Short abstract:

I will address how carceral technologies, specifically gender recognition software and healthcare AI, are designed to capture and erase trans people. In contrast, I will stress the importance of abolitionist imaginaries to both resist capture, and grow new trans technologies of empowerment.

Long abstract:

With the relentless expansion of state surveillance, and the calculated control of fugitive bodies, spaces, and places, technologies developed, designed, and refined in the carceral, are extending their reach beyond the prison industrial complex into our everydayness. Presented to us under the guise of protection and progress, carceral technologies can be found in healthcare, education, employment, online, and in the political and media narrative. They are embedded in our imagined idea of what technology should be, while we are taught to barely know they are there.

In this paper, I will discuss how carceral technologies strategically target and erase Trans and non-binary people, and are embedded in the White supremacist framework of silencing, control, and punishment. I will use two case studies – automated gender recognition and AI data gaps in the medical metric model – to highlight how technologies of surveillance and captivity have been lifted from the prison landscape and reformatted as a wider means to govern and discipline the ‘deviant’ Trans body.

In contrast, I will champion the importance of Trans care and mutual aid. I will show that transformative practice and collective access are fundamental to dismantling carceral technology and in turn the policing that has come to dictate the supremacist norms of our society. That is, how we might, together, use liberatory imaginaries to seed new technologies grounded in abolition, accountability, and radical kindness, so as to support those that are most vulnerable now, whilst keeping our eyes on the future.