XOXO or XX/XY? Gender Essentialism and Queer Exclusion on Dating Apps

In a world with shrinking queer spaces, dating apps serve as a useful way to find romantic or sexual partners, make friends, and develop connections in an often fragmented community. However, dating app structures may exclude queer users more than their cisgender heterosexual counterparts. In this paper, we examine how gender and sexuality are formatted as data in dating app profiles and algorithmically curated matchmaking functions. Based on an analysis of ten popular dating apps, we found gender and sexuality were often divided into descriptive labels and functional categories, which systematically marginalize or exclude queer identities from the matching process despite appearing inclusive. We present a framework for identity on dating apps, disentangling identity into a multi-layered construct of data schemas, profiles, algorithms, and platform ideology, thus enabling designers of data-driven systems to identify salient factors for users, even beyond queer identities and dating apps.