparingly with the violent legacies perpetuated by algorithms that trans people encounter, rarely bring this beyond notions of bias and fail to centre trans experiences. In this paper, I extend scholarship on critical algorithm studies, trans studies and necropolitics to show the vicious algorithmic operations on trans lives by forwarding three accounts of lived trans experiences. Centrally, this paper argues that algorithms are not neutral, distinct or progressive, but rather as a ‘cis-tem’ enact forms of violence towards the possibility of transness rooted in legacies of capitalist, colonial and cisheteronormative power that violate trans lives and radicalise transphobia. Contrasting trans voices against the algorithmic machines, this paper offers a novel perspective on the entanglement between algorithms and trans liveability through the lens of algorithmic violence. I demonstrate how algorithms embody racialised and gendered ideals of the human targeting trans people through (1) engineered transphobic feedback-loops (2) cisnormative default, and (3) capitalist fear profit to (4) reimagine liberatory digital futures.